It's kinda weird to have a volume only be 3 chapters. The standard is 6 per volume, so did this uploader just confuse them, or is that really it?
Ichiro Akitaka, framed for a crime most heinous—child molestation and murder. Engulfed by desp...
- Author: MUSHIKAI Natsuko
- Genres: Drama / Psychological / Yaoi
"Maybe I've endured everything so far just to cross paths with this person..."
While the prose was beautifully written, with the story having so many sentences that jumped out at me as something you could easily imagine posted onto a pretty photo or grunge picture and posted on Tumblr, the way those sentences came together to form a story was just incredibly poor.
Having been framed for the rape and murder of a six-year-old child, Ichiro Akitaka has lost everything. No longer a priest and having to constantly go from job to job due to his supposed past routinely coming around to the ears of his coworkers, Ichiro can only imagine one thing to do: kill himself. He happens to drunkenly find a beach, and decides there and then would finally be the time he hangs himself. With the noose around his neck, constricting around his throat, he thinks this is the end—except someone ends up saving him just in time, a priest by the name of Kyosuke Kiba.
Instantly, Ichiro grows attached to Kyosuke. He doesn't know him for long and yet feels this overwhelming warmth from him; Kyosuke is what offers him salvation, he is the one person in the world who still sees him for the person he is, not the monster he's painted as.
However, it turns out Kyosuke isn't a stranger.
Kyosuke is the man who framed him.
I personally find that to be an incredibly strong premise, and when put on paper, the entire story sounds like something that could've been incredibly strong. It had so much potential to be a great slow burn psychological story but it ultimately just couldn't live up to said potential because the biggest flaw this story had was its pacing, which is in part due to its short chapter count of only six and is present almost immediately.
After Kyosuke takes him in, Ichiro trusts him basically straight off of their first interaction, and talks about him as if they have a deep connection. Kyosuke being what saves him from falling into the deepest end is something that has an almost poetic element to it I like, the story does that incredibly well—it has this ability to phrase things in a way that feels like beautiful, poetic musings . . . But after only one chapter Ichiro is saying things like "Maybe, just maybe, my life's winding path has been just to encounter this person." It's very romanticized language, which I love; in a vacuum, that quote is great . . . But that is about a man he's known for, like, two days. We haven't seen any development there for quotes like that and the supposed connection they have to feel all that authentic.
I'm also quite conflicted on my stance towards the way Ichiro gets attached to Kyosuke. On one hand, I totally understand how after being hated all the time and having to exist in constant fear of this allegation being revealed to new people he meets, he'd obviously find solace in a man like Kyosuke who says he hears him and believes him when he says he's innocent . . . But, he still lived an incredibly rough life for a while there. To constantly be barraged with people calling you a pedophile, to be stripped of your job, serve time, constantly have to move—that would jade you. Ichiro should be a jaded man. And yet he's not. I get he's desperate for the comfort of a safe space but I found his acceptance of it too quick, he didn't have any walls that needed to be torn down when realistically I feel like he would have.
Kyosuke as a character also just fucking sucks. Like to be blunt, he's fucking ass. He murdered *and then* raped a six-year-old. The story did try to redeem him, which I'm actually not against, but . . . Its tries were very low effort. It felt more focused on explaining his past, which while appreciated and shows a clear reason as to why he acted the way he had, there's a difference between focusing on his past and focusing on his character. Like, congrats I guess, we learn the child rapist got raped as a child. So what? You didn't actually develop him in any meaningful way outside of his trauma, so it unfortunately ended up feeling shlocky and like low-quality shock bait.
One thing too is that this story is structured in a way that it feels like the intention is to be a slow burn, but . . . It's just not a long enough story to actually be slow in any way. It has multiple "plot twists" and reveals, but the thing is that since there are only six chapters, there isn't any real plot established to actually twist. It plays these like huge reveals, but . . . No, they're really not. They're plot beats, not plot twists, and I thought the execution of it was really underwhelming because of it. This story would have shined if it was longer, if it could further establish mystery and some tense unsettling dread behind who Kyosuke is before revealing that he's the one who set Ichiro up. But no, it just goes from plot A to plot B to plot C every like two chapters.
To end on a positive, the art is great. Stunning, even. And as I've mentioned, and even highlighted, the prose of this story is phenomenal. The author really knows how to write in a way that is incredibly pretty. Lastly, I liked seeing a suicidal uke. We need more ukes who try killing themselves
(This is who volumes; I believe the second volume isn't out, despite the chapters being marked as volume one and volume two—there only being three chapters for a volume seems a little odd—however I have no intention of reading volume two, if it makes its way on here. Maybe if I'm bored, I guess).
Minwoo waiting for Norman and having that be correlated and contrasted to him listening to that radio show of someone waiting for their lover is crazy to me bc, like...........Minwoo and Norman aren't dating Norman borderline seems like he can't stand Minwoo most of the time lmfao and he always turns down his advances. Waiting for someone who has next to no interest in you is sad bruh stand up !!
Two teenage boys barely knowing each other. One day one learns the other is selling his body to get ...
- Author: ARIMA Arashi
- Genres: Yaoi
This story is something that leaves a kind of bitter taste in my mouth because it's so, so close to being good—great, even—but there's one thing that rather dramatically weighs it down.
Having accidentally bumped into Shiraki—a popular, seemingly rich classmate of his—bloodied and running away from who he later finds out is one of Shiraki's "clients," Kuro impulsively decides to run away with him in order to shield him from the dangerous life he was living. They'd be getting a fresh start together, with promises of seeing the sunrise together and a better future. But after running into the police, their whirlwind romance is brought to an end after three days. They end up losing contact and going their separate ways once brought back home.
That is until years later, when they end up reuniting by chance. And when they reunite, their feelings—both known and unknown—end up rising back to the surface.
I personally felt like the post-time skip was rather stronger than the first half of the story when they were running away together. While the first half of the story had this romanticized filter painted over it, which I loved, I felt the emotions once they reunited were more interesting to me, and felt more understanding and digestible as a reader.
After they end up going their separate ways, Kuro gradually forgets about Shiraki and the three days they shared. That is until he walks into a bar and sees Shiraki is a bartender, and everything comes rushing back to him. And when the memories of everything come back, so does a new feeling form—guilt. Guilt over the fact that he didn't fight for him, that he let that distance grow between them until they were strangers again, that there was so much he could have done to help that he just didn't do. He could have said something, did something. He could have stayed. But he didn't. And that eats at him, it washes over him and is something he ends up dealing with in a way that makes him have to do it head-on.
Shiraki was also an incredibly good character. He was a character that was inherently sad; everything about him was shadowed by a depression. He was a prostitute who was sold off by his mother, forced into it because they were poor. And there was one scene I don't think I'll ever forget where Kuro says he smiles a lot, and Shiraki apologizes and says it's just out of habit now, because his clients would treat him better if he had a smile. So he had just gotten used to constantly smiling. And small things like that build his character, he is a man built of bittersweetness and sorrow. And I really fucking love characters like that. He's something that feels almost Shakespearean in how his character is almost a tragedy.
However, I did say there was one major thing keeping this story down . . . And sadly, it is the act of them actually running away together. I just didn't buy it. I felt there was no reason for them to run away together because I didn't feel like there was any instant connection between them, there was nothing there that'd warrant Kuro taking Shiraki's hand and just abandoning everything to keep him safe. It's so intensely romantic in theory, yet in execution, it just felt rash and silly. I usually don't like instalove but I think a story like this needs that instant moment where time slows down the first time they look at each other and you can just see that there's something pulling these two men together. Because in this story, there's just nothing, and when your whole story hinges on this, there being nothing is bad. Like, really bad.
The lack of connection is also why I like post-time skip more than the time they ran away, because the lack of connection does fall almost entirely on Kuro. He's the main character during the first three chapters, so the lack of connection only really impacts him. After finding out Shiraki is being whored out by his mother, you can easily understand why he'd take Kuro's hand and be swept away, and you easily understand why he fell in love and stayed in love for all these years after. You don't have that with Kuro, though.
To end on a positive, I will say that I thought the art was pretty great, and the writing itself—the prose—was quite beautiful.
Giving it 2 stars but it's more like 2.5
Dude, this story was so fucking shit, literally just do not read this ever. If you're drawn in by the fat tits, trust me there is better—anything is better. Open up MRM and literally everything under the 'huge breasts' tag blows this out of the water. There's genuinely nothing redeeming to this for me.
The art—the fat tits especially—was a big draw, and that was almost enough for me to say that this story had at least one redeeming quality. But the art seemed to be really inconsistent, and the proportions were just some of the worst I've ever seen. The tits were huge, which I loved, and so the rest of Oroks body was huge too to be proportionate to that, even with the exaggeration of the breasts . . . Except for his head, which at times looked distractingly small. It was just bad. This was bad art.
Another thing that was just straight-up bad, which also impacted the overall story, was the translation. It was very evident that the translator either wasn't fluent in English, or they were using a machine translation and just didn't bother to clean it up; I'm going to assume it's the former, because for whatever reason that's just really common. People that can't speak English for some reason love translating shit to English . . . Don't do that. You ruin the story. Stick to your own language. If you can't differentiate between 'you're' and 'your,' what business do you have translating shit to English. Bitch you can't even speak English.
The biggest issue for me though is that the story just . . . Wasn't good. It just wasn't. I can't tell how much of that can be attributed to the poor translation, but even with that, the basic story is just poor. The structure and flow of it was terrible. There are only thirteen chapters, and it's a love triangle . . . Except the second love interest isn't introduced until, like, five chapters in, and it's mainly just porn, so the sudden inclusion of legitimate feelings from the two love interests just felt very . . . Well, sudden. It wasn't well built. There was no foundation there. All they did was fuck, we didn't actually see any of these three men fall in love, so Karrian and Cornnell trying to make him choose between them at the end just felt stupid and unearned rather than engaging and intense. Why would he pick either of y'all when you're just glorified dildos?
