I powered through all of it in like two days which may be a lethal dose of yuri but... it was pretty good, if somewhat meandering. I felt like I never got a good grasp on what the main couple actually wanted to accomplish - it kinda flip-flopped between "I want to beat you" and "I don't care anymore", sometimes even within the same chapter, so that shtick kinda got old fast and I just kinda expected they're going to come to an obvious conclusion in a convoluted way. Maybe it's just something that comes with ingesting 50 chapters in 2 days though, overall it was pretty high quality and enjoyable.
Yeah, I think that neither reading this series in real time as the chapters came out nor binge-reading it in a couple of days is absolutely optimal for this one. In the first case, it was a bit jarring to get into one arc only to have it stop and a whole new set of characters get introduced, and there are just too many characters (not to mention the people in the inter-chapters) and plot developments to have it all cohere after a rushed read over a couple of days. (Probably one arc at a time with a bit of a break in between would be closer to an optimal reading mode.)
Shiramine is a classic tsundere, so her changes in attitude to some extent come with the territory. Kurosawa is somewhat less changeable; at first she thinks that just having Shiramine beat her academically will fulfill her dream, but later realizes that she needs to figure out some things about herself by herself. So her attitude towards Shiramine changes as well.
But in a fundamental sense, you’re right—readers can see that Shiramine is head-over-heels for Kurosawa very early on, and it’s clear that the endgame is the two of them together. I would argue, however, that the MCs’ whole character development, including the interactions with the other characters, is necessary for the ending to be fully satisfactory. Opinions on that, of course, may vary.
This series has an unusual (as far as I know, unique) narrative structure, with not so much the traditional “MCs” and “side characters” as much as Shiramine and Kurosawa forming a kind of nucleus, and a whole bunch of other entities (pairs, mostly) in a variety of orbits around them. It bears up well on a re-reading, since you can see how the story-world gets gradually built up and how the various arcs echo and shed light on each other. (And you have a much better chance of remembering which character is which.)
last edited at Jul 4, 2022 7:53PM