axelmania's manga / #ongoing(909)

super compelling!! a good balance of drama and humour, with frequent creativity from the author in depicting the characters emotions. the two main friendships outside of the couple are so interesting, and im glad for the acknowledgment that gay people dont always have relationship compatibility and stay friends. cute and eccentric and i cant wait to see them work through their issues, especially their views on religion, and get that webcomic done!!

a manga very similar to her shimcheong in its central idea that everyone is equally vying for or crushed by power, corrupting all of society into evil, and that the only ultimate escape from the suffering this causes is death. but where shimcheong dumps all its secrets out at once, this slowly reveals them and allows the reader to gradually figure things out on their own. my favourite part of this is the horror of the memory loss and how it warps the relationships of the protagonist. no character is really good here. to some extent thats just them trying to survive, but a lot of it is desensitization to hurting and killing others, and thats very depressing. amidst all the darkness and pessimism, its almost funny that gay kissing is one of the plot devices. thats why this is bl and not just a manga that happens to have gay men in it. what i really want is to read some actual chinese history about ths politics of royalty, and see if its as bloody as all the fiction drawing from it.

pretty good final story that takes its characters seemingly silly traits very seriously and to their logical conclusions, but takes too long to get there with a lot of meandering meaningless comedy. positive asexual rep is always cool!

the setting is very interesting, but the constant rape and unrealistic yaoi-isms make this practically unreadable. also, the artist can only draw maybe three different faces which are repeated over and over and its painful to look at

look, this isnt perfect, but its pretty fucking close for bl. real review coming when im not swamped with work lol