Back to yodlormak's Profile yodlormak's Profile

Citrus is one of the mangas of this genre that starts pretty great but ends up only mediocre.

The story for the first arc got detailed explored and well written. The author did spend enough time building up the characters, added their own history and problems, explored possibilities of how to resolve the built-up issues, and concluded the arc nicely and reasonably.

At that time, I think we have both Mei and Yuzu as two main protagonists.

Then this manga kept going where we mostly saw only Yuzu points of view and how her character has grown up. I think it is quite enjoyable reading her journey. However, ... Mei has been set aside and her role only served as a plot device for Yuzu's character growth. There is no character development for her, in which, I believe is a waste of an opportunity because she was introduced as one of the main characters, and there are people who adore her in the beginning. I even found her choices in the story a bit annoying sometimes. Mei was like this in the beginning and she still is in the end. (And yes, because of this, we could see and learn the improvement in characters of Yuzu.) In fact, even support characters such as Matsuri and Harumin, with much less appearance, was written better and we could also see their development.

Setting aside the writing of characters, the story for later arcs are so conveniently resolved. I'm not sure why the story just abruptly finished, or why the authors built up a large tensions then clearing them "just like that". Actually, I wouldn't wish for a fairy tale kind of endings but a reasonable and convincing ending is good enough for all the drama of this love story.

Nevertheless, the art of Citrus is pretty solid and beautiful. It is not extremely unique, but still have its own style. Various expressions of characters can clearly be seen without a require to read the dialogues, which i think is really good and important aspect. I also appreciate the fact that each character has its own design and details.

Anyway, I did somewhat enjoy the manga overall, and it is still good enough for killing the time. It is also not often to find a yuri manga with a long story and drama, so this is a plus. It is just that, in my opinion, there are other older mangas in this genre that are done better such as Sasameki Koto and Aoi Hana, or even less well-known ones like Octave. These are good old Yuri dramas that largely outperform Citrus.

I try reading Q.E.D. after I become bored of the so-long story and uninteresting and some impossible trick of Conan. Q.E.D. gives me a more exciting theme to me. All the tricks are based on mathematics calculation and prediction. One thing is that, the main character are more like human (though he a genius), where he can have some mistakes. The story is much more fun and relax while keeping the good standard of mystery story. One thing that I have to note is that all the clues to solve the mystery are clear (if you notice it) rather come from out of nowhere. The ... good thing here is that, there are some variety of cases: a very plain one to the very great one which you can relax while have fun reading this. Some are about abstraction and some are about realistic. I think if you like math and mystery, you should consider Q.E.D.