I saw a take somewhere that Usui Shio's works are love stories that kind of strip the usual conventions of those relationships out and then build them back up piece-by-piece. You might even call it "love without romance," though that implies that it's not romantic, which I don't think is necessarily true but I'm struggling for a better way of saying it. It's more like...you're removing all the baggage and assumptions from the relationship and then having the characters discover them one a time. "Love BEFORE romance." Which kind of explains the slower pacing, because you're unspooling all these feelings and examining them one at a time. ("I want to help support her! Oh, her family is my family. Why does it make me so happy just to spend time with her!?" It's because of luuuuuurve, you adorable dummies)
EDIT: It also occurs to me as you could see this manga as being about an arranged marriage (where the arranges were the couple themselves), which gives some context to how they have this relationship that hasn't quite built up the intimacy that marriage requires. And then the story is about them building that intimacy.
last edited at Mar 13, 2022 7:42PM