I do not think I ever saw a series taking this steep of a nosedive before. Certainly, there have been plenty of other stories that started out strong, and then kind of lost their way after a while ("My Unrequited Love" comes to mind in recent times, "Aoi Hana" amongst the classics). But that things turn from promising to utter garbage, plus that it happens this fast, I honestly can not remember the last time I saw something like it. The writing on this is atrocious.
I think that’s what distinguishes the complaints about this one from series where people just drop into the comments to bash something they don’t like—this story started out being, if not highly unusual or original, pretty solidly good.
It set up Maki as a basically likable, naive character with plenty of room for growth and self-exploration, with Liz as her mysterious, knowing, sexy foil who would spark those changes in Maki.
When the story actually started revealing what lay beneath Liz’s aloof facade, however, it quickly became “What The Fucking Fuck?”
Liz suddenly seemed to regress in age about 5 years, and her “sexy edge” turned into narcissism and psychopathy. Her dark, secret, life-changing, psyche-twisting trauma turned out to be that old cliche of “dumped at graduation” (I swear I’ve seen a yuri 4-koma where that particular tragedy was cured by friends getting together for ice-cream sundaes).
Maki, meanwhile, never the sharpest instrument in the toolbox, seems to have shed 50-100 points of IQ, and become someone who puts up with physical and psychological abuse not because she’s into it but because she’s too bovinely stupid to be aware of what’s happening.
I can take or leave D/S as thematic material, but now I sort of want a series like this one seems to think it is, with the naive sweetie protagonist discovering her need for kink, and helping the damaged femme fatale to channel her real trauma into a healthy, mutually supportive kink relationship.
I think I may be getting something not unlike that in Yuki and the Authoress, which is light-years better-written than this one.
