Ebonyslayer

Cross and Crime is one of the more tricky seinen series I've read recently. It deals with some of the more touchier subjects in anime and manga, such as child abuse and sexual assult. And without further ado let's examine this series. SPOILER ALERT! 

Story- The story begins when Yazaki goes to do a story on rock star and friend Keito. However, he is put into a sour mood when he finds out Yazaki has a girlfriend, Yuuka, whom he brought over to the interview. It doesn't take long before Keito makes up his mind that he plans to do something awful to Yuuka, with the build-up at the end of chapter one. Before long he has inserted himself into their lives.

Art- I think the art for the series is actually one of the better parts of the series, since the author got her share of experience doing other series before this one.

Characters- The relationships between Yazaki, Keito and Yuuka are some of more complicated and perhaps messy for a series. We see a long distance relationship between Yuuka and Yazaki grow stale and fall apart, like the 5 Centimeters per Second movie. Whereas Yuuka and Keito carry more and more into their affair, because Yuuka is afraid of what Yazaki would say.

Halfway into the series Yazaki finally finds out about Yuuka and Keito's relationship and of course he's mad, although he's no saint either since he's been cheating on Yuuka with another girl for a while now.

So yes, its one of those NTR series. You know, where a male character makes a move on someone else's girl, and if the main guy isn't devoted to his girl, the other guy pretty much steals her. There's also the female version too, where the girl steals the guy from the main girl, but its not a genre I'm familiar with.

I truly believe the author was trying to show how an act of love can inspire someone to become a better person. Although I think Ai-Ren handles this a lot better in my opinion.

Overall- Not going to lie, this is a bad series. It deals with its share of mature themes, and the author had some good ideas, although I think more development and execution could have helped. But who am I kidding, this is based on an old hentai series actually. I don't know why the author did it, but I guess they wanted to get serialized. People will do anything for money I guess.

Ultimately, I just don't think I'm capable of liking this series. It makes NTR look like a good thing, and is this really the type of message we want a younger audience to be exposed to? To make cheating on your love interest look like its a good thing feels wrong to me. That's the conclusion that I have come to anyway.