Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2019
- Messages
- 1,992
It's a perfectly mid sappy shoujo romcom.
The two main characters are fun and their story is cliche but entertaining enough. The biggest issues I had were that most of the supporting cast kinda sucked when they had their biggest personality tropes leaned into (Kimishima and Azusa aren't prickly tsunderes, they're just jerks. Jou/Jyou begins as an aggressively self-absorbed tool before that fades and he simply becomes a pushy dope, and Nanase could be interesting as the shrinking violet/wallflower who sees through shallow attention, but that gets traded away for "oh no she's hot" and repetitive "the burden of being a hot person everyone wants to get close to." while also seeming to justify a trope I detest, the idea that "plain" characters need to be made over into generic supermodels before anyone will see the value in them.
Drama usually ends up injected, festering, and resolving in extremely short bursts that makes basically none of it satisfying or engaging. And worse still some dramatic plots are introduced and almost as quickly forgotten about (Furuya's mom is a massive obstacle in the chapter she appears in, then is seemingly fine with all the resolution happening off-page.)
The whole idea of the drama and danger of a teacher/student romance becomes a non factor so quickly that you almost wonder why they bother except for the ability to mine high school drama and age gap tropes from it. Almost everyone who expresses the slightest bit of reservation over a guy in his mid 20s dating a 16 year-old (at the start of the story) that is also his student is won over within a chapter because they're just so cute together I guess.
The ending is sweet but predictable with one appreciated bittersweet twist, though it's also kind of jumbled up with a time skip forward, then back a bit, then seemingly back farther (but still after the main story) and an unfortunate ignoring of the potential dynamics that result from An's growth and (without spoiling anything) career path choices over an extended period of time. Instead we get one tiny flashback/epilogue chapter with her working a bit and the rest of the time you'd be forgiven for thinking she's retired to be a housewife like all "proper" manga wives do.
I blitzed through the whole series in a day (had to read the first few chapters on an aggregator site since they're not here) and while I'm a bit sad to leave some of the characters behind, this isn't a series that's going to stick with me or be fondly remembered beyond a few scenes.
5/10 (smack in the middle of the scale and therefore perfectly mediocre, before anyone thinks that a 5 means I thought this was actively bad.)
The two main characters are fun and their story is cliche but entertaining enough. The biggest issues I had were that most of the supporting cast kinda sucked when they had their biggest personality tropes leaned into (Kimishima and Azusa aren't prickly tsunderes, they're just jerks. Jou/Jyou begins as an aggressively self-absorbed tool before that fades and he simply becomes a pushy dope, and Nanase could be interesting as the shrinking violet/wallflower who sees through shallow attention, but that gets traded away for "oh no she's hot" and repetitive "the burden of being a hot person everyone wants to get close to." while also seeming to justify a trope I detest, the idea that "plain" characters need to be made over into generic supermodels before anyone will see the value in them.
Drama usually ends up injected, festering, and resolving in extremely short bursts that makes basically none of it satisfying or engaging. And worse still some dramatic plots are introduced and almost as quickly forgotten about (Furuya's mom is a massive obstacle in the chapter she appears in, then is seemingly fine with all the resolution happening off-page.)
The whole idea of the drama and danger of a teacher/student romance becomes a non factor so quickly that you almost wonder why they bother except for the ability to mine high school drama and age gap tropes from it. Almost everyone who expresses the slightest bit of reservation over a guy in his mid 20s dating a 16 year-old (at the start of the story) that is also his student is won over within a chapter because they're just so cute together I guess.
The ending is sweet but predictable with one appreciated bittersweet twist, though it's also kind of jumbled up with a time skip forward, then back a bit, then seemingly back farther (but still after the main story) and an unfortunate ignoring of the potential dynamics that result from An's growth and (without spoiling anything) career path choices over an extended period of time. Instead we get one tiny flashback/epilogue chapter with her working a bit and the rest of the time you'd be forgiven for thinking she's retired to be a housewife like all "proper" manga wives do.
I blitzed through the whole series in a day (had to read the first few chapters on an aggregator site since they're not here) and while I'm a bit sad to leave some of the characters behind, this isn't a series that's going to stick with me or be fondly remembered beyond a few scenes.
5/10 (smack in the middle of the scale and therefore perfectly mediocre, before anyone thinks that a 5 means I thought this was actively bad.)
