Mimi's manga / #BL(768)

2.5 I'll whine about it later but to the ppl/person who tagged this was "plot twist" what plot twist??? Here plot twist??? However, to the ppl/person who put "bigoted seme" i love you --- Aki exuding misogyny? It is a BL after all. And he's homophobic? It is a BL after all. I know my main problem with this story was Aki himself. He’s written in a way where the author knows he’s pretty unlikeable, kind of a dick, and that’s the point. However, they also want you to care about what he was saying, sympathize with his story, and basically redeem his shittyness by the end... Kind of hard for me to do when I wasn’t given a reason to. The guy just sucks. Throughout the whole story, he is just an asshole, an asshole to Umi, an asshole to women in general. I didn’t like how he strung Umi around even though he knew by chapter 4 that he was feeling something, and yet he was still being a little shit even in the last chapter. Him being so stand-off-ish to Umi but also dangling the possibility of a relationship in his face to the point where Umi looks more confused than happy at the end of chapter 7 made me want to scream. Something about Umi constantly apologizing really pissed me off because he had nothing to apologize for. There was a bit at the end where Aki apologized himself for how he acted towards Umi but it wasn’t enough and it didn’t change how he kept acting for the rest of the chapters. The part where we all just... dodged the fact that Umi was almost sexually assaulted but Aki was still being stubborn despite Umi explaining what was just happening. I’m not looking over that, what the fuck? You want to make a shit character, fine, but don’t think that chapter 7 was enough to make me go “aww, that was so sweet. they kissed! aww” like I haven’t wanted to punch Aki in the face for the last 16 days. You had 7 chapters. And for 5 of them, I've felt like we've been saying the same thing. The story hardly moved. This doesn't make me want to read seaside strangers.

Started - 12/21/25 || Paused - 12/26/25 || Dropped - 03/15/25 || I didn't want to drop nor put this on hold especially since there's another sorry in here, but this book put me in a reading slump that's starting to piss me off. I don't like Minami, I don't care about the story, don't care about the couple, and really can't stand the art style. All of this doesn't make me want to continue, but I just dropped the manga before last and I don't want to do that again so soon. The gang stuff is whatever. I didn't care for it but I also didn't really mind it, it wasn't the main part of the book so I can deal. What really made this difficult for me (besides the art) was just Minami himself. He's moving way too fast for Sakurada who's obviously trying to become more comfortable with being with a guy. Hell, in a relationship in general, to be honest. But it doesn't read like Minami's is considering that most of the time. It's kind of annoying and disgusting, really not making me like Minami at all. I also thought that their first couple's conflict was just fucking stupid. I don't know, even though this is going on hold, I may just end up dropping it. This worries me because I have a couple more manga from this author on my TBR that I'm now not eager to get to. Edit 03/16 - I'm not coming back to this.

Started 12/19 || Ended 12/21 Idk, Goodreads' 2.50 kinda feels too low. It wasn't that bad and I'll add all my thoughts a lot later.

... I’m so confused on this one. Kinda... Sorta? I'm pretty sure I forgot that was tagged as mature, but I didn't think that this was going to have this many sex scenes. It kind of ruined the actual story for me even though half of the plot was about Keppei's issues revolving around having sex with Keita. There are times in this manga that didn't need a sex scene, times when serious talking about Keppei's embarrassment and Keita's trauma would've been better... But instead, they fucked. It wasn’t like we didn’t get to see them talk about each other’s problems, it just wasn't enough and you could tell the author really wanted to put a sex scene in every chapter. There's also the fact that some of those scenes were with each other's 18yd selves and I hated that. It's just my age gape disgust that got in the way at times. This story was both really cute and very frustrating for me. I really loved the characters and I liked the premise but the time we spent reading them fuck felt wasted. On top of how it ended in six chapters, it was difficult for me to be happy about the proposal with the way chapter six went.