Oh, oh! Finally, a good one! I feel like a dude who’s been fishing the whole day and the only thing that’s been biting is tiny lightsaber-dick-largemouth-bass and man-rape-mackerel, or a strange deformed mystery fish like Tomcats that looked like it swam out of the number four reactor at Chernobyl. But I suddenly I finally reeled in a decent fish – it’s no lunker but I’ll eat tonight at least. Perhaps next time I should move to a lake that’s actually been stocked with fish past 2008…
This is a high school love triangle story, and you may be eyeing the cover and wondering what’s so good about it. Trust me, I was surprised too. Don’t get me wrong it’s no Shakespeare or any sort of revolutionary story by any means, but for the BL genre it’s well done…the mangaka did a good job of hooking you in and keeping you interested until the end.
Akira is in love with his best friend Tatsuya, but is too shy to do anything but admire him from afar. Another classmate, the aloof and sarcastic Tanabe, overhears Akira calling out Tatsuya’s name while masturbating in his room (it’s a boarding school), and teases him about it.
Akira soon confesses to Tatsuya, and his friend is so shocked he can’t even answer. Akira takes this as a no and begins to confide his sorrow in Tanabe, since he’s the only one who knows his secret. Akira is desperate to feel something other than his emotions and it leads to him coming onto Tanabe a bit, who is happy to confide his dick in Akira’s asshole in a (consensual) and casual hookup.
Small aside: this stuff happens kind of early on, so if this title sounds like something you might want to read you should skip the rest of the review as it goes deeper into the story and might spoil some things depending on what you consider a spoiler, so here’s a small commercial break.
(Just kidding, Google won’t let you runs ads on a blog that has hundreds of censored black and white weiner drawings and jokes about shotacon and ass rape, in case you were wondering)
So Tanabe and Akira aren’t that close, misery sex aside, and Tanabe is fine with letting that be the case. When Akira tells him about how his father didn’t love him, Tanabe informs him he has daddy issues and that’s why he likes a man like Tatsuya who takes care of him, which annoys Akira – but it doesn’t stop him from pining after Tatsuya anyway. But to Akira’s surprise, after Tatsuya has the token BL “am I gay?” crisis, he begins to return Akira’s feelings and they begin to date.
Soon after, Tanabe decides to leave school because of a violent incident from junior high becoming spread around the school. Akira confronts him and learns about it, and Tanabe makes a second shocking confession – that he loves Akira. However, he thinks the reason for his feelings are just because he can’t have him, the very same reason that got him in relationship trouble in the past.
This of course leaves Akira confused. He loves the doting and sweet Tatsuya who represents the father he never had, but he feels something for the mysterious and troublesome Tanabe too, who soon leaves school. What feeling should he trust?
The mangaka says that she really wanted to keep you guessing until the end on who Akira would end up with, and she did a good job. I had an educated guess by the middle and turned out to be right, but I had some nagging doubt until the last chapter. This “element of surprise” isn’t that common in BL, and it was a pretty driving factor. Even if you weren’t really surprised like me, she did a good job establishing the characters and their conflicts and making you want to see the ending.
Unfortunately the art is definitely not that great, but I’m giving it a bit of a pass because the story was good. Literally if nothing else was changed about it except the art style updated it would be a real winner but sadly this meh 00s look does drag it down a few pegs. If you can deal with that though it’s definitely worth reading, and a good one for genre beginners as well.
TL;DR This is a good love triangle BL – not like groundbreaking story-wise or anything but it’s well done. The mangaka said she wanted to keep you guessing until the very end, and she did a good job…even if you could tell from story cues or just how these things go in BL how it would end and weren’t that surprised, it was a still an absorbing and satisfying read for such a worn out trope. The stale 00s art is a frustrating blemish though.