Reviewed @completion (epilogue ch21)
It's about women (mostly girls, tbh, 16 years old) and the toxic side of their love.
Each of them involved in or engaging in unhealthy acts/relationships/etc to varying degrees due to, mostly, emotional immaturity.
Especially the 'adult' lead character who becomes a predator on our main pov mc as an outlet. She clearly has a form of arrested development.
And most interesting about this is that every single character is wholly aware (to use the psych term, they really have remarkable insight) into the unhealthy parts of what they're doing and are mostly doing it because they don't know what else to do and are figuring things out (except for the one character who's mostly just resigned, like when a depressed person gives up on life for a while)
It's also interesting because a lot of the time this means that the characters' communicate about the issue when you'd maybe not expect them to. But there's probably more things that they keep inside of themselves as they're stumbling through it all.
I actually failed to predict where this story would end a few times. I definitely got the very end wrong.
And I'm a little surprised it ended when it did. It kind of felt like things still weren't wholly resolved, but I guess the path at least changed and that's what the story was about?
But for two side characters in particular, especially one of the two (the gyaru), I really could have used more chapters and stories. As it is, with those two characters, it feels like we more saw a significant snapshot of their lives.
The ending felt a little rushed. Kind of like either she didn't know how to clear up those points, or was out of ideas or perhaps it was intentional idk.
Would like some more epilogue chapters, like we got with Can't Defy the Lonely Girl in it's two spin-off sequel one-shots marking and Kekkyoku Sonna Kimi Ga Suki. It took half a year to a year for those to come out and it's been 3 years for this one, so maybe it won't happen, who knows.
Now what to rate this is...hard to decide. I came out thinking the writing was 'good' my enjoyment 'good'. Almost 'very good' but not quite.
But it does tackle toxicity in an interesting way such that a lot of it wasn't entirely off-putting (of course the whole 'adult teacher predating on a vulnerable 16 year old who just wants friends, and in a sexual manner' is still very off-putting. But I'm referring to the other many any other unhealthy things we see that were mostly interesting and done with understanding and with partial reassurance of it being due to cluelessness and immaturity.
Oh and it's very NSFW, the sex scenes are pretty well drawn.
So...was thinking 7.5/10. Maybe 8? But also the ending feels a bit rushed...7.5