The mistake here is the perspective not the story, this story makes much more sense as a light novel than a manga. Making the story a flashback while risky, I don't think is its biggest flaw. The way the story is cut, positioned and presented is where it lacks, but that's my optimism that later on the climax and resolve would make sense. Maybe if that chapter where Hikari saw Yama kiss the male deutegonist would have been better to be a first, then the whole development background behind them, and then involve these interactions between them two, AND after that the first 20 chapters, this would have been better.
Yeah, I was thinking about this too, and even more than the medium, I feel like the problem is serialization and letting the reader's knowledge of the plot pass out of short term memory and their understanding of structure and characters to solidify incorrectly. It's so jarring this way, when the twists and comparisons require a kind of fluidity to enjoy properly.
Clearly the author was going for the bait-and-switch 'we interrupt your romantic comedy to bring you a romantic drama' effect to lob a cannonball at readers expecting another light and fluffy childhood friend experience. That requires Hikari's bit to come first so it can shatter us as much as it does her, and that's hard to reconcile with the most effective way to tell the WHOLE story. The manga author leans even further into this by using familiar love-status-quo tropes and an initially 4-koma format to lull readers into expectations of familiarity with how it's all going.
If this series were released as a completed novel or manga, I think I wouldn't put it down until I finished, and the timeline issues would be much easier to overlook. Even if we know the middle of the story before the halfway point, I feel like there's still plenty of drama in the journey along the way. Really hope it delivers.
My sincerest hope right now is that neither of the girls' stories are the ones that 'matter' in the end, and that the last section of the story is focused on the male lead's experience over a broader time period that amounts to something like the woodcutter's testimony from
Rashomon.
btw killer first comment