This story's really grown on me? It was one of those series I'd been keeping up with on autopilot amid other stuff, but this most recent chapter really crystallized its appeal, that special, subtle something which always reels me back in. Fundamentally, this is an incredibly earnest romance, a wondrously clear and heartfelt ode to first loves that sings of infatuation's gifts to moments, lending feathers to feelings and gilding memories in rose, kindling the mundane and banal as fuel for pounding hearts, kneading daydreams into sugary fantasy. Minami's love is so powerfully portrayed, so potent and fiery in its quicksilver flashes and pensive stirrings, so certain in yearning as to leapfrog entirely those sloughy stretches of angst and wish itself indeed into a storm, dispelling all clouds that drape a failed outing or mixed message to reveal once more those silver starmaps that twinkle the trajectory of her hopes. It's rich enough to lend layers, textures and depth to all it touches, a touch-starved Midas tracing her fingertips across a tale with a fairly unremarkable premise and standard building-blocks and leaving it a city of gold, every chapter more charming than the last, eminently capable of pulling readers all bundled in wintry cynicism back into a cherry-pop world.
What really helped this series make the jump in my mind from one I read out of habit to one I'm actively looking forward to is the sheer infectiousness of its enthusiasm to exist, its gamboling, rollicking exuberance in being brightly itself. You see it bursting in Minami's gosh-golly-gee-I'm-so-darn-gaaaaaay non-sequiturs, in the way Tatsumi cuts electrifying promos for local lesbians as proof of cosmic hope and justice, and in the way the girls just gush over how gosh-darn cool Nitori is. It's been a while since I've encountered a story that just loves girls so much- not just girls who're dating or girls with a certain style, but everything about girls everywhere and all at once, gay-as-in-rapture with that almost religious vision of ascending in choral fanfare into your paramour's arms, sighing-singing-praying-gaying class S if all the money that went into building ye olde all-girls school was used instead to build (more) girls. It's adorable.
Yeah, you've got the boatload of tropes, that Takeshi's Castle of silly old moats and ramparts a girl's gotta scale if she wants to be a contender, but the essential zest radiating from every page of this series makes every single one of those hackneyed old tactics work like its the first time anyone's ever belted 'em out. An ambiguously romantic line that our lead doesn't quite know how to process and will haunt her for chapters to come? Oh, rats! A confession that fails to go through because of some external disturbance? A bigger AUGH than Charlie ever Brown'd! A deceptive, unprecedented interest in someone else? Slender Aphrodite, cut me a break! I am slapping my knees and hollering my cheers like a middle-aged parent at their daughter's first baseball game. I want my disaster gay daughter to go out there and play her heart out and come back home all muddy and tired with the biggest ol' gap-toothed grin she can muster at the end of an absolute banger of a match. Fight on, Minami! Aim for the stars!
last edited at Sep 28, 2022 7:32AM
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