I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #homophobia(2)

Incredibly beautiful artwork and a realistic, thoroughly absorbing and (so far) somewhat scary storyline. A Mama at a fishermen's bar, renowned for rough customers, uses her cross-dressing son to attract custom. The story starts off edgy and dangerous, but shifts in Chapter 3.

I wasn't able to recover from the whiplash caused by jumping from "Oh, what a great stepbrother I now have!" to "Aargh, the gay, it burns! Get it away from me!" to "Let me protect you from being at the mercy of sex friends, and I love you!" to "Let me move in with you." I just couldn't believe that Ryouhei would switch from being a bigoted little homophobic shit stirring up trouble in his family circle to this noble self-sacrificing lover-boy who wants to protect Nanao from the degradation of casual sex and the wounds of sex friends. There wasn't enough of a emotional compulsion for it, and I am a person that tends to think that hate and love are often interlinked, whereas the opposite of love is disinterest, so if there was a believable bone in that sudden transformation, I would've thrown all my support behind it. There needed to be more story between one state and another, more transition. Without it, the book felt truncated, which is such a pity! Such an absolute crying shame! Because it was a great story up until Ryouhei suddenly offered to have sex with Nanao. It was going into utterly realistic and emotionally wrenching terrain up until then. It's just too bad.