This forum could honestly work as a “We Hate Citrus” subreddit.
I’m not here to change anyone’s opinion, as many of the points made here are valid. However, I feel like I have to bring his to the table:
If you all genuinely hate this manga so much, why are you still reading it? Wouldn’t it be easier to drop it if you feel it’s such a waste of time?
I’m not attacking anyone, but as someone who genuinely enjoys this manga (and thinks it greatly makes up for the rushed ending of Volume 10), I’d really like you all to enlighten me on this.
And don’t dance around the subject either. If you honestly just read this manga because you enjoy hating it, tearing it apart and berating Saburouta, just say so upfront.
Partly I’m reading this just to see what happens. I liked Citrus very well at first, and I once thought it could become one of the better series. It had a fascinating initial setup, and Sabu seemed to do a pretty good job of combining drama, romance, and comedy, (and was particularly well-suited to the latter). The art was, in general, pretty appealing, with some well-staged individual scenes.
I would say that as a reader at one point I was considerably invested in the Yuzu-Mei relationship, and I thought Mei in particular was an interesting character with lots of room for development. And some (although by no means all) of the side characters tended to be fairly vivid, and seemed to have their own internal lives.
Matsuri_wins (If I recall correctly) and I have agreed that up to about Chapter 24, where Mei and Yuzu agreed that they would go forward into their relationship together, with Mei as the mature, poised, knowledgeable one and Yuzu as the spontaneous, emotionally honest one, this was shaping up to be a really good series.
But eventually it became clear that in building up all the social and personal barriers to a happy yuri ending, the author had written herself into a corner that she actually had no viable plan for getting out of, and past a certain point the plot wandered pretty aimlessly, introduced unnecessary characters, pulled plot points out of nowhere (the arranged marriage in particular), and dragged out scenes to no purpose.
And the finale to the regular series was epically, universe-class, ridiculously bad—as if to say, “Remember all those chapters with all that angst? Fakeout—never mattered one little bit.”
So in some ways, keeping up with the series is a way of looking back and wondering, “Was I just deluded that this was ever any good?” as well as hoping that some flashes of those characters that I actually liked might somehow reappear (as did happen a little bit in the previous chapter of Citrus +, where we were reminded that Mei really was a strong, ambitious, confident person as opposed to a poorly programmed robot).
