It was not bad. Honestly, a lot of the stuff you mentioned seemed like it would be blown past.. if it weren't Chii. Even the teens in swimsuits thing isn't anything you can't find in a dozen manga romcoms, half of them embracing social media now.
I would agree about the romance angle, but it feels like she's a late bloomer instead the whole aro/ace cra.. conditions. It could also be a Naruto/Sakura, Harry/Hermine type situation, where we'd get frustrated for the dude not receiving affection from the girl he likes (Not sure if the H/H situation goes here, but it's what I think of when the MC and the fMC don't get together).
But to my original point, is it bad enough for people to skip parts of the story? Any story, at least the first time around?
I will say that
Even the teens in swimsuits thing isn't anything you can't find in a dozen manga romcoms, half of them embracing social media now
Isn't really an argument against it being something to find objectionable about in this story, given the context of people's gripes with Chita as a character and how her behavior and mindset relate to that.
Whether one wants to be charitable or not to that actual moment of the story, the result
is that she took them away from the studying that Anjou & Toyoda were doing to further their own aims, had them come with her to a night pool, filmed them in bathing suits at provocative angles, and then uploaded them to her channel
all to simply pad out her analytics and try to monetize them. For what it's worth, she also didn't promise them any sort of payment for it, even though that was brought up by Anjou herself in that very chapter.
I can only speak for myself, but my primary issue with Chita is that she's an active drag on the velocity of the character arcs for other characters, simply by virtue of the fact she refuses to acknowledge that things have to chance and time has to move forward.
And she's being humored by those around her, rather than facing any actual consequences for the things she's doing. However
actually bad or not things she's doing are where other characters are concerned, the cast and narrative are allowing her to continuously enter the scene, demanding others to bend to her whims of the moment, throwing a fit until they do, and then proceeding to stay in one place and get upset when others don't.
That gets old, after awhile, when we as readers are seeing the other characters actually making efforts to grow and change.
Especially so, when Chita's character is also prone to getting mad that her two friends have boyfriends, and acts like she's entitled to all of their time and attention and that they should also stay in stasis alongside her.
That's not her even being a good friend, at that point, so much as her being selfish. And again - she's not facing the consequences of that by anyone or anything around her, and--realistically--that's not how things should work, if we're being at all grounded about how the world should operate.
So maybe,
hopefully, that status quo starts to shift for her. And I'm personally expecting this to be the start of that. Because if she goes through whatever arc is approaching and comes out the other end with no shift or even
acknowledgement that she's not the center of everyone else's universe and that she can't keep digging her heels in like she has been, then she as a part of the cast risks destroying any hope of progression for the rest of them by virtue of her being allowed to exist in a fixed point of time independent of everything and everyone around her.
