EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Affection that had only been received is now chosen. Connect: A Girl Weaves Love with a Tentacle, Part Two enters the hall on that turn.

The father comes home. The rain keeps falling, and the girl follows him into the forest, down to a cave that leads underground. The research that had been going on in the study, and the nature of the wordless creature, both take shape there.

The pivot is the moment the girl pushes away an outstretched white hand. She stops being the one who gets rescued, turns back along the road she came by, and goes to the friend she left behind. What in Part One was only received, by a girl who knew nothing of sex, becomes her decision here. Readers arrive at the same scene independently, because that is where the weight of the story sits.

The pages carry that decision before any line of dialogue does: the rain that starts with the father's return, the cave mouth that looks bright only when seen from inside, the sky that has cleared by the time she is out of it. A reader of the simplified Chinese edition wrote that the light and the composition do the telling, and the dialogue only fills in. Full colour throughout, as in Part One, across sixty-nine pages, most of them given to the story.

The creature that sat in a cage in a dark study when they met walks out under open sky at the end, with the girl and the maid beside it. Two volumes close a circle, and no answers are handed out. How far anyone's feelings actually reached is left with the reader.

Published in 2022, with official translations in simplified Chinese, English and Korean. Twelfth in the doujin hall, and second in the pure-love category behind Part One. Connect remains the only story KOMOTA has put into the world.