The pages before the actual comic started were so good, they set such an artful and considering mood. The sex itself really did nothing for me, personally. The retrospective knowledge that hearing her childhood nickname turned her on and put her into a frenzy was kinda sexy, but the action itself, not as much. However, I find it really impressive that the sex managed to fit so well into the piece’s mood—that melancholy of life changes, of leaving the final trappings of a life once lived behind and moving on.
There’s something to the fact that a lot of works like love live are set in highschool, and in the context of highschool clubs no less, that makes them feel really transient, when you take a step back. That no matter how bright those days were, you have to graduate and move on with your life—I think it plays really well with the audience’s love of the characters and attachment to their story, and the excitement of it all, to place that as one moment in a long life. And here, in this doujin, the characters are saying goodbye to the stage of life that came just after that bright, exciting one—I think that, in that moment, it makes sense to have a melancholy nostalgia, knowing that the chapter of life you’re entering doesn’t even border on that one anymore. Your life is full of other things, like a relationship that came out of that time and then matured into something else: you have other things to think about, and so much more to look forward to, but you’ll never have that specific time again, and you have to make peace with it.
It’s a similar thing you feel as a fan, knowing the source work is coming to a close, or remembering when it ended. It’s a subject rich with emotional potential from many angles, and I think it’s something universal to the human experience to the point that, when a work really taps into that vein of feeling like this doujin does, I can feel it and trace it even as someone with no attachment to the original property. And I think that’s really beautiful.
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