Art

• The best thing about this story is easily the art but mostly because everything else is bad. I don’t usually read BL but I imagine they live and die based on how hot they can make the characters and honestly it does a pretty good job. That is to say it feels like they have a well drawn cast of characters that embody what I think are the major character archetypes you would expect from a BL. The facial features, expressions and especially their styles, clothing wise, felt like a very important shorthand to understanding who these characters are supposed to be. A shorthand that was desperately needed given the short length and disjointedness of the story. Kudos to the well drawn and varied designs. Outside of character design backgrounds range from fine to absent not that that’s bad for this type of story. Panel work is pretty meh as well nothing really stuck out one way or the other. There was an interesting use of bubbles to display a dream sequence I liked towards the end but otherwise rather standard. 7/10

Characters

• The story follows four couples and jumps around between them.

Couple 1: is a depressed radio host and an energetic older coffee shop manager who listens to his show
Couple 2: is already sleeping with each other but aren’t in a relationship because one of them can’t let go of a past relationship
Couple 3: meet in an it could only be anime way. The happy golden retriever guy collapses on the side of the road while trying to rescue a cat only to be rescued himself by a passing older yakuza
Couple 4: they’ve been together since high school but always seem to be fighting
There’s potential and that’s what initially sold me 3/10

Plot

• Garbage 1/10. While all of the relationships have potential to be interesting none of them deliver. It is interesting that all the characters know or interact with each other however the decision to switch between them so often in such a short runtime was terrible and it made even piecing that short synopsis of the different relationships an SAT level question. It felt like things just sort of happened with no lead up or reason but just because the author thought oh yeah that sounds cool. There was this constant feeling of missing something throughout the entire story. There would be scenes where I’m clearly meant to feel sad or in suspense but all I ever really felt was whiplash. Every touching scene felt completely undeserved. On a more micro scale the dialogue and inner monologues were just as bad. I thought I just had a bad translation so I went looking for other english translations and found what I’m pretty sure is the official one but it’s also ass. The banter between the characters was empty. Every fight felt soap opera-esque but the fact that so little screen time was given to them made them feel pointless. Lastly I finally understand what women feel like when they read women written by male authors because at no point did I think, yeah I could see a guy saying or thinking that. I don’t know if that’s standard for BL but as a more vanilla reader I just didn’t like it. On that note, this is very tame for a BL. There are scenes of the characters in bed together but not a lot of what I would consider fan service. There were definitely some cute kissing scenes and some touching hugs but I didn’t feel much of anything on account of how confused I was about the story. Overall a 1/10 it was a poor execution of a short romance anthology series.