The characters are remarkably shallow. Oh, they have “depth” that comes in the form of tragic backstories and internal self-hatred, but it’s all paper-thin. They aren’t believably flawed human beings. They’re perfect caricatures that exist for the reader to fantasize about dating them, and their “flaws” only exist to make them feel like troubled emo bishonen that a good girl can surely fix.
Miyazawa, the girl, has less of this issue, though she isn’t particularly interesting. If she was any more bland than she already is, I’d call her an intentional blank slate for the reader to slot themselves into. The story started with an interesting hook for her personality — an egoist who wants to maintain a facade of perfection to impress her peers. But this is only temporarily maintained for the initial drama for her to start dating Arima, and a brief arc of her being bullied. Past that, she essentially forgets that this was ever part of her personality, and settles into a forgettable lack of traits. You could call it character development, but she develops into someone with nothing interesting about her. Near the end of the manga she essentially stops having any relevance to the plot at all.
Arima is the bigger problem. He’s so perfect it’s hilarious. #1 test scores in the country, kendo prodigy, likeable and lovable by everyone. His only flaw is that he believes himself to be a terrible person, for hiding the fact that he’s a terrible person from those around him. Notice the circular logic? Not all characters need to be perfectly rational, but the internal conflict should be at least believable.
It reminds me of another manga, Kaguya Wants to be Confessed to. Kaguya feels like it took heavy inspiration from Kareshi Kanojo on several fronts. But it’s also much better written, and understood how to balance its perfect-seeming protagonists out by making them inwardly flawed in realistic ways. Arima feels like both of those characters wrapped into one perfect person without any of the realistic drawbacks to that lifestyle.
If all you want out of it is an enjoyable fantasy of a perfect, darkly troubled bishonen boyfriend, then I don’t begrudge you that enjoyment. I don’t personally think it holds up as well written.
Visually, it’s not particularly well made either. The art goes through three stages. The early art has extremely messy and hard to follow paneling, with way too many small (and weirdly narrow) panels crammed into single pages, and way too much dialogue crammed into those panels with very little flow. It was tiring to read. Luckily, past the beginning, the mangaka apparently got much more experienced with the art of making a readable manga, and it settled into a mediocre average. In this phase, the main thing I’d criticize is the extremely repetitive character designs. The mangaka blatantly had very few character design ideas to actually draw from, with many characters having the same faces and extremely similar hairstyles, differentiated only by hair color and height. There were countless points I mixed up the main girl with a temporary rival, or the main boy with the main girl’s father or another girl in the cast. If characters aren’t immediately distinguishable at a glance, then something’s clearly wrong.
The art improves in the final stage, but I’ll talk about that part of the manga later.
During those first two stages of the story, the plot is mostly bland. After Miyazawa and Arima settle into their relationship, it has a collection of arcs focusing on various other couples. Most of those are about as bland as the main duo’s romance, and I won’t say much about them. Though there’s a bit of a problematic romance between a high school girl and a 28 year old man. But that's another thing I’ll talk about later.
Most of the drama during this stage of the story is, yet again, shallow. There are far, far too many misunderstandings borne purely of miscommunications. There are ways to make the resolution to that kind of thing satisfying, when they finally do communicate, but here it mostly felt arbitrary and forced. I also never found this manga funny. There was very little drive to keep reading.
Later in the story, it improves… kind of. The art definitely gets better, with the occasional impact page that has solid shading and composition. This is where Miyazawa completely stops mattering to the story — now, it’s all about Arima, and his tragic backstory. The backstory itself isn’t that poorly written, but I’d laugh at the idea that this makes this story “dark.” It’s written to make Arima more of a caricature, the boy who’s oh so perfect yet is so darkly troubled. It’s dark in an edgy teenage way. All of the drama centering around his belief that he’s a bad person, because he was abused as a child, is just nonsensical.
What’s a little more compelling is his relationships with his birth parents, which have a little more basis in truth, in the desire some adopted people have to gain some sort of connection to the people they never knew. It’s not awfully written, I’ll say that much for it. It does, however, lead to an absolutely ridiculous climax. It’s like the story goes from an extremely boring soap opera, to an spicy, over the top, hilarious soap opera. I’ll give this part of the story credit for having the guts to go crazy.
After that, things get problematic. This is where I have to spoil a couple things, though I’ll try not to go into detail. Spoiler warning.
In its epilogue, the manga starts to seriously idealize certain ideas, and I’d call it genuinely harmful of it to do so.
The first is how it idealizes teenage pregnancy. Shockingly, there’s only a single character who has a realistic reaction to this reveal. Everyone else is happy and supportive. I won’t say it’s outright impossible for a teenage pregnancy to be handled in a mature way and for the involved parties to all grow up fine. But even with characters as “perfect” as the protagonists of this story, it comes off as incredibly tone-deaf and problematic to treat it as a perfect situation with no concerns. I guess it’s “believable” in this story since there’s rich grandparents supporting them through it, but realistically, I honestly don’t think this is a good message to end on, for shoujo readers to internalize or believe.
The second is to do with Asaba’s ending. He’s Arima’s best friend, a womanizer who never found the girl right for him. Somehow, when he finds out that Miyazawa’s baby will be a girl, he goes through a strange thought — that this girl will be his soulmate. I genuinely gaped when reading this, going over the last few pages, certain I must have misunderstood something. I didn’t. In the epilogue chapter it makes it clear. Their daughter falls in love with Asaba, and he “resists” this weakly, essentially acknowledging that he’s going to “give in” because he loves her too much.
This is not an okay thing to condone in fiction. I don’t care if you think that cases like this are okay because “the child wanted it.” Minors are not capable of making that kind of decision, full stop. Art does not exist in a vacuum. When you write something like this into a story, treating it like a positive, you influence your readers to think it’s an okay thing, to not be as careful as they should about not falling into abusive situations. If you read this and were smart enough to just take it as a story and not be influenced by it, then I’m happy you reacted to it properly. But that does not make it an acceptable thing to write.
These abhorrent moments are at least small, near the end. The vast majority of the experience has nothing to do with it. And normally, I would have given that experience a 4/10. Because of the way it ended, it gets a 3/10 instead.
But by and large, even without the awful ending, it’s not a manga I’d recommend. It’s uninteresting, unfunny drama, with poorly written characters. It feels like what Kaguya is making fun of, rightfully, and has none of the self-awareness. If you want to read a good shoujo, go read Glass Mask.
