i feel like this manga was trying to be deep, and say something profound, but never really said anything at all
Yeah. The author’s writing really made you want to know how things would turn out, but it doesn’t feel like they understood people and emotions well enough for readers to really draw a line or a takeaway from what was going on. It sort of feels like, “a bunch of stuff that happened,” and it can’t really be tracked.
On the other hand, the stuff the girl at their new school said about yuri and the response about rafflesia (the intense-smelling “corpse flower”) kinda stuck with me. I think the story could be read as saying, “love between women is not necessarily heathy or pure. It can be messy, lustful, sticky, unhealthy, resolved, etc. and it doesn’t always make a nice pretty story.” In that sense I can kinda see it as criticizing and breaking this frozen image of yuri and its relationship to actually WLW relationships.
With that in mind, maybe the story’s directionless, un-trackable quality is a product of making a story like a messy situation in life, where things just happen and you can’t get enough perspective to parse and track them. I don’t know if that was really successfully achieved; I don’t think the author knew really how to get out of the mess they’d made and reach the desired final position, hence the ending being rushed.