Gotta say, the manga gets pretty wild in the later chapters. Which is not to say it gets good. It's a concentrated mediocrity, masquerading as a stoical and philosophical love story. Sorry but no. Yamamoto Naoki clearly just wanted to draw porn doujins but wound up at a "normal" magazine. The plot is superficial and banal, which wouldn't have been so bad by itself if it wasn't also trying to pretend to be something more.
But most importantly, it doesn't feel real. This manga is too sprinkled with jokes - though many of them are not bad, it robs the story of its immersive aspect - you can no longer empathize with characters quite as well. Not only that, there are too many characters to empathize with, none of which deserve it. The point I'm trying to make here is, we need fiction to read about people and events that are not real - that are better than those we meet in real life. Here, everyone (save for Freddie) is spineless, unscrupulous, unsympathetic. The characters are just hanging in the middle - they're too unreal and irrational to be evoking empathy, but not unreal enough to entertain.
In the end, it's just an extremely depressing and unrewarding manga, that's also unreasonably long for what it is trying to convey. A comparison with another odd show Orphan did, which actually has more in common with Asatte Dance than what meets the eye - Okama Hakusho. There, I was actually excited to finish the manga and wasn't disappointed by its later development, despite the story and even the whole premise being way cheesier and sketchier. Okama Hakusho was resolute and to-the-point with resolving the unavoidable love triangle, it never pretended to be a highbrow story about love, it consciously followed its groove as a sketchy anti-pro-gay-manga. In turn, Asatte Dance completely forgets its raison d'être by the time you make it to volume 3.
You could also make an argument that I'm just salty over this manga due to not being laid nearly as often as Suekichi does, which would be completely legit too.
Another odd comparison that came to my mind is Koi Kaze - I haven't read the source manga for that, but from the TV series I've seen I got the impression completely opposite to that from Asatte Dance: Usually, you'd start Koi Kaze (if ever) with aversion from just reading the synopsis. I personally grew extremely fond of it over the course of TV series, genuinely impressed by the touching, benign, and humane way in which they disposed of the initially degenerate concept - it's a deep and moving story about love and real, alive people under the veneer of doujinshi. Then there's Asatte Dance - a complete opposite of that, a doujinshi under the veneer of a romance manga.
It's good the OVA omitted the most irritating characters, but I still don't understand why it was made. Seems like the most ordinary "gold digger" story to me. Perhaps it was still a novelty at the time? At least it's relatively short and dynamic for what it's worth.
