Killer in Love is bad. I am not going to mince words here. 90% of it is just soap opera tier sludge. Which is fine! I came back to it, week after week, to have a little giggle.

Oh, look how silly that is. Oh look how melodramatic and edgy it is.

Honestly it's not a great way to consume media. When you read something bad, It's kind of easy to forget that there is an author on the other side of the screen, even as a creative. This manga goes through the motions and seems to back the MC 100%. He kills the Fem MC's past lovers to prove his own love and protect her, and paints him in a sympathetic light. We follow him for most for most of the manga, a sad, broken, unloved man yearning for something to fill the hole in his life. Mentally ill and unstable, trying to find anything to keep him sane, fixating on a girl because he doesn't know how to be by himself. He sees the issues with the Fem MC, but decides to just ignore them and feeds into his own saviour complex, idolising the girl as being the only one who he can be with.

It's a fine premise. It could be done decently enough with a good enough writer, but the writer just doesn't feel strong enough to actually write the story properly. So it was just garbage I laughed at each week for being bad. It really started to drag towards the ending too, as it felt like the author ran out of things to write.

And then.

The final two chapters happen.

Now, it's pretty obvious they're being axed here. It's a pretty sudden and non-conclusive ending, but I honestly don't mind it. It feels like a 'gotcha!' moment. You know, this character who was sort of vilified the whole time actually has a sympathetic backstory! With the quality of the writing so far it should fall totally flat.

But it doesn't. It's actually good. It feels genuine, and expresses the frustrations of being unable to find friendship as a woman because of the alienation of romance. And in turn, becomes a person who is desperate for any connection she can get. But this time it feels like it works. In a short two chapters, I get far more invested than I did in the male love interest that got 30-something chapters. Because it was never about him, it was about what he represented. Someone willing to protect her. As she reflects on her past, she wants to kill herself to "join him". If this did happen it would have been a shitty ending, and I wouldn't be writing this review right now.

But this character is tired. She's sick and tired of relying on men for her safety, to give her purpose. She thinks back to her memories of him, and it finally all clicks into place. She realises she has to learn to be alone. Instead of walking off into the ocean, she walks across the beach, and is implied to start anew.

When this chapter came out I was SCREAMING at my monitor. Because I felt so cheated.

You had that in you the whole time? You just decided to NOT write that well? A gut-wrenching, emotionally investing narrative out of nowhere, and then just ending it. I checked the comments to see if anyone agreed with me on the site I was reading it on, and then I remembered what anime fans were like so just had to bottle it up and mull over it to myself. But I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

What's worse than something that never gets to take off, is something that does, and has its wings clipped immediately. It's like shooting a baby bird learning to fly in its nest.

I've read some of the author's other work, and it's cutesy romance stuff. I liked Killing Me!, that was a fun GL, but it seems like they've given up on making any sort of serious stories. Which, like, good for them! Their fluff is much more consistently decent than most of Killer in Love. But I can't help but feel like there was something there, a potential for an amazing story that the author had in them, just gone. Discarded to the wind. I would have rather have just dropped the manga so I didn't have to know the potential I glimpsed. I feel cursed with this information.

But if you're a writer reading this, if you learn any one thing from this review, please don't be afraid of taking risks. Don't play it safe because you're afraid of what your readers might say, or because it might go poorly.

Because it's better to burn too close to the sun, than to never burn at all.