Iori and the Beast

Too cute. Loved.

In general, it's a cute story with characters that are fine but no one I cared to get too invested into except for Riku. I do like that this book only talked about 1 story instead of 3+ like most bl manga, it gives you more room to flesh out the characters and story... Room the author clearly didn't take, I feel. While I liked it to the point of wanting to buy it and seeing this be turned into a two-part OVA, I feel we moved too fast to let Iori and Goura characters develop. They just felt flat as people with the only thing moving them being Riku. Maybe I just didn't really care for Iori and the way he thought about Beast Folk. A thought he clearly got from his grandmother that I don't completely agree with. There were some nice moments especially at the end I would've love to see more of through out the story.

However, can I just yell about a part of the story I didn't understand and I'm not even sure if this was the author's or translator's fault? There's a part where Iori begins to think about adopting Riku for a second but then says something like "I'm gay, I can't do that". The story up until now has not talked about queer people adopting nor did it ever come back up. What came up instead, some 3 or 4 pages later, was Iori talking to Goura about how humans can't adopt Beast Folk because they were abused or treated as pets by some humans in the past so they don't allow that anymore. While that's a good bit of backstory that would be interesting to know more about, WHY was that not his first thought as to why he couldn't adopt Riku instead of him being gay? It should've been "I'm human, I can't" and not "I'm gay, I can't" if you're never going to bring up why queer people can't adopt in your modern fantasy/slice of life story. That moment was just left there hanging and because it never came back up again it felt even more out of place and weird. Maybe there's something in Japan that makes is difficult or impossible for queer people to adopt at the time of writing the story but we wouldn't that and there's no in-book segment explaining it..... ?????

I'm realizing now that this story has a problem with explaining things. It can't even hide behind having more sex scenes over plot since there were only 2½ total sex scenes. It just felt like they went in circles talking about the same thing that they could've moved on from or worked off of by explaining some other things, but they never did. They would just bring up the same topics as if they're bringing it up first the first time while also stopping at the same pots, never explaining it further. Again, while I like this story, my main problem with it was the lack of story explanation and that adoption dilemma really got to me.