Good god, it's so nice to see a short, androgynously pretty man topping someone. Like, so many works, by gay and straight alike, make who tops whom, and who doms whom, all about who could physically overpower the other (unless it's bara in which case they're both the same). Are you a dom who happened to grow small? Fuck you. It's painful sometimes, being a romance fan who prefers their men short and cute.Anyway, Wizard and the Neet is pretty alright. It's a three-shot that's way too short and unfocused to tell much beyond some cute slice of life interactions before it's time for smut and fin. As a result, both the story and characters feel really half-baked. You can understand why they do what they do, and the wizard hints at some kind of depth, but his ulterior motives for helping never really materialized before being immediately replaced with attraction to the NEET because he... made him omurice? As I said, half-baked. And way too rushed to be believable as anything other than lust plus 'he seems like a neat guy'. Not to say it's unbelievable, just that it's more like the barest beginnings of a loving relationship than anything that seems like it could deliver a 'kiss from one who loves you back'. Speaking of, CW: technically consensual sex under the influence of magic aphrodisiacs. If you dislike blurred lines, this has them.The translation made sense, but felt very stiff, with none of the characters having noticeable voices and often seeming overly formal with one another. It kind of causes issues when an early character interaction involves one asking the other to not be so formal with him, but all that ends up meaning is NEET calls Wizard 'hyung' instead of 'sir' now, and they talk... exactly as formally as before otherwise. Despite the above, I'm just glad what they said to each other made sense tbh.The art is pretty standout. A friend of mine has been reading Under the Greenlight recently, and honestly from what I've seen of it, this tiny little three-shot blows it out of the water on the art department. I legitimately had a moment where I looked at the top in this and thought 'wow, he has really pretty hands'. Maybe I'm just super gay for noticing that or something but... a BL character with pretty hands, stop the presses. And the muscles look so good, too, without attempting to be photorealistic. Is it the prettiest thing I've ever seen? God no, but it feels like it's been forever since I saw a BL character I actually find viscerally attractive, and all it took was an artist who doesn't draw their men like they were trying to draw Eren Jaeger's titan form with some big old CLAMP shoulders, then fucked up the hands real bad. I don't usually comment on the art of these things because I feel like a subsection of manga readers over-focus on it as the only sign of quality, and that's how we get style-over-substance media with nothing to say. Regardless, surprisingly good stuff here.Overall, it's another popcorn story that feels like fanfic with the serials filed off. The world seemed sorta interesting, with a seemingly modern technology level, but when the NEET gets hungry at home, he defaults to foraging in the woods with his modern smartphone in hand until he happens upon a literal mystical fruit tree. That's an eccentric af take on magitech settings and I can't hate it.
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