Aside from all the love stuff, I love the way this manga just rolls out the side jokes really well in rapid succession, like Yura frantically starting an MBTI test to try to help her club-mate.
This and Hoshi of Girls' Garden are the only two manga that make me laugh out loud consistently. Hoshi of Girls' Garden is a comic masterpiece with exceptionally funny dialogue. This - I have no fucking clue what this is but goddamn it also gets to me.
Whoops! Didn't mean to imply that Hello! Project was creating 12 year old gravure idols - just regular idols. Though that said they get sexualised by the online fanbase just as much as everyone else, and it's not like they didn't in the past have some extremely shady stuff with girls of that age...
Quite a few gravure idols now are starting in their mid 20s now, I think there might actually be more of a market for it (but that's just an assumption based on the popular gravure idols I see crop up a lot). Ino Enohara started at 26, Minami Hori and Aoi Mizobata started at 24, etc.
Gravure...
There are an endless amount of manga about being in love as a teenager, but I don't think any have captured the actual feeling better than this - the attempts to always be physically close, the clumsy flirting, the preoccupation after the fact. It makes me realise just how un-intimate most...