Rereading Yukidoke to Agapanthus has got me thinking about some things.
It feels very much like the story is lacking in an underlying structure, and well, these super stimulating "events" are just getting hastily stuck together in this rapid fire way. And everything resolves so quickly, so it's like your brain has no time to process any of it, or rather, it's like the author is trying to keep you occupied with constant stimulation, to make up for the fact that they have no confidence in the substance of the underlying story...
Like, there's just this "Shun almost drowns" event that happens suddenly and is immediately resolved, and it doesn't have any relation to the story space around it, it's like a postage stamp that's just been slapped down and stands on its own.
Shun has a brief moment where she wonders if she sees Natsuki as Natsuki, or as a prince, and if it's ok to face her with halfhearted feelings, but then it gets immediately resolved in a single chapter! Like, what the heck!? I would have wanted the story to sit with and mull over that question for a lot longer, you know?
It's like, "Omg, Shun got a part time job at the beach! She's wearing a swimsuit and Natsuki is flustered!! Oh no, but now Shun is drowning!? Oh, but Natsuki saved her, so it's fine! Oh, and now they're going to wear yukata at the summer festival! Omg, and Shun has realized that she likes Natsuki romantically!! But she's not confident in whether her feelings are genuine... Oh, but she got encouraged, so it's fine! She's made up her mind to confess! But it's hard to get the words out... Waahh, and now a love rival is getting in the way!?"
Just this constant sense of overstimulation and disorientation, y'know? It's all packed in so tight, but there's not really any substance to it... It doesn't linger on anything for long enough to create any actual feelings or attachments... It's just breezing through it all, like it's trying to speedrun through the developments as fast as possible, dutifully checking things off a list. :T
Rather than having a bunch of disparate, short-term conflicts that get introduced and then immediately resolved one after another, isn't it better to have one or two core conflicts that get immediately introduced at the start of the work, and then slowly chew through them before finally swallowing them at the end of the story?
I saw somebody compare this story to Bloom Into You (which I think is an insult to Bloom Into You, but whatever), but well, Bloom Into You is the kind of story where it immediately puts forth the problem of "I want to fall in love, but I can't fall in love with anyone" and the reply of "That being the case, I love you", and all the developments that come from that are a natural escalation of the characters' inner conflicts evolving from that point while crashing against each other, right?
It's a story that straightforwardly explains its premise right off the bat, and sticks to that premise, dutifully fleshing it out and iterating upon it, until the very end.
Plenty of other stuff happens, but it all serves to benefit the development of that central idea. There's absolutely no extraneous pieces whatsoever.
This story seems to be trying something similar, and it's absolutely the case that obfuscation can be utilized to great effect in a story, but well... In this case, although you could say that the central idea is, "Everybody idolizes me, but I'm happiest when I'm just treated like a normal girl", the story spends barely any time properly sitting with that idea, so I can't really be happy with that answer...
It just seems like this story doesn't actually have anything to say, since nothing that it puts forth ever accumulates into anything substantial, and I feel like my time is being wasted...
To begin with, I have a soft spot for this kind of couple, but I just feel bored and frustrated while reading this... All the spice is missing! Seriously, what's even the point if you're not going to depict the parts that are actually interesting!? I don't want frictionless nothingburger... So flavorless...
