facepalm

This author has such great art, it's a shame how much she really needs (needed) a writer to help her, or something. Finder suffers from this problem too, except its a million chapters longer which makes its issues much more glaring. This is basically the manga equivalent of eating a pint of ice cream for dinner (and Finder, a gallon).

It amazes me what old BL managed to get made into anime back in the day. They should've put more effort into the Sex Pistols anime rather than even bother animating this one. This is just schlock.

Anyway, don't read the rest of this, because it's just me complaining about nearly everything but the art.

(spoilers)
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This is such a trashy plot with a hella annoying main character. I feel like the only reason this was ever popular was that the art (and smut) is really great.

Problems with the main character, Ranmaru:
- stated to be a badass but he's constantly damseled and rescued by his boyfriend
- is a total tsundere, a brat, and an idiot, none of which are appealing traits (to me)
- he yells at random people who just ask him questions, or are simply trying to communicate with him, which is inappropriate behavior whether or not you're in a foreign country where you don't speak the language
- he's an adult (20+?) but acts like grade schooler in terms of sexual naivety
- note: wafuku is traditional japanese dress, and hinagishi-style is basically a wafuku no-pants party
- he wears the wafuku hinagishi-style instead of normal clothes even when trying to sneak around without his yakuza escort, which makes him easily identifiable to anyone looking for him
- running around in basically a shirt and underwear in a foreign country where he doesn't speak the language, with nothing else on him. he basically just has some clothes, no phone, no id, no keys, no pager, no money, no nothing, wtf
- even though they knew each other for 20 years, Ranmaru and Kaoru never had one conversation beforehand about how they would deal with a marriage neither of them wanted? ugh

Pretty much every scenario in this was completely implausible wacky yaoiland insanity that you can only shake your head at:
- getting left behind at the winery without anyone noticing. use the winery phone. also, there were cellphones in the aughts. i would think yakuza would be rich enough to afford them. or pagers if you want to be old-school.
- the whole standing on the balcony and yelling at people and then falling is just so grade-schooler and yet another damsel moment
- running into your main rival yakuza group in the same foreign country in the same hotel at the same time. this could've made sense if the rival group had planned it, but Goudou was just like "eh we do business here too", wat.
- random italian dudes driving around the countryside who suddenly decide they are interested in boning some random asian guy they come across because he's cute and ain't got no pants on
- ranmaru getting kidnapped in the street just because he chose not to confront Al at the bar, and then he blames himself for choosing not to go be in the protection sphere of the man he refuses to admit he wants to ride the D of, ugh
- why would you take pills from kidnappers (or random strangers at best) when you wake up feeling like crap in a place you don't recognize? why would you believe anything they say? ugh
- how convenient that the women who were paying off their debt by kidnapping ranmaru (or just any hot japanese guy?) knew specifically where he (or a hot japanese guy by himself in rome) was at the time when they needed to kidnap him. why bother going through that bs and instead just put him in a car at gunpoint. he doesn't even have pants on muchless a gun or a knife.
- every dude in italy seems to want to spend a night up Ranmaru's yaoi hole but not Kaoru's sexhole? this is so ridiculously implausible that it's almost offensive.
- there was no indication that ranmaru was gay, yet Al pushed him into gay adulterous sex on his wedding night wtf. not wanting to get married, or marry a specific woman is not the same as being gay.
- one chapter implies he was sexually assaulted as a kid by another guy but it doesn't mean he's gay
- nowhere in this manga does ranmaru really ponder his sexuality in any way. did this stuff never happen in japan, where every guy on the streets of tokyo who sees ranmaru wants to do a prostrate exam on him with their dick?
- how convenient that the hot italian guy knows japanese and has a dad obsessed with japanese culture so that he can communicate with ranmaru. i'm glad the dad showed up later and tried to molest ranmaru as well so we could watch another damsel moment where Al swoops in to defend the sanctity of his boyfriend's poopchute yet again.
- Al seems to just lust after Ranmaru in some kind of a fetishistic way; he doesn't even know the guy at first beyond him being a good-looking if annoying brat with no pants on who is a passenger on his cruise ship
- Ranmaru deciding he loves Al was hella rushed, and was only supported at all by forced sex/stockholm syndrome and Al rescuing ranmaru constantly to ensure that yaoi hole remained his and his alone
- it just generally would've been better if ranmaru had also been completely spellbound by Al the first moment he met him and then at least we could say they both had love at first sight or whatever. this would've been better than Al's fetish-at-first-sight and Ranmaru's ok-well-at-least-you're-not-kaoru.


There were also other issues:
- Al was a pretty generic tall/older/powerful/rich/super hot seme/top stereotype
- the mythical yakuza organizations here are corny rather than feeling at all dangerous. why bother having a yakuza plot if you're not going to have a dark/dangerous tone. just make him rich kid from an old-money family instead
- seriously, why did Al's pervert dad have to show up? just to tease an old-man sex kink scene that never materializes?
- why is ranmaru wearing female garb at the wedding instead of two guys in menswear (Al in a tux and Ranmaru in a formal male kimono)? Ranmaru as an uke/bottom does not make him a woman, and Ranmaru constantly rails about the fact that he's not a woman all throughout the manga.
- I don't want to harp on this too much this since someone went to the trouble of scanlating this, but too many words were in romaji with t/n instead of translating them when there's obvious english equivalents. For example at one point "hanao" is in romaji and then they had to put a translation note, when they could've just translated it in the dialogue as "sandal strap". or even just said "my sandal broke" and leave it at that.
- Also the t/n for "hinagishi" was inadequate given how much it's used in the dialogue. ITS A SLOB LIKE RANMARU BEING TOO LAZY TO PUT PANTS ON WITH HIS KIMONO. I guess he's gotta show off those sexy thighs so that all of gay italy can come sniffing around his yaoi hole inside his underwear that looks like a thong-diaper. :)


tl;dr -- Ranmaru is a hot annoying idiot, everything that happens is implausible or stupid, dumb cornball yakuza organizations, no paaaaaaants. The end.

I wrote this topic with no pants.