This was one of the most boring yaoi I’ve read in recent memory; I may as well have been reading a school textbook. I was thinking about the most mundane shit during it, like that I need more granola when I go to the store tomorrow and if I should really cancel Funimation yet (I should have like 2 years ago probably, but they really are taking their sweetass time porting everything over to Crunchyroll). My eyes were glazing over even during the steamy bits. The story was so predictable and trite and the art was passable but not really to my liking. I’ve certainly read worse, but I just really struggled to get through this one. Maybe I’ve just read so much bad yaoi that mediocre yaoi is now dead on arrival, who knows.
The main story was about the Katsuragi brothers who help run their family’s sweet shop, when their estranged older cousin Takara comes to live with them. He’s a bit of a punk (she did ballet, what more can I say), but don’t worry he has a good heart guys, the plot makes sure you know that. Otherwise it would be creepy and rapey for him to be having gay sex with an underage cousin…
Before becoming estranged from the family, Takara had befriended the middle brother Tooru. Now that seven years have passed and Tooru has some hair on his balls, Backstreet’s back baby; let’s take that friendship to the next level! Time for some chitty chitty bang bang.
Even though I found the plot very boring, it truthfully wasn’t that bad. It was sweet and wholesome even though the main pairing were cousins (not really, but they think they are until the ending). Hey, based off my own personal research, in yaoi world you can still have sex with your cousin and have it be a sweet and vanilla story. You heard it here first.
The second one was a teacher x teacher story, which means I liked it more by default, even though it was not really objectively better in any way (it was probably worse, actually). Two teachers fucking in secret on their own campus? Huzzah, feed me Seymour. Even if it’s drawn rather meh (it is) when it comes to secret partially-clothed teacher sex, my imagination could turn a ball of dry purple playdoh into the Pieta. This story was shorter but had more sex scenes too and had a little bit of light bondage, so I guess that’s something?
After this, the main pairing return at the end for a side story which features – no sex. Well there *is* sex technically I guess, but you don’t see it. You see them kissing, and then waking up the next morning. Ummm…did some pages not get printed? Surely the mangaka knows the purpose of the final bonus stories in yaoi. This definitely made for a disappointing climax. Ouch, my lady blue balls. The sex scenes tended to start and end abruptly too and show up with no lead-up or foreplay, which is a little jarring.
I somewhat disliked Sugita’s art style. The way she draws facial features just doesn’t really appeal to me, especially when they’re not in profile, and her ukes are a little too feminine for my tastes – you can’t really see her signature way of drawing faces on most of the pages I picked for this review except the first one, but it is noticeable on the cover. Looking at her most recent work on Pixiv (which, by the way, is Haikyuu doujins from 2015 so I’m unsure if she’s still active) she got better as an artist but still doesn’t draw faces in a way that I find appealing, although her anatomy is ok. She also sometimes uses screen tones in a distracting way that throws off the contrast balance, which you can slightly see in some of the above pics.
There is some sex like I mentioned but they showed pretty much nothing. It wasn’t really an undeserved M rating so much as a wasted one. I guess you can’t complain about bad censoring when there’s like, no dick to censor in the first place. I could have been reading reverse-trap yuri and not even know it. This isn’ t really “worst-rated” material but I found it to be to be a bit of a snoozefest, and I think even new readers of the genre would find it boring.
TLDR: This is Candy if candy tasted like sugar-free plain greek yogurt. The two stories in here, a school romance and a teacher x teacher story are not really that bad but fairly blah and mediocre, and I found the mangaka’s way of drawing faces in the front view particularly unappealing. There are several horny scenes – mostly concentrated in the second story – but they don’t show enough even to censor. Also, putting a final bonus story of the main couple in the back of an M-rated yaoi without drawing them having sex should be a slap on the wrist, with three strikes to a misdemeanor.