I can’t help but feel a strange sense of cognitive dissonance with this entire work. On one hand, regardless of your personal beliefs on the subject matter, branching out in new ways is always good for a creative industry, especially one as over saturated as modern manga. But on the other… it feels like a soap opera repackaged as a high school story, with the requisite pendulum of uncanny sensibility to utterly unhinged irrationality depending on the circumstances. I get it, teenagers are hormonal so to some extent, that’s not too unforgivable normally, but the utter extremes are just way too off putting to me.
This is probably just a symptom of the author not really having much planned, but it feels like the main character can’t exactly catch a break without becoming the bad guy in a new excessive misunderstanding whose entire resolution will boil down to “communicate better with Runa”, even though most of the situations could be easily resolved if she told him about her concerns BEFORE their relationship gets tossed into limbo for the umpteenth time over something she got mad about in silence. MC’s back must be made out of steel from carrying so much baggage just to maintain a relationship that nearly fails every three chapters before they enter a new honeymoon phase. Again, teenagers, so to some extent, let them have communication problems and work them out… but it’s gotten to the point of being practically every major development when the side characters aren’t being equally brain dead with each other.
I mean, spoiler alert for side character drama, but the current side character shenanigans involve a character getting rejected, coming back after dropping like a hundred pounds between chapters, and then the girl who rejected him starts crushing on him. That’s it.
And if I’m gonna be completely honest, it’s really starting to feel like Runa’s sister is the most developed character in the whole series, with the most compelling arcs and the greatest growth, and yet she exists now just to suffer because the MC got rejected by her once in the past. Some part of me kinda wishes her and the MC end up together, especially with the way this current arc is heading with Runa’s reaction to her sister experiencing a Japan moment (molestation), but I know they’re kinda glued together now because they exist to spread the “don’t discriminate against someone for their past” message that has already been portrayed loud and clear. With the emphasis this series has on growing as a person and maturing (that the characters forget before every new arc), it wouldn’t exactly be a negative for them to split up amicably due to personality differences and unnecessary dependence on each other in a high school relationship of all things, but dreams will remain dreams.
Anyway, if you like soap operas, you might like it, but it just feels off to me with how dramatic everything tends to be. 6/10.