We never stay to our words do we? Well “feeling like we can’t do this week’s reading log but turns out we can” is a pretty low stakes lie so it's fine, a bit funny to us even! Anyway there is much to say for this week. We were pretty busy but even through that busyness we were still able to read a good lot of stuff! Like Gray to Blue no Ai Made. Despite having read it twice we don’t really know how to talk about this one. It's about a boring teacher, his gay charming 50 years old father in law, and his student. All a failure when it comes to love one way or another. Koutarou doesn’t have the drive to do anything with his wife moving away from him because of his own purported inability to help her in her dreams or anything about their stifling marriage, Koushi despite his own admission that he’ll do anything he want in his old age isn’t brave enough to actually fight or want his love for Sayotani to be more than a temporary one due to his trauma, and his student Sayotani who doesn’t have a care for whom he is with until Koushi saved him from ex-boyfriend and called him a brat. But failures they’re meant to be worked with, to face with, to not regret over and over again. Maybe that’s why the ones who’re the happiest by the end are Sayotani and Koushi. Sayotani by the mid-point knows what he wants, the flaws Koushi and Koutarou point out about him. He wants to be with Koushi and he will not live forever in his youth anymore and be a person for Koushi. And Koushi faced his fear by the end—embarrassed—but he will stay with Sayotani now. That leaves Koutarou, his wife who nearly divorced him and came back after it turns out her and her new love is a sham. He hasn’t moved in regards to his love by the end but it can start now.
What’s another one? A reread of Cure Blood. We're very into its depiction of vampirism from a medical bent alongside the way Tadayuki and Juji's relationship is written makes for us a work that is deeply in love with people. By which we mean the way their relationship is never defined yet you would be strained to not see them as anything but lovers. We value deeply any work that makes us understand romantic love which seems contrary but just putting the most basic definition of love possible—I want to take care of you and be there for you—in a romantic context makes for an engaging romance to us even through they don't exactly have a chemistry that interests us in and of itself. The bit with the vast field as representation of the distance in their age is great too. There is a nice visual too with Tadayuki's tall grass like his long life and doubles too as he hides within that grass like how his physical body not aging cuts him off from his friends and family and Juji's short grass as a normal human life. The romantic and the platonic aren't different much and this is what we imagined that would be as simply as possible.
We have another work we read again, Antique Bakery and Gerard to Jacques. This will happen a lot. We don’t have anything new to say about the latter again but the former! Reading it again made us realize what exactly made us fall in love with it the first time around, chapter 13. Of course we liked the earlier chapters but to us those chapters really only get complete when read through with the doujinshi. Chapter 13 meanwhile to us showed exactly the kind of melancholy felt during a wedding. All the time lost for you to have this beautiful day juxtaposed with your participation in making the wedding possible and a bit of a blase reaction when you express your own desire to have it. It made us understand at least a little about the emotions felt by people when they say they love someone so much they want to marry them, to build a life together. And another thing too it's very effective in regards making the emotional highs even more impactful by making it proceed an intense exchange, be it a fight, wondering thoughts, or humorous screaming match anything that comes after just seems and become a poignant end to the exchange. This is something we noticed usually contained into a single chapter but sometimes it's the cumulative feeling of being overwhelmed. From arc to arc each character talks and talks and talks like people would and when they stop and say something well cliched and stock to us they feel resoundingly human somehow.
We think we also read two be x boy comics anthologies but we are equally sure we didn’t finish it. Oh well! There is always a next time in regards to reading things you forgot. Pretty uneventful week when it comes to reading huh? But somehow we are able to make more words to describe it. That’s pretty good! Our goal when it comes to enhancing our writing is being fulfilled little by little, excitements. That’s all we have for this week, see you next time!