The Ocean Meets the Sky - Reviews

There are two aspects to this story--the Sci-Fi stuff and the shoujo-ai stuff--and both aspects are done very poorly. The Sci-Fi stuff is badly explained--with the ease of repairs, the nature of the mechanical problem, and the poetic glossing over of the awakening being especially egregious. The shoujo-ai stuff is similarly unsatisfyiing, with only shallow relationships and weak-ass fan service pictures. They show the curvature of the bodies underneath the light dresses by including a lot of creases in the cloth in a way that reminds me of the wet dress from that scene in The Notebook. There is also no reason for Umi to join the club or for the automaton to be treated as the property of the club (or for the club to exist, for that matter...). I'm also not sure why they weren't able to go to the sea. Like, it's implied that it's related to the mechanical problems, but everything is just so weakly presented that it feels unexplained. I'd like to say that the ending didn't feel like a proper resolution, but that would be suggesting that this story had things to resolve in the first place. This story felt so weak and half-assed that it failed on the basic level of creating tension and drama that the reader gets invested in seeing resolved.