This series is a very normal old-style shoujo: a girl (Yuu) follows a dream and finds love (Touya) along the way. It's fun, uplifting, and cute. That being said, although it's a fun read, I don't get much out of it. You don't get the appeal of a character who is or grows into a mature, experienced adult woman. I went to school in literature and writing and have a successful career now... and I can't relate to any of her struggles!
The biggest problem is that Yuu does not have a single significant failure. The story is about the progression of her career, not of her personality or relationships. Too bad there is never a significant obstacle to her career. Bumps in the road and nails in her tire don't give her flat tires or even bended bumpers, they just slow her down for a moment. It's a drama about drama which lacks drama:
The one play she was in, where she tripped and messed up, turned out successful. She makes a more successful version of the play which was 'stolen' from her. Even though her scripted episodes of the TV show were going downhill thanks to the actors, she wows everyone with the best episode ever.
Her directing always goes well. She becomes famous after a very few plays. If the story's about her career, she shouldn't become an instant star, even if she knows famous people. This manga is missing TIME.
Closer to the end, the script she wrote with memories of her grandmother makes vague references to childhood memories, but we are never shown anything. Her victory feels hollow because you only see her winning without seeing anything of the great story or strong feelings she put into them. We are TOLD she put her feelings into them, and we are TOLD she struggles with scripts, but we never SEE that. We don't even know anything about the plot of most of the things she writes, with one exception: The great story of 'Hana', I think it's called, with the showgirl ghost and the salarywoman, sounds fun. I wish we had seen a little more of it. Then we could understand why the play was so alluring and fascinating. All of the plays in this series are given about a page to show scenes from them.
This is my problem with the whole thing. Unlike other series about girls following their dreams, i.e. Glass Mask or Ingenuo, there is absolutely no detail put into the intricacies of the girls' chosen professions. As a result, the manga spends a lot of time telling about how tough things are without showing us the true difficulty. Similarly, we never see the wonderful things about the theater life, either.
The ending is disappointing for so many reasons:
Touya offers the script to Kazuma Rin without Yuu's permission, and says to go ahead and put on the play. He does this because he and Yuu need "rivals" to do their best. Apparently they don't have enough motivation just doing what they love. Furthermore, the fact that he gave the play away should have been a huge problem, because the problem of a stolen script and someone else doing the same show was a BIG problem earlier! There's no discussion, he just comes back and says "I did this, it should be okay with you." And she agrees! AGH!
And to top this off, the entire play which Yuu (and I) have been waiting for since the beginning of the manga lasts for what... a page? Two pages? And we don't even know what they did during practice! It's like the author wanted to write a drama about theater without knowing anything that actually goes into making theater! The manga is about a scriptwriter, but we never see stories! If this were a drama about dance, we'd be shown pages of astounding dance moves. If it were photography, we'd be shown scenery or touching Kodak moments. And so on.
A less important point is the clumsiness of the love issue. The second 'love interest' was introduced much too late. As a result, the love complications of Kina (the childhood friend)->Touya and the Kabuki guy->Yuu are never fully realized and the addition of these complications is pointless. The plotline with Kina and Touya's brother is never explained and you are left wondering what happened there and why Kina gave up so easily.
At the end,
Yuu decides to follow Touya to England since apparently the Japanese think that true love does not persist over time and distance. Presumably she can study script-writing there. Oh yeah, too bad she has to learn English first, because England is not big on Japanese. And then she's just going to come back to Japan and write Japanese scripts again...
If I do have a moment of praise, it's that there's not too much unnecessary drama between Yuu and Touya. Their relationship grows and they share
a very natural kiss
and eventually work hard together. I can accept the unnaturalness of a normal girl falling in love with a star because this is shoujo manga, after all...
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