I had to stop myself from commenting on this work until I read the end. I feel like nothing I could say would be justified until I read the entirety of this manga in full and I just have so many mixed emotions. about a lot of things because this is such a messily made manga (or adaptation really).
First of all, I don't like Miura. yes, she's cute, she's fun, and quirky. but she's also??? I don't even know like I read the ending and I was just like bro this manga is okay at best but a lot of what was surrounding her was done cartoonish-ly. like elements in this manga that I really disliked were centered around her because she is just a selfish person. first of all she outs Jun to the entire school, and not only out him, but like tells everyone in the school the specifics of their relationship and what he has done to her (ie kissing makoto during their date and etc). and not even that when they’re arguing instead of saying stuff like “you cheated on me” she goes to say “are all you homos like this? Having affairs and deceiving women who can’t help but fall in love with you because it’s how we’re biologically hardwired to feel” like UGH I UNDERSTAND WHY SHE SAYS IT BUT ALSO WHY DOES SHE HAVE TO PHRASE IT LIKE THAT because it perpetuates this kind of homophobic rhetoric that gay and queer people are predators to straight people! and just ugh
and then tries to continue to pursue some type of romantic relationship with him EVEN though she fully understands he's gay and EVEN though she knows how he feels she keeps on putting him in these strange situations like when they see mr. fahreniet's mom she still introduces jun as his girlfriend like why not say you're just his friend here for moral support
and what REALLy irked me was her recommending such unrealistic BL to jun like i can only imagine that by doing she was trying to say "look liking guys can be natural" and because you know jun is her friend and she wants to share her hobbies with him!!!! but her recommending a series called BL planet where the only reason why men are attracted to each other is because there is a decline of women in the world population and also people can begin consenting at age ten LIKE BRO it just goes to show exactly how much she fetishizes gay men and doesn’t see being gay as more than a biological thing?
Like there’s good yaoi and then there’s like bad extremely dehumanizing yaoi (the kind where authors forget that gay men are humans too) and it’s so bizarre to me that Miura, even after experiencing her gay friend attempt to commit suicide, even after seeing that a middle schooler successfully committed suicide because of a situation that stemmed from his homosexuality and relationships, even after seeing how people in her community treated the gay people around her so violently, still chooses to dehumanize and fetishize gay men in the same way she did before. That’s probably my biggest grief with her character.
Because my biggest problem with her character is that she doesn't really...develop. She's not trying to learn anything from this, she's still writing extremely fetishizing yaoi (openly about the people about her, and about people she knows are homophobic). She's not trying to learn more about what it's like to be gay, she's not really trying to understand Miura's struggles as a queer person she doesn't even become a more aware and sensitive person! It’s like! What was I waiting for? It’s been acknowledged Ono will never understand what it’s like being a “homo” but Miura still doesn’t either???? As far as she’s concerned being gay in real life isn’t a big deal.
I feel like I could nitpick with her character and arc. From that little novel excerpt though it can definitely say that her characterization probably suffered the most from this adaptation. I think the way the artist portrayed her in the manga made her character lose the most nuance. Forget Ono and his “questionably homophobic ass” you don’t need nuance to understand he was a homophobic jerk, but with Miura, all her lost nuance really damaged her presentation as a character here. As I said before, I had to hold off writing any comments about the series because I really wanted to know what the author/artist was doing with Miura and I wanted to see the complete picture before I wrote anything.
That being said, Jun grew a lot as a character. I’m very satisfied with the ending he got. I think his recognition of his relationship with Makoto was…satisfactory. At least he got out of the relationship, even if his fixation on dating older men…was never brought up but given how the rest of this was written I DIDN’T EXPECT MUCH IN THE FIRST PLACE. I also don’t think he has to announce her sexuality with the class the way he did, but knowing that he decides to not live in the closet is very comforting? Like we know that even if he has flaws, and even if he does struggle with his sexuality, he is able to live with it comfortably.
This series is not a perfect one. There’s a lot of messed up shit in here (subject wise), and it’s not the greatest thing, but I can see where the author was trying to go with it. Do I like this story? Not really. I think a lot of what happened was extremely dramatized (like what the hell was this series from chapter 7 to 10/11ish like that was just awful not in an emotionally painful way but in a really edgy cringe way that was so unrealistic and so dramatically different in tone from the rest of the series). I do think that a lot was lost here from the adaptation, but I’m not such a big fan of the story that I’d want to watch the drama or read the novel. I appreciate what the author tried to do, but it totally could have been done in a better way.
Don't get me wrong, there are hundreds of things wrong with this series. Just as everyone below has typed out that I could spend hours just talking about how this series fails so miserably in focusing on the important themes and morals it's portraying (like all the emphasis on Mr. Fahrenheit committing suicide as a CHUNIBYOU OF ALL THINGS and not about the fact that he was in an incestous, pedophilloic relationship that gave him AIDS/HIV) but then that would just mean that this story wouldn't be the one that the author wanted to tell. And that we'd have a different story entirely. And probably that story wouldn't even be story in a manga/ live action format, because no one wants to focus on the dark realities of that some of us queer folks have to face, because they'd rather focus on the straight fujioshi girl instead.