Does anyone else have the pages of the last chapters all mixed up ? All the other mangas I'm checking are fine...
Why Ogawa Chise, why ?
I know it's unpopular to dislike this author currently, but besides Oita ga Sugiru wa Koneko-chan (which I'm looking forward to buying in physical form in my country in a few months) I've been quite disappointed in her recent work.
I used to love Caste Heaven and thought it held a lot of promise to become a great and smartly put psychological manga about interesting sociological questions (how power works and the relationship between dominants and dominated), but I feel like she forgot/gave up on her first intentions to slide down easy rape tropes like this one... Too bad really.
I agree with you
I think Katsumi is my new spirit animal.
I took a look at the raws (couldn't resist) and at the end he just incarnates what "thug life" is. Fun and openly gay characters like him are a rare gift.
I must ask... What kind of insult is : "I'm going to kick your feminist ass!!" (to a homophobe) ?!
Wow, there are a lot of angry people around this comment section.
This is clearly not a perfect manga in my opinion, but there are however several points that make it at least different and unexpectedly good, or at least interesting to read.
First, even if most readers here don't agree with this, I think Yuka is, for once, a great portrayal of a woman in a yaoi. She is free, and sweet at the same time, and not a witch or a bitch as I have read. Let's put breaks on "slut-shaming" and let women explore their sexuality the way they want to do it and enjoy their life the way they see fit.
The 2 first boys knew what whe was doing, and so agreed with it. She lied to the third one, that was a mistake, and it was wrong, because I see no problem in open relationships but only as long as all parties are in on it. But that's what makes her human, and a normal person. Not an evil woman set to destroy everything in her path right before dying. I also really like the theory of a comment I saw saying that she did pick those 3 boys so that they would not have to face her death on their own, and it is pretty much exposed that the first boyfriend would have killed himself if he had been left on his own.
There's this quote from the poet Alfred Tennyson that I think would fit really well with this story : "Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."
Yes she might have lied, she did take for herself the upper hand in those relationships because she selfishly wanted to enjoy everything she could before dying (and I am not using "selfishly" in a good or bad way here), but the most important thing is, she still loved them, told them so, and even if it was short, and probably not perfect, it's better to have this love than dying without knowing it, don't you think ?
But yes, sure it is tragic, and I see it is a genre often rejected by the readers of yaoi. I personally, and with every art, be it cinema, music, or manga, wouldn't reject a genre in particular, the important thing is the quality of the creation, and that it can touch us. And clearly this manga brought up a lot of feelings around here.
But then like I said in the beginning, it is not perfect either, and I did take out a star because of that useless drunk rape that I think was out of touch, and rape does piss me off. And I know the fact that rapes in manga pisses me off, piss off a lot of people who somehow love to read those kinds of scenes. They just ruin the creation for me, since most of the time they are not explained, or even linked to any psychological pattern, but are simply most of the time the illustration of a patriarcal way of seeing the relations between male and female (in yaoi that is to say the slender, emotional, and somehow really physically weak uke getting raped but still falling in love and forgiving at the end).
To conclude I think that for the originality and reflection that brings out this manga, it really doesn't deserve that really poor grade.
Ch.141 : I died.
Ch. 142 : My body was dug up and some animals came to chew on some parts of it.
Ch. 143 : I was reincarnated as a bug, and smashed by a giant foot the first day of my life.
Mmmh well, that would be seriously unfortunate if I reincarnated twice in an insect. The next step would be a plant. Or maybe a stone, if this relationship gets (somehow) even more heartbreaking than this.
And then, the end of life as we know it.
I want to upvote this comment but I can't because a.) Mangago won't let me and b.) I'm in the midst of dying myself.
Sea cucumber. Next step down is sea cucumber. Or amoeba. :P
This story had a pretty original concept and very cute characters, but in my opinion it really lacked in closure.
I like shonen-ai / slow-paced stories / "shy" relationships (like "Senpai" from this author, which a beautiful piece of work !) but this was more on the bromance side rather than the romance one. You can guess the partners really care for each other, at some points the author might be hinting that it could be a little more than friendship, but nothing more.
HOWEVER, while the same sex pairings stay in the friend zone, the two heterosexual couples in the story get to have their very own love story... Alexi's parents, obviously, and then the couple in the last chapter (that I didn't fully read because I'm not really into shoujo...) in which the girl even gets her sweet love confession...
Seriously when you read something labelled as "shonen-ai", this is kind of frustrating.
What really disappointed me was that I actually loved the story regarding Alexi's parents. I actually bawled like a baby during it, and I thought it was a nice addition to this story. But since it was so... explicit in its portrayal, I was hoping the same would apply for the main couple's. After seeing the parents', I expected our couple's to MOVE somewhere. To develop beyond friendship.
And I wouldn't have minded if it was just friendship if the manga didn't have a bloody "shounen-ai" tag on it. So I wholeheartedly agree with you that it seems a bit out of place in its genre, and for that, lacked a lot of closure. I also didn't like how ambiguous they made Gil's and Floran's relationship. The author could have clarified that it was nothing more than a friendship, as they did (for the relationship) during the arc with the parents' love story, but they didn't. They treated it with the same atmosphere delegated to the main couple, which made me start questioning the main couple's attraction as well. ;;
this is a terrible car wreck I can't help looking at