Mimi's manga / #questioning character(4)

I actually want to fucking scream. I've never... Related... To a character so hard like I did with Soushi when reading this. I'm not into metal or any of its variants, but reading him talking about how the metal music and intimidating look prevented people from talking to him hit me like a train. Seeing him dealing, growing, and how his social anxiety and possible AVPD kept him from conveying important shit or even living a goddamn life felt like I'd been thrown off a fucking plane. Seeing him trying to speak up made me cry more than once because I know... I know how that feels when you're on the verge of passing out because there's so much weight on you to speak. Coming from someone with AVPD and BPD and struggling with that constant tug-of-war of wanting to speak, wanting to make friends, and wanting to keep the friends you somehow made while so much of you is scared to do so at the same time fucking sucks. I've been that person starting from 5th grade that had a permeate depressing look, a permeate intimidating look just so people wouldn't come up to me. Hell, I still do! The moment I had with this book... Anyway, the story was great, I had an existential crisis, and I'm looking to buy this physically.

This was such a 3 or a 3.5 star for me overall but vols 1 & 2 are straight 4 stars. Mainly because I don't think I liked any of the characters except the main two and even then Mashita was riding a fine line for me. Yoshinori was definitely the only character ever, everyone else was either ok or "please stop talking". I've also noticed that this took forever for me to get through even after all the vols came out because of vol 3. The story itself was just ok, nothing gripped me but I also didn't want to drop this either. But when Yoshinori's friend was a part of the story and the vacation stuff stared kicking off, I just didn't feel like reading it. Probably the worst part of all 4 vols for me. Afterward, it just became fine again. Overall this was just fine.

Update: This is just for the 1st vol, not my complete thoughts for the whole series. I plan on rereading it once I give a damn about reading vol 3 because I am Nagisa'd-out. Honestly, I really did expect a bit more from this one. I've been on a Nagisa Furuya binge right now and I've noticed they really like slow burn high school romance love confessions (help! we get it! ohmygod!). I also feel like the story in this vol felt empty? Maybe because I kept see this get hyped to hell and back about an emotional slow burn romance that I thought I would get... emotional. Although, because we have 3 vols, having love confession be quick and out of the way so we can get more time with slowly grouping together I'm much more in favor of. Most of Nagisa's other stuff ended right when they started dating so we don't often get enough time to see them be together. I like that we're getting more time with these two as a couple with this one. I'm interested in continuing this.

Update: ... Who knew that the 1st read was gonna be the HEIGHT of my Nagisa Furuya marathon. Loved this, liked My Summer of You... but it was all downhill from there. This was probably the best I've seen of Nagisa. It was also the 1st story I've read from her and I kinda felt everything else in this binge I'm putting myself through has gone down from here just a bit. The sad part is, going through her work book after book and not jotting down anything melted my brain and I don't 100% remember all that happened. I do remember liking this more than anything else I've read from her. It is a book I'm going to reread so I can update this. I would've actually like to've seen two lions get a second book because I feel like this couple was a bit more interesting than the one from my summer of you.