"Master, a relationship with a person is like a kite. It won't fly high if you hold it too tightly. Loosen your grip too much and it falls, and when you pull strongly on a kite flying high in the sky, the string will snap and it will never come back."
I wish I could like this anime. I wish I could write nothing but good things about it, especially since it seems to have a cult following with fans. But I can't.
I'll start with the most glaring issue - This doesn't feel like Shounen Ai. This feels like queer baiting and people clutching at straws. This was produced in China, which you probably know has a strict censorship law over gay relationships being shown in the media. I believe this show only got away with what it did show because its producers were Tencent - a very well-known Chinese conglomerate. But even they had their limits.
Let me start by saying every kiss in this has a purpose. Much like Mahou Sensei Negima!? and Yamada-kun and the seven witches. Each kiss is an "exchange of energy" or forming a contract between the two characters. There is never any mention of love and each kiss has a clear purpose to it.
Which is fine. We're watching Shounen Ai, not smut, right? But that's where it falls apart. The characters are unlikeable and never really develop from their initial introductions in season 1, and therefore their emotions never really develop. They're never shown to love each other beyond this sould connection, and it's never even explained why Ki makes the connection with Keika in the first place. ~Sure~, we're given backstory and how they're fated, but Ki doesn't know this at the time he makes the pact and he never shares this information with Keika.
And sadly, there is no season 3, so we can expect to never know past the webtoon as this anime has been cancelled. If there was a season 3 - I might've spared this anime such a harsh review, but the entire plot was just all over the place. There was no pacing, scenes felt awkward, places that were supposed to make you cry just left me sighing and wishing I could fast forward to the resolutions. I couldn't connect with these characters or their emotions, and the emotions felt by most of them seemed flimsy at best - or had overarching, massive conversations and conflicts between them go unspoken or even straight up forgotten about and ignored.
So I couldn't even go "at least this is a good anime, even if there's not any real romance." Because there wasn't any real plot, and any plot was quickly abandoned for the new, shiny plot line they decided was better the next episode. In fact, 5 episodes in the second series were dedicated purely to a flashback between a character introduced 4 episodes into the season within these flashbacks. And the 5 episodes weren't even needed - it was two perspectives of the same events, and by the second run-through, I really didn't care anymore.
I think a portion of this criticism can also be attributed to the Japanese dub. They tried to match the lip animation to what the original Chinese dub said, but Chinese is incredibly fast compared to English and Japanese, and I feel like a lot of what was ~supposed~ to be said was lost in translation and lost it's impact. Instead, scenes flew by unnecessarily fast, littered with sentences and statements that made me go, "uhh, and?" where I'm sure they were supposed to shock you and add tension.
I was going to let this all slide, because "at least the art is good" but it's very sloppy in some frames and scenes, and for some reason, Keika's eyes are retconned and made purple in the second series instead of yellow. Which really doesn't help when Ki and Shouken also both have purple eyes, so every important character just looked the same in the flashback scenes. I wouldn't have cared if they'd even explained it. But there's zero explanation, and Keika's eyes are purple in flashback scenes, so the fan theory that they "changed when he got closer to his ancestor's power level" is redundant because he has them as a child.
I feel like this entire show was trying to do too many things at once, and spread itself too thin as a result. It prolongued the scenes it should've shortened and missed the big picture involving the things it should've prolongued instead.
I can't hate it. It has guys kissing in a CHINESE piece of media. That's nigh impossible to achieve ordinarily and I'm certain Tencent's production was the only reason this was given a second series. It's paving the way for more acceptance in a culture that desperately needs it. And it wasn't a horrific anime. There was semblance of a plot here, and it tried. It just didn't try very hard.
