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When Shinohara Erika is asked to show a picture of her boyfriend, she usually deflects. During lunch, he seems to call every day, and she leaves. As she hides in the bathroom after asking her friend to give her a call, she overhears the other girls say they don’t think she actually has a boyfriend. Desperate to make sure she fits in, she snaps a shot of a random handsome guy to show them. Unlucky for her,it turns out to be Sata Kyoya from her school, a popular guy in her year. Lucky for her, when she explains her situation, he agrees to help.

That is, if she’s willing to pay the price…

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I’m not a fan of this one. I have several reasons for this, but I really don’t like this series. I went into it, not liking it, though, because I watched the anime many years ago, so I already had an impression of this manga by Hatta Ayuko. If you don’t want spoilers, my conclusion is in the last paragraph as usual.

This is not a good romance, and I don’t mean that because of the basic premise of this, but rather the characters enter this very unhealthy relationship. Both while it’s fake for Erika to hide her singledom and while it’s real, it’s really not a good, healthy one. And this could be fine, but then there’s the demographic… It’s just not a good one. Erika constantly tries to please Kyoya when he is in the wrong, and he is actually just a really bad person for a good chunk of the series.

So this is clearly going to be about the characters more than whatever plot there is. Because I have opinions.

Erika’s character arc is, in my opinion, more about friendship, because later the girls in the beginning basically gets dumped out of the story and Erika’s with her friend since before. Erika’s character arc is rather unrelated to Kyoya, and that makes sense. The conflict for her is trying to fit in.

But this means that she doesn’t evolve much in the dynamic with Kyoya. After she falls in love, she doesn’t really change all that much, she doesn’t mature, and even when he’s so bad that she doesn’t want to be with him, she still gets together with him. Her arcs are so messed up. Erika is so… I don’t have a word for it. But she chooses this highly toxic relationship. Twice. And falls for him. While he’s an arse. Lovely.

And yet, that’s just the better part.

Kyoya is, in a lack of a better word, awful. Toxic. A guy who needs a punch in the face. Very puncheable face, by the way. He’s sold as the nice school prince with a dark side and a sprinkle of human decency and probably a lot of possessive rage. I mean, he literally punches some guy in the face and says Erika is his.

While they aren’t together. It’s while they’re still in the fake-dating phase.

You know what he reminds me of? Alphas. I’m thinking of omegaverse ones, but werewolf probably fits in as well. Dominant, possessive scumbags who’ll bite your neck to own you. And if this were in a magazine for adults, I could have let that go. But no, this ran in a girls’ magazine. Okay, Betsuma does have a large older audience, but we need to look at the content of the magazine itself and its target audience. The younger end of the spectrum is twelve or thirteen (as one is in the first year of middle school in Japan), and the content does reflect that a lot. Erika’s problems are very real to teenagers in their early and mid-teens. This series is obviously toward the more mature audience, and that can be fine… if the relationship looked different.

Instead, we have this really unhealthy relationship, which actually gets worse because they get together. I genuinely love a lot of Betsuma titles, which I’ve read since my teens; Ao Haru Ride, Kimi ni Todoke, Lovely Complex, The Devil Does Exist, Crimson Hero, High School Debut, My Love Mix-Up!, and Love Me, Love Me Not are or have been some of my absolute favourite shoujo series throughout the years.

Kyoya does eventually have a character arc where he matures and is forced to face his own lack of proper communication and the way he has to meet Erika in the middle. Like, why does his arc make him mature while Erika keeps chasing this douchebag for several volumes, including while they’re together? Why does she have to go through this abuse throughout nearly the entire story just to be resolved because he matures? Why is the main conflict not the fact that Erika excuses his behaviour time and time again?

He does a small action, and everything is all right? No!

This. Is not a good romance. Because it doesn’t resolve the conflict that is between the characters in a way that is actually good for it. It shouldn’t be that Erika should be willing to throw herself at him for sex before it’s resolved, because he finally has to actually communicate. Only he’s needed to communicate the entire time! The entire story he could have matured, but that’s where we draw the line?

So, what’s my conclusion? Considering the target audience, and especially the range of the target audience, to me, this isn’t a good romance at all. A good romance doesn’t need to have a happy ending, but it does need to be age-appropriate and give a good depiction of romance. It can be a good depiction of an unhealthy romance, but it needs to be good. So, if you want something about making friends, we got Kimi ni Todoke; for trauma or personal relationship causing friction, read Ao Haru Ride; and, while I’ve never read it in full, but watch the anime, I think Lovely Complex does a pretty good job in terms of expressing the importance of communication, and they’re all great stories. They have very different tones from each other, but they deal with the same themes better, and do actually cover the same moods and atmospheres as Wolf Girl and Black Prince does.