Mimi

I don't know why I'm determined to like a Nagabe manga. I want to love his work but the last 2 haven't been very favorable to me and I'm still aiming to read EAT knowing I really shouldn't. I love this world he's building and some of the stories in this book are great, but there's themes and dialogue choices he chooses that bother me so much that it impacts my enjoyment.

What I did love about this was its world and having each story connect since it's taking place in the same academy. You see the same characters in other's stories and it gives it this anime feel. This whole manga reads like season 1 of an anime, I can see this working well as an anime. I liked that by the time Cromwell got his own story we got to get to his personality well enough to perfectly play off Benjamin.

Out of the 8 stories, I ended up liking stories 4, 7, and 8 the most.

My very basic thoughts I was having while reading.

Story 1:

I don't know, man. I don't tend to like love potions and stuff like that because of the whole “removing of one's free will" and all that jazz... I think Alan should've thrown him out the window, but that's just me.

Sad, I really like both of these characters visually.

Story 2:

Honestly liked this story better than the first one but didn't like how that chapter ended. Loved Nicol's kink awakening. Good for him.

Story 3:

Skipped it. Student/Teacher relationship. Also, because there weren't any ages being said or signs of whether this was a “high school" academy or a “college" academy I just felt very uncomfortable reading this story.

Story 4:

Cute. Cute. Cute. Cute. This one's my favorite so far. It was super sweet and very warm, I'd love to read more of them.

Story 5:

Doug sucks and I gave Huey Mandark's voice in my head so I ended up hating them both by the end. I am suffering.

Story 6:

... This one was kind of just weird. For starters, Nagabe, I did not need to see that. But the kissing bit after that felt... weird. The way it was written was like when two 10 year olds find out what kissing is and try it together. It. Felt. Weird.

Update after reading ch7 - WAIT, THEY ARE KIDS?! LIKE “KIDS" KIDS!? LIKE “THEY PROBABLY ACTUALLY ARE THE EQUIVALENT OF 10 YEARS OLD" KIDS???!!

Story 7:

It started out kind of “what the fuck? why would you say that?" But it's ending with me asking for a full spin-off manga for these two in particular. Go figure that the story featuring two older men got the least amount of screen time...

Story 8:

Yo? OOOOOHH?! OHMYGOD!! A HUMAN!! AAAAAHH!??? SO THEY ARE STILL HERE!? I mean, I guess I didn't think they were gone completely but was I right about the World of Darkness analogy? Are there really still humans who live in the city parts of the world?? Nagabe!?

The LOOOORE!!! I want to know more about how divided human and beast folk are! What do they think of each other? Either way, favorite story out of the 3 I liked. Super cute, audibly made me “awe", I love both of these characters so much.

… Bruh. I’m so happy about this getting a physical release really soon because this just became one of my favorite manga. I’m gonna start with the only problem I had about this story and that’s the amount of affection Yutaka had towards Tane. You can kind of understand why Yutaka was at peace around Tane because of his backstory but the author didn’t give Tane much of a similar connection to kid!Yutaka to justify why he’s happy to see Tane happy and it comes off as a little creepy.

I know the author wasn’t trying to write him that way, but without Yutaka talking about how he wished he was as happy as Tane is as a kid and/or showing that Yutaka is really good with kids in general to make a good father figure is a missed opportunity to me. Yutaka’s childhood was a lot for him, so much that even eating in front of people was uncomfortable. But after meeting Tane and Minoru and having that “found family” moment was he really able to be happy and feel like he was part of a family. In that sense, I can also see why he cared for Tane like a son/little brother. It just wasn’t written well enough to 100% convey that affection.

Other than that, I loved this story. I love the characters and how it focused on their development. I also love Tane’s crush on Yutaka as it’s very clear from the start to see it and made me laugh. The time skip was very adorable and I thank them for writing that bit in.

Update: This is just for the 1st vol, not my complete thoughts for the whole series. I plan on rereading it once I give a damn about reading vol 3 because I am Nagisa'd-out.

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Honestly, I really did expect a bit more from this one. I've been on a Nagisa Furuya binge right now and I've noticed they really like slow burn high school romance love confessions (help! we get it! ohmygod!). I also feel like the story in this vol felt empty? Maybe because I kept see this get hyped to hell and back about an emotional slow burn romance that I thought I would get... emotional. Although, because we have 3 vols, having love confession be quick and out of the way so we can get more time with slowly grouping together I'm much more in favor of.

Most of Nagisa's other stuff ended right when they started dating so we don't often get enough time to see them be together. I like that we're getting more time with these two as a couple with this one. I'm interested in continuing this.

Update: ... Who knew that the 1st read was gonna be the HEIGHT of my Nagisa Furuya marathon. Loved this, liked My Summer of You... but it was all downhill from there.

This was probably the best I've seen of Nagisa. It was also the 1st story I've read from her and I kinda felt everything else in this binge I'm putting myself through has gone down from here just a bit. The sad part is, going through her work book after book and not jotting down anything melted my brain and I don't 100% remember all that happened. I do remember liking this more than anything else I've read from her.

It is a book I'm going to reread so I can update this. I would've actually like to've seen two lions get a second book because I feel like this couple was a bit more interesting than the one from my summer of you.

Note: These were my thought back in 2019. I plan to reread and update this at some point.

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I need to read more BL like this. I love how adorable and likable the characters are and the story focused more on the characters being in school and friends instead of trying to push things along and try to get to anything about sex. I've seen too many school au's where the people are a good 16-18 and there's sex involved. I get it that people do end up doing it around those ages but being in my 20's I don't really want to read that and it almost seems like that's all there is. Having just a pure love story of this dorky high school kid having a crush on his friend and the story grows around them being friends is refreshing and makes me cry. Thank God for this and thank God it got officially licensed because I was about to buy it in Japanese... I think I'll still buy it in Japanese, to be honest.

I'm very excited for Motto Ganbare! Nakamura-kun!!, I read the first chapter and it seems it's being slowly released through a magazine and I'm not sure how far they are over there... So just waiting on that is keeping me really hyped.