I adore this manga. It is the first one I ever read and to this day it has remained one of my favorites.

Of course, some may not appreciate the chaotic (and genuinely unfulfilled) script where slapstick and/or bloody sexiness is used as a pretext for introducing situations, characters and whatnot. I however think that not only does the art compensate for that but also, and more importantly, does the overarching goal of the artist with the story compensate for that: the point is that in life there is no point to revenge (or for that matter, to almost anything, including infatuations, disease, science and so on). I think the anti-sentimental "cruelty" of the very last chapter was kind of refreshing. There are romantic comedies around, for any one who are looking for that kind of plot; there are furthermore plots perfectly rounded off and motifs operative on a global scale in a smarter way than here. But that is just the point! There are no such stories in real life. Hence it is a romantic comedy when regarded sub specie aeternitatis: from an "omniscient" and eternal viewpoint, the moments of "intense" emotion (or anything as close to that as the mangaka gets) are but comical - because they do not last even 90 years.

I think Anotsu kind of compensates for the idiocy of some other characters (including of course the lead). Anotsu is a hopeless dreamer, nourished by this weird fantasy of something he does not really believe in. I really liked him and it pained me that he was crippled in the end. Btw, judging from some pictures in Love of the brute where an Anotsu-like creature reappears, I wonder if he in the imagination of the mangaka was not some kind of hermaphrodite *irrelevant*