But the writing as a whole is kind of a hot mess. You're lead to think that some characters will be relevant, then they aren't; that the blackmail (remember that?) will have relevance in Eichi and Akino's relationship, then it doesn't; that the contest subplot will be suspenseful, then it isn't; that the Kubo siblings' drama will be relevant, then it's not. It's like playing hot potato: every time the mangaka touches upon something interesting, she flings it across the room.

The 6th chapter was especially hard to understand among the new characters that are suddenly thrown in there, changing hairstyles, and confusing speech bubbles. At the end, everyone is mostly as they were introduced save for Eichi no longer being scared of Akino, because I guess they had one quick chat and the blackmail's forgotten. Any interesting drama is just breezed through, yet at the same time this story felt so long and boring to get through and I didn't care about anyone.

I thought it will be better.

It's one of those stories where hate changes into love (it's a popular motive but the outcome usually is cheesy). The idea of the story wasn't that bad - I mean they met, one of them fell in love at first sight and then he worked hard to make his honey like him back - but development is so so. I have a long list of things that kept me bugging but it's a waste of time to point them all. I'll just say that the mangaka was trying too hard to be artsy. He picked too many (cliche) ideas and stuffed them into this work and even if some of them deserved a proper development this has only been done in a superficial way (for example the dark past of uke and seme, I expected some meat when it was mentioned for the first time but in the end it wasn't explained what exactly happened in their past, like what happened with Kubo's mother? why Kubo and his brother aren't on good terms? there's a lot of questions like that. Giving readers some hints, dropping some flashbacks and leaving things without any explanation is just wrong, I mean if you didn't plan to explain sth from the start then don't put it into the story). Let's leave it at that. The art is really good.

In short it's OK for a time killer.

I actually found the first few chapters really promising and engrossing and just couldn't wait to find out what would happen next, but that feeling disappeared rather quickly around halfway through the story when it became apparent that it was going in a much less interesting and more predictable direction towards the conclusion. The ending feels so anti-climatic as a result despite the suspense it was supposed to bring you. Also, turns out we have yet another manipulative and calculative seme scheming to bind his uke to him under the excuse of love. Colour me shocked.

... Last updated on June 28th, 2019, 5:41am

trigger warning:

Shallow. Infatuation at first sight. The clothing designs mostly need work.
Assault/dubcon here and there, which I wouldn't have a problem with if it WEREN'T SO FLAVOURLESS
Kind of a nothingburger. Disappointing.
I finished it bc it felt like it'd have felt even worse without at least a resolution?