It's really hard for me to get into the swing of calling this series "Laid-Back Camp" rather than "Yuru Camp."
It's also becoming harder and harder to retain the idea that this is a manga about camping and not a manga about eating food. This volume is especially difficult in that respect. Eating interesting snacks and meals goes hand-in-hand with these girls' camping. Afro is really good at drawing tasty-looking food. Nadeshiko's wanton lust for food infects the other characters and even the reader. (Though, oddly, after I finished reading this volume I didn't end up eating anything the rest of the day. But maybe I could make the excuse that no food I had could compare to Rin's soba and certainly nothing could compare to the "highest-quality" eel.)
Did Satou always have blue eyes? This is really fucking me up. I started watching the new Heya Camp shorts the other day, and the first several focused on just Nadeshiko, Aoi, and Aki. Nothing weird. Then Satou shows up at some point, and her eyes are blue, and I couldn't focus because I watched the entire first season of the anime, spending much of it thinking Satou was the cutest of the girls (I liked Aoi most, first), and now I'm learning I missed a huge part of her design. I'm going insane.
Anyway, I think in the past I've compared Aki to Nezumi-Otoko from Gegege no Kitaro because of the way her weird bangs frame her head. She's actually cuter here, but it's maybe cheating because I'm thinking mostly of early in the volume when she has her hair tied back while at work. But then we later see Aoi with a ponytail when she's in the bath and she looks better (her big fat titters are also floating in the water, a detail for which I applaud Afro). I normally hate Rin's hair because of her stupid thot-bun and how weird it looks when let down, to have such long hair but with no volume (it sticks closely to the shape of her skull, whereas e.g. Nadeshiko's hair hangs more loosely) but she also looked cute with her thin ponytail. I'm basically revealing my inner Kyon. I enjoy ponytails, at least in 2D.
It bothered me that one of the Heya Camp comics, about the different shapes of mountains, simply used illustrations of each mountain, when I read this after the anime adaptation which transformed this scene into Nadeshiko eating some kind of Fuji-san curry rice-mountain and having the thing constantly warp as she took more bites. C-Station's anime version is more interesting than Afro's original. Good for them!
On that note, it feels a lot more "free" to read this manga outside the context of the anime. For the first four volumes, I was balancing manga with anime, and I kept fucking up. I couldn't iron out the order in which I should experience things. Should I read the original, the manga, first, so that I could see how it changes in the anime form? Or should I watch the anime first, then retroactively compare against the source? Usually I go for the source first. If ever I watch the anime first, it's because I'm uncertain of whether I'll care enough about the manga to justify getting into it, and so use the anime to dip my toes in the water, so to speak. But I'd bought the first four volumes of manga before bothering to watch the anime, and so I drowned. Watching Heya Camp, free for the most part of the burden of the manga vs. anime question, I was able to better appreciate this series (there was too much unwitting negativity in earlier of my Yuru Camp manga reviews). I'm a hell of a lot more comfortable reading this volume and onward, with the second season of the anime a year away.