beta
Ok I think the Japanese reviewer hit the nail with ‘cool’. From what I get from the raws Rio has a cool personality, he is also very caring, attentive and cute (he doesn't want to admit he likes romance movies lol)
Lately I've been thinking that people use ‘tough Bottom’ based on how the uke acts compared to the seme or other uke instead of the personality of the uke as an individual character in their respective story (a lot of bl its from the uke perspective so his interiority is more explored than the seme, plus the ‘twink’ body makes people instantly asociate it with feminity, so when the uke body is a little toned even if he acts the same as the twink uke, he is already labeled manly/tough) also, people think that muscle = manly, and well ‘manly’ is subjective but several use it as an interchangeable term with ‘muscular’ but they are not synonyms.
This author draws muscle bodies, but not defined is more a muscle body form and acording to the canon in universe of the author, Tooru is muscular, so I would say that Rio is not really muscular but it is definitely more toned than Ikeda. Rio has a body similar to Mizuki or Kirino, and Ikeda has a body similar to Takase
I made this comment because the manga already has the tough bottom manly bottom and muscle bottom, nothing wrong with that! this is just a personal observation, sorry.
I am not saying that you need to like everything and that you cannot express your dislike for something, I just feel that most of the time the way in which BL readers express their dislike for an author or manga is very pedantic, some comments are super normal ‘wow i didn’t expect this from them’ and then you have the ‘finally this dumb degenarate wrote something good’
And this is not exclusive to when they don't like a bl, because when they like one, it is always something among the lines of ‘finally something good in this garbage genre." If someone gave me money for each ‘breath of fresh air’ that I find in yaoi comments I would be a millionaire lmao
Also, people really forget that authors/creatives are multifaceted, and instead of being happy or amazed by the versatile of an author they feel betrayed /syundei or that the author ‘improved and grew as a person’ /paspaskim. and is like, authors sometimes will want to approach certain topics from different perspectives