pidgeonreads's manga / #sensible age gap(29)

I rarely leave reviews on unfinished stories, much less five stars. But Anemone Theatre is in a different league. First of all, it’s the perfect combination of real and fantasy. It makes me, as a person in the community, feel seen seeing out history displayed in its both wonderful and painful truth. The elements of found family are perfection and not a single character feels like a caricature - a common feeling I find when reading BL. At the same time, it nails down the feeling of your average coming to age historical romcom so well. This is one of favorite genres, but I next to never find queer stories that actually capture the feeling without any ‘otherness’ included. But the cast feel so perfectly like they could be real people you’d meet. Another thing AT does very well is nail the sexy without lessening the story elements. Despite being a smutty story full of graphic content, it does not feel like a story made with the sole intent of making porn. At the same time, I would not say that the porn is something you can separate from the story. It is important to the character development of the cast and didn’t have the porn for the sake of porn feeling. At the same time, it’s extremely smutty and will make you blush.

The comedic timing in this comic was absolute perfection and weirdly the story managed to uplift and see through on some lofty ideas about humanity, love, and worth. A wonderfully strange experience.

Absolutely none of the popular tags on this prepared me for the absolute emotional roller coaster of a read this was. Though I give it three stars, most of my faults lie with the way you can tell the artist was running out of steam entirely at the end. The art began to slack off as well as the story pacing. And on top of that this is even a story where I wished the main couple didn’t end up together. So it’s a little insane that I still found myself with so much to say about it. This is a story with deeply faulted characters. Absolutely none of the main or side cast is free of series character defects. And reading their story often filled me with rage. I got mad at the stupid choices they made and how awfully they treated each other. Even now I’m pissed that the main couple stayed together after everything. But I feel like that was, in a way, the point. You’re supposed to get mad. You’re supposed to hate the actions of CW and TS. You’re supposed to want to scream at the breakdown of the friendship between the lead and his bestfriend. This was a story about how painful and messy and hurtful loving someone can be. TS was so afraid of becoming like his father yet he woke up one day and realized that’s exact what he was. CW spent the better part of his life suffering only to find out that he could be just bad as TS. Worse, even. The protag of the story is supposed to be this crowd pleaser who no one can dislike yet he spends almost the entire story setting himself up to get hurt and then wallowing in exactly what he knew would happen while dealing with the one person who really doesn’t like him. It’s very human. I would still say that it’s solidly a 3 star read. There’s a ton of problems. Like I don’t really see a need for the bully to have so much time dedicated to him. He didn’t even seem to serve as any sort of parallel, just an easy way out of setting up scenes. And though I felt that the slow deterioration of the protag was executed very well, I found CW’s arc to be the opposite. His actions felt extremely out of character and basically reversed his personality for the beginning half of the story. Like for someone who’s supposed to be so in love with and obsessed to TS he literally just dropped the dude and then basically he ceased to exist for him until he was needed again in the story. Not great.

Such a beautiful, well written story! It really felt like the characters came to life. They were people that you’d meet on the street or know as friends. The author is brilliant at their job <3