That was... a ride? I started off thinking this setup reminded me of those 2000s yuri stories where some stormy, tormented kid agonizes silently over the girl she loves possibly slipping into the arms of someone so privileged over her in the hierarchy of norms that all competition feels helpless; she's led to swing between desperate attempts to surpass her (oblivious) competitor and then fatalistically enact the sisterly best friend, transformed by turn into pathetic parodies of the stereotypically assertive prince and the stereotypically passive maiden, because she can't enact her liminal, individual identity, her combination of intimate empathy and transgressive boldness until she comes to accept herself and proclaim her love in the end.
It's a good setup for depicting the intense, turbulent emotions so many queer kids often feel in adolescence, this terror of growing up from a world of childish, unlabeled intimacy into an adulthood of suffocating roles, and the pressure to be perfect and flawless in order to pass as normal even as the toll this performance takes on your composure threatens to make you explode into those very grotesque, predatory, monstrous stereotypes you want to avoid. Case in point, Yoh's ideal combination of empathy for Misa's feelings and the courage to stand up for her when she's bullied mutate as a result of her repressed emotions into an exploitation of those very virtues- Misa's trust for her as a fellow girl and friend afford Yoh closeness to Misa in her most vulnerable moments, and Yoh's intensity and determination are here put to horrific use in what she does to Misa while she's asleep, which to any outsider would seem like a classic example of that odious archetype of the Predatory Lesbian.
It's a tragic inversion, but if this story is trying not to be a textbook tragedy about how Yoh's circumstances lead her to ruin her relationships and turn into the exact kind of invasive, manipulative scum she hates (like the senpai who picked on Misa), but a romance that nets her a convincingly happy ending anyway... yeah, the author's got their work cut out for them. Like I said, this story is very 2000s, but that also applies to the rampant sexual assault, which in so many works of the time, yuri or otherwise, was not dealt with remotely the nuance and sensitivity such themes required. There are, theoretically speaking, ways this story could portray the nature of Yoh's desires as a horny, uncertain, impulsive teenager while still underlining that there are certain lines that must not be crossed lest she alienate those best-suited to understand her- the Icky Segment at the end of Ch 1 could be retroactively presented as a fantasy on Yoh's part that she's ashamed enough of to flee, for instance- but I'm not really confident that this story will pull it off and rise above the potential pitfalls of the premise. Heck, the blatancy of the molestation in this chapter and its bizarre, romanticized framing is already a red flag, and I wouldn't blame anyone for dropping this series for that alone. I'll cautiously give it another chapter out of morbid curiosity- perhaps this series shall swerve as deeply into Misa or Ren's perspective as it did into Yoh's and present us with a completely different view of reality as per their desires- but I'm not optimistic.
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