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 will not stop, and the girl follows him into the forest, down to a cave that leads underground. The rites in the study, the nature of the wordless creature, and what the father had been trying to bring back all take shape there. Many readers note that the mysteries spread out in Part One are folded up with care. Like Part One, it is a tentacle fantasy that tells the bond between a girl and a creature as pure love.

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. In Part One she was sheltered, on the receiving end; here, for the first time, she decides. Readers arrive at the same scene on their own because that is where the weight of the story sits.

The pages carry that decision before any line of dialogue does: the rain that begins with the father's return, the brightness of the cave mouth seen from within, the sky that has cleared by the time she is out. A reader of the simplified Chinese edition wrote that light and composition do the telling and the dialogue only fills in. Full colour throughout, as before, now across sixty-nine pages.

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

KOMOTA brought the story to its close in 2022, with official translations in simplified Chinese and English and a Korean edition. 13th in the doujin hall, third in the pure-love category, and fourth in the loli category.