People who read Backstage, I'm Yours

xander

Short and cute, it contain no violence just focused on raising love interest

Sluttyreader

Harassment to love...

chlorine

While not awful, I still found this pretty bad. The biggest issue this story had is the fact that it just feels quite rushed. Because there's a pre-established history between the main characters, the author doesn't really attempt to show them bonding or actually falling in love. Much of the emotional aspect of this story hinges on the fact that they were already friends, and since we see so little of their past, it's very underwhelming—which is a shame because, while quite vague, their past does seem quite interesting.

Matasaka and Kei used to be friends when Kei was an unknown musician, and though they've seemingly grown apart since Kei's started to find success, Matasaka still works as his audio engineer. One day, Kei's manager (or something like that) invites Matasaka out to a club. Swayed by the suggestion of free food and drinks, Matasaka blindly agrees, but is shocked when it ends up being a sex club.

When the person who invited him to the club starts getting handsy with him, Kei steps in and pulls Matasaka away, most likely jealous. While leaving the club, Matasaka makes a snide remark about Kei frequenting the club, but immediately apologizes. But Kei hears it, and tells him he'll only forgive him if Matasaka jerks off in front of him. Matasaka refuses at first but Kei is pushy, and the two of them end up going even further. From there, the rest of the story is essentially Kei constantly pushing Matasaka into having sex with him, and the turbulence of their relationship.

As I said earlier, the relationship in this falls quite short because it relys heavily on their past, and you're just not really shown much of it. While the weight of their past obviously implies they used to be close friends, you're not actually shown that aside from quite literally just one panel, where Matasaka says he used to go to Kei's old shoebox of a house and the two of them would talk about music and eat instant ramen together. It's a shame because that tiny little glimpse you get of their past actually does a lot, the image it paints of them having basically no one but each other and of Matasaka being Kei's first fan, and being there from day one, is really sweet . . . But all of that is implied. So you can't really go far with that. This really needed at least one proper flashback to their past to show not just what their relationship was, but also how they grew apart.

Them seemingly growing apart before the story starts is one thing that's quite odd to me and definitely needed to be explained, because Kei isn't even famous yet—that comes later in the story—so I find it hard to believe he didn't have the time to keep in contact, especially as they do keep in contact later in the story once Kei actually reaches true fame. It just further adds to the narrative messiness of their past, since I feel as though it implies they weren't actually that close. If they can lose their friendship so easily, their friendship clearly wasn't that great.

One thing I did really like was a small aspect of chapter three; at the end of chapter two, Matasaka gets photographed being pulled into the back of Kei's car, and when Kei drives past Matasaka's house, it's swarmed by people. Since the photo got released to the public, Matasaka assumes he must have been doxxed and Kei's rabid fans are surrounding his house. Kei suggests coming over to his place and staying until it all blows over, which Matasaka accepts. But midway through the chapter, Kei reveals there was actually an ambulance on the street and the crowd was because of that. It wasn't a crowd of fans and paparazzi, he just lied because he wanted to spend more time with Matasaka. While quite shitty—one of Kei's biggest personality traits is his selfishness—I actually found his quite cute. It was very endearing. And it ties to the overall issue I have with this story; I thought this moment was cute, it was quite desperate from Kei's side. He just wanted to spend more time with Matasaka. We needed more moments like that, moments of the two of them wanting each other beyond sex and actually just wanting to spend time together, to get to know each other. They still kind of felt like strangers by the end of it.

I hate ending things on a negative, but I also wanted to say, I didn't find the art in this to be all that good. Generally, it was passable, but some panels looked off-model and just generally quite odd. It was a shame.

Mimi

_MayuL88

Meridian

Phime

Zen

Nothingcangowrong

val

Kenma

inter_expl

jae

star

Hanna (~^0^)~

k.hatake-lovebot

RGBunn

taru

kari~

Val