#2 Neil stan

This is an old ask but I wanted to wait until his route was over (and then I forgot about it, hehe). Spoilers ahead.

I didn’t like the plot of the route, it made no sense to me. It’s hard to believe that Ethan, a doctor who worked on that vampire serum, didn’t think about a cure and spend years in his misery until a 18 years old woman came out with a solution in a matter of weeks.

For the characters, I only liked Eloise as she was more brave and self assured (although I noticed that for the bites they made a change compared to the others route: she always said “I will let him bite me because if I agree then I’m in control” which...makes no sense to me but okay). The others (Bel, Aaron, Vlad) were meh. BUT Raph and Ivan were an exaggeration of how they were portrayed on the others routes. Just compare Raph’s dialogues on this route vs his dialogues on Bel’s route; Ivan is a mess but he would never cry as he did in the ballroom chapter, etc.

From the “this is an otome game” perspective I feel like this route had very little romance. Most of the chapters were spend justifying why he was always a jerk with everybody, with a little bit of him being “nice” (or just normal) kinda as a treat for us (”oh, he hold my hand 🥺", “he smiled!!!!”).

Now this is just personal opinion but I don’t like jerk types. Sarcastic/cunning are fun but cruel and mean are not. This particular scene made me really angry. I get the “he has trauma!!”, yet I don’t think that gives you a free pass to be an ass. I think I’d be less angry if this scene had happened is earlier chapters, not chapter 8 when their relationship was “deeper” but *shrugs*.