Okay, yeah, Kate's weird immediate falling for other girls is a bit unsettling, but the rest of the manga makes up for it (despite the, uh, implied [REDACTED] parts with Niki later on) in my opinion. This is a profoundly introspective story of an artist who learns to come to terms with her feelings, her loneliness, and the nature of solitude as a whole through her art. It's beautiful. Angie may just be her OC, but she channels her hope and despair through her and learns to become an actual, normal person as opposed to the clingy, pathetic, and needy brat she was at the start.
The backdrop of soul/funk/disco was also fun and quite unusual for ... most any manga I've ever read. You can feel a love for Black art in this story even though there's no actual Black characters in this Japanese town (lol). It feels genuinely appreciative and not fetishisizing, which I found very refreshing.
This manga's biggest fumbling is the really weird, heavily implied father-daughter incest. I, personally, was reading with blinders the size of dinner plates on so I tried to come away with a reading where there wasn't any actual, physical incest taking place -- and, instead, the girl was simply speaking metaphorically about the embrace of a lover versus the comforting hug of a parent -- but, well. I also have to accept that I'm being swept away by a desire to be in denial as opposed to accepting this work for all it is.
I mean, a person can be flawed without fucking her dad, right? She's plenty flawed and that makes her human. That whole subplot just... felt somewhat derailing. She can connect with him in so many ways, and she DOES, so I'm not sure what that weirdly carnal aspect does for the story. Sure, she's promiscuous and this probably stems from her childhood experiences, but that does NOT mean she needs to go bang her dad?!?! The logic is so strange.
In the event that no fatherfucking took place, I'd say this was actually pretty top-tier. The characters are messy, difficult, and annoying, but all in ways that humans can be. The homophobia is fairly realistic without being melodramatic. The complexity of the different relationships -- that between women and women, men and women, fathers and daughters (platonic), mothers and daughters, the aged and the young, etc. -- all struck a chord with me.
In the event that fatherfucking did take place, I have to embrace this manga as a bizarre but engaging story of the human condition, I guess.
But I'm going to keep my blinders on, just for this story, because I do think it's a little more cohesive without that one, off-camera but heavily implied subplot.