Can you please elaborate on your feelings more? I wholeheartedly agree with you and felt very understood while reading this. I can't describe it but it's like, if I had found this story on a hentai site, I would have still read it for the plot and art but wouldn't have left feeling so... strange at the end of it. Maybe it's that it has been going on for 4 years, with 117 slow progressing eps, I've become invested in these characters and I'm sorry, I don't know how to put it... I keep coming back to this comments section to understand my own feelings and why this work left me more traumatised than the works of (as you said) Harada or maybe Koogi's Killing Stalking or Blind Play, works that I consumed and easily put behind me. I have even enjoyed the most brutal/twisted hentai and horror movies without experiencing any bitter aftertaste and yet Sadistic Beauty just made me uncomfortable. The story didn't feel like I was enjoying something decidedly twisted by my own consent but like I was being forced to watch something (this is so out of pocket but it's exactly how I felt) turn into a horrifying demon while people around me rush to worship it and treat it like a God. I didn't feel in control of what I was reading and whatever I was reading felt wrong... somehow.
So, I like to read some fucked up stuff. Harada is a constant re-read and it’s been over 10 years since I ventured into Hoshi no Yakata. But something about this series really didn’t sit right. It has nothing to do with femdom, my taste in hetero series leans towards femdoms with a toxic depiction of the BDSM community.
Maybe it’s that the writing and length of the series doesn’t lend itself to a doujin-esque “open-and-shut no deep investment” plot or the more story arced psychological territory of Tourou no Ori? I can’t put my finger on it, but something feels wrong.
Like when I read “Now You’re One of Us” but instead of completing the cycle it just ended on the family orgy and shrooms. No actually closure.