pidgeonreads's manga / #himbo(43)

tldr; surprisingly alright story? … for a manga with a completely unnecessary graphic rape scene ️ This manga is going to have me sitting up in bed for a few nights going ??? because I’m so confused how it was so good. I throughly enjoyed it despite the fact that it somehow also awful and disgusting. This could so easy have been a top ten favorites 5 star manga for me if the author had just ?? Not decided to include the vocalist getting raped and tortured. Like it wasn’t at all a needed plot point and contributed literally nothing. And it was so weird that my guy literally had to be nursed back to health and canonically developed ptsd symptoms from the trauma but the event was still treated kinda as a joke like ‘haha that was crazy’ and the mob boss guy still came to shows that they were pretty cordial. It didn’t really even make sense for the mob boss guy to do it. Up to that point he’d been presented as a die hard yuru fan so it made zero sense for him to throw that all aside just because the guy slapped his sister. Completely unnecessary and weird. Don’t get me wrong, the top in this manga was unlikable from the start and treated the bottom horribly but it made sense for the story and the bottom never complained. His whole thing was that he was happy to receive attention from the guy even if it was bad. The plot could easily have leveraged using the slap and how it made the top feel about himself as the thing that broke the barrier and brought them together. Could have even went with the mob boss hurting the top physically. But the inclusion of the rape was unnecessary and gross and ruined what should have been a solidly good story. Like I liked this pairing. They’re both stupid and insanely full of faults but they were funny and silly and a little adorable at times. I genuinely found myself laughing at the top struggling with being shorter and the honest realness of that last blowjob.

Normally, I’m not a fan of psychological/mystery thrillers. Especially not when it appears that the relationship is toxic. But something told me to keep reading and I’m so glad I did. This story isn’t perfect and neither are it’s characters, but somehow that made it even better. This is one of the few stories I’ve read that managed to display how a healthy relationship dynamic can function between two individuals with unhealthy tendencies. L literally kills people and has an extremely possessive side, but his steadfast loyalty and strangely silly personality made him so loveable. In the same sense, S is lackluster and unlikeable even. He can’t make up his mind and has emotional outbursts on top of pushing people away. But he’s honest and hardworking with a passion that L lacks. They’re both so authentically flawed for characters from a story leaning toward fantasy. The plot itself managed to come together in a perfect way. That last shot of their dinner filled with onions really got me. Onions are disgusting. Raw onions even worse. No one in their right mind would want them in every single meal. But neither of these two are perfectly sane. The onions are such a perfect and understated representation of their relationship and it brought me great joy to see it come to its conclusion.