nathandouglasdavis

This doujinshi starts out with two hooks that help draw the reader in: 1) Rio is the sister of Haruto's best friend, and 2) Rio is five years older than Haruto. Now, let's ask ourselves "why do these function as hooks?"

And it should be immediately clear that the author is playing into the abnormality of their dynamic. Abnormalities can function as hooks in two basic ways:

1. They can feed into a desire to gawk at things which are different. Think circus sideshows. But I don't think this manga is really playing into this gawking sort of enjoyment (partially because the age gap isn't visually super obvious).
2. They can serve as foreshadowing for future tension or drama to develop because of something related to the abnormality. Normality can be relatively bland, while abnormality can bring to light disagreements or differing values between characters that might need to be resolved. My assumption going into this doujinshi was that it would be playing into this space--that maybe Haruto's best friend would feel uncomfortable with Haruto being interested in feir sister or maybe Rio femself would feel uncomfortable with the age gap or maybe related outsiders would be judgmental of their age gap when they got together. But the manga didn't end up playing into this space in the slightest.

Not to spoil anything too much, but this story introduced two hooks, either one of which could've led to some drama, and has done nothing to actually take advantage of the hooks within the narrative. The hooks end up feeling entirely irrelevant by chapter six or so. It's like, why even introduce these hooks if you're not going to make use of them within the story? I know this is just wholesome fluff and the author probably wanted to minimize the amount of drama, but it's so low-drama that the aspects referenced within the title itself end up just feeling pointless.

[Reviewed at chapter 18]