Content warnings: borderline grooming and co-dependency.
After meeting online and dating for a while, and even though they have a ten-year age gap, Koharu (30 years old) and Minato (20 years old) finally decide to move in together. This first volume takes us through this new stage in their relationship and how they feel about each other as they navigate it.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with age gap relationships as long as everything is legal and consensual.
But very quickly into the volume we find out they have been dating for at least two years. I immediately lost all interest. Not to mention, it’s not like their age is something that’s barely acknowledged; it’s actually a major part of the story. They mention it all. the. TIME. They constantly describe each other as “my ten-year-older girlfriend” or “my ten-year-younger girlfriend”. It’s obvious this is the central selling point of their relationship.
Furthermore, the whole volume’s tone is extremely cutesy and clingy, which doesn’t read as funny or interesting to me at any point. It’s just cringe and boring. Koharu’s whole thing with Minato is that she finds her so cute. But that starts getting extremely creepy when we see their interactions from two years ago. It feels predatory, bordering on grooming.
After they move in together, Minato basically becomes a housewife, doing all the chores while Koharu works. Koharu simultaneously treats her like a stay-at-home wife and a child, and she babies her with cutesy language and gestures (dresses her, helps her shower, feeds her, brushes her teeth, etc.). This is all played under the “joke” of Koharu spoiling her, but it almost reads as abusive and enabling co-dependency to me.
In a nutshell, they’re completely head-over-heels, seeing everything about each other as perfect.
The problem is—besides the obviously imbalanced power dynamic—it’s painfully boring. Nothing about them or their relationship is interesting, there are no stakes at all, and no plot-driven actions. It’s just them going “OMG YOU’RE SO PERFECT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH” for almost 150 pages, non-stop.
There is a way of writing a happy love story, with only romance and no trauma (which is something we desperately need in queer ones), but this over-the-top clinginess and problematic behavior is not it. In all honesty, I began to skim through the rest of the volume pretty early on, and it was all the same. I wish I could find something positive to say about it, but I just cannot recommend it at all.
Pros
- Character designs are okay
Cons
- Problematic depictions of co-dependency, bordering on abusive dynamics and grooming
- Plotless, boring, and repetitive
- Childish and unfunny over-the-top romance
