A Terrible Thought Has Moved Into My Mind

It's my 15 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Volume 3 of Monster in Sheep's Clothing/Hitsuji no Kawa has been announced for release in Japan on Christmas Day... I was expecting early next year so a bit earlier than expected. That cover is, uh... ahem. 😍

I haven't been keeping up with this volume in the magazine at all so I am Hyped, no idea what happens honestly. I'm sure lots of pleasant, not at all dramatic or traumatic things.

In the time it's taken to get through volume 2, there have been a number of chapters published in the magazine; unlike Acid Town, Kyuugou is pretty consistent with chapters of Hitsuji in Chara, where the series remains fairly popular. I'm expecting there will be a volume 3 sometime early next year but that is just my guess.

I think I mentioned before, but we don't currently have plans to continue the series beyond volume 2. My free time has become very limited and the scanlation process is very time consuming. I think it would be different if we had reliable staff, but I'm doing most of the work currently with some occasional help from volunteers. I don't mind continuing to work on the series in my free time, but it would probably result in long wait times between chapters. I'd also prefer to wait for volume 3 to even start on any new chapters. Kyuugou is notorious for doing extensive touch-up work and revisions for the print versions of her manga; for instance, the chapter 15 we are releasing is from the print version of volume 2, and the first 19 pages of it didn't appear in the magazine. That's a big difference.

We've finally released some new chapters for Monster in Sheep's Clothing/Hitsuji no Kawa wo Kita Kemono... you can download chapter 14 here: Monster in Sheep's Clothing - Chapter 14

and you can download chapter 15 here: Monster in Sheep's Clothing - Chapter 15

Welcome, hahaha.

The fanfic is done, I've done a couple of editing passes on it for grammar and spelling errors but at this point I've hit the limit of what I can do without outside feedback... Like at this point I need less "this is spelled wrong" and more "this doesn't make sense". I have a couple people IRL who said they'd beta the fic, but one has had it for weeks and hasn't started (AFAIK, probably just busy) and the other has a personal project they're working on and is too busy... so if I'm waiting on them I don't know when I'll be able to post it. As the fanfic is rather long (152k words) I feel bad bothering anyone to beta it as it's quite a task.

Hey, we've got chapters 14 and 15 typeset for Hitsuji no Kawa, but I'm having trouble getting a hold of my usual JP proofer (to be fair it took me like a year) so we are searching for another JP proofer to fill in and help us get these chapters out. I just feel more comfortable having someone with more Japanese knowledge than I have looking over the translations to make sure there aren't any egregious errors.

I want to talk a bit about this, because it's something that affects a lot of people like me, and I want to emphasize that this is not about "protecting women and children" as anti-porn interest groups would want you to believe. It is about exerting control and silencing voices they don't like. They won't stop at just erasing porn. What they don't like will always keep growing. LGBTQIA+ content is just the beginning. It is about silencing the voices of anyone different or anyone who has experienced something unpleasant. It's about revising history and our human experiences.

I wanted to talk a little bit more about what's frequently mentioned in this article, which is interactive art as a means for processing trauma. Art can sometimes be used for depicting things people find distasteful or objectionable. The purpose of this is sometimes to titillate or shock, but often it's for those who have had these experiences to process their thoughts and feelings on it and give it a voice. The reality is that awful, traumatic things happen to real people in real life all the time. As much as it may sometimes feel like it, the people in art and stories and video games aren't real. They can stand in for real people and real experiences and create a safe distance for real people to experience and process difficult things they might not be able to otherwise. It is important, I'd even say essential, to expose ourselves to stories and voices we find uncomfortable. These are the stories of human experiences, and it's important as a person to understand the experiences of other people... otherwise you end up with things like this, people who are so afraid of others and themselves that they try to silence others, or legislate them out of existence, or literally kill them.

It's not about trying to defend truly awful content (and it does exist, the sort of stuff most people find beyond the pale). It's about protecting our voices and our rights to process our human experiences on our own terms. I want to emphasize again that anti-porn groups like this will never be satisfied, they'll never stop, because they need a boogeyman to galvanize their base.

I haven’t seen a whole lot of other fans for Acid Town, and this probably isn’t really the best question to ask you but I really don’t know anyone who is (or used to be) in this fandom, but is the fandom dead and should I even hold out hope that it will finish? I love this story a lot and want to see how it ends or even some kind of expansion on it, but there isn’t even a lot of fanfics for it!

I know this is a shot in the dark, but this fandom is small and there’s not many people who have as much insight as you probably do.

Thank you so much in advance.

Hi, thanks for reaching out and thanks for buying the official books to support the artist (you bought them right?) even if I have a personal grudge against the Tokyopop translation, lol.

The fandom is super small (I think my fanfic is one of the only ones?). There's a few of us that have hung on for the past decade+ waiting on updates. I do check every once in a while, but the magazine it's published in only releases every 2 months and I see Kyuugou isn't listed for the July issue, so I'll check again at the end of the month to see if she's listed for the September issue but I'm guessing not. Please keep checking back every couple months or so.

Kyuugou has a tendency to put Acid Town on the back burner whenever some new fancy comes along and for a while now that's been Hitsuji no Kawa. My hope is when she wraps that series up she'll come back to Acid Town.... but it's a long shot. She's dropped series before though admittedly not any as long as Acid Town.