About Rei and Arsenio

I've been thinking about why the Rei x Arsenio ship feels so much weaker than the Sauro x Arsenio ship, and I think I put most of the blame in the manga's tone shift. This manga started out feeling primarily like a comedy. The beginning of Arsenio's attraction to Rei was "hey, look at how cute and naive this girl is because she's actually a boy who isn't very conscious of the fact that he's got a very attractive female body, and sometimes that puts him/her and Arsenio into some risque situations. ;)" By the time Sauro was properly introduced, the manga had taken a couple steps back from its comedic "turn the girl back into a boy and defeat the perverted demon king" premise and moved on to include more serious concepts like gender identity and sexuality and how religion can affect your view of the world (although comedy is still definitely present). So Sauro and Arsenio were given a basis for their relationship with real work put into it about friendship and betrayal and redemption, while Rei and Arsenio missed out because those sorts of stakes just aren't super necessary in comedy-based story-telling.