#10 count

☀️ The Summer Hikaru Died: liked it lots, wish it were complete. The creepy art style took some getting used to, I didn’t like how unnerving even normal people looked at first but I ended up loving how the art fits its genre. Mystery + horror + a sort of love I like, occupying the twilight zone between platonic, romantic and goodness knows what*. The theme of grief is executed well, very moving, and thumbs up for the other complicated feelings the characters wrestle with. From the Chinese words/kanji, I can tell that the title is “The Summer the Light Died”, which makes me go ahhhhh. I’d like to have the reassurance that there will be a happy ending, because I feel like there could be a melancholy one.

* I like amorphous kinds of love. Qijiu from the danmei book SVSSS has that too (don’t look this pair up if you haven’t read SVSSS, it’s spoilery). The phrase that comes to mind is 犹抱琵琶半遮面, ie, (a musician) “covering half their face with the pipa in their arms”. The beauty of things only semi-revealed.

🎥 Twilight Out of Focus and its sister series: enjoyed them. My favourite character is the film director with semi-long hair who’s capable, strong-willed, outspoken, and competitive, tempered by a softer side (the thing he’s loud and passionate about besides filmmaking is BL, of all things. But I didn’t know he swung that way until he got his own manga series. Should have seen that coming). That tends to be a winning combination of physical and personality attributes in my book, I always fall for this type of character, but I’d be on edge if I had to deal with such people in real life because their cut-throat attitude would be, well, cutting.

🧼 Ten Count: can relate to the mysophobia. Interesting premise! Enjoyed it. But I feel like it was dragged down a little by the smut. I have mixed feelings about saying that, because on one hand, smut is always welcome, but on the other hand, I wish there was a greater focus on the process of overcoming the ten mysophobic points beyond the romance and smut. Another downside is pretty-boy same-face syndrome.

🪞 The Black Mirror: there are a number of imperfections but I was hooked because I like mystery.

If anyone has recommendations, I’m all ears! BL manga is new to me (previously, I think I’ve only read the comedy about the guy who realised he’s stuck in a BL world, haha).

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(Not BL)

Read a number of chapters of Liar Game. I don’t know why the author is drawing manga instead of messing with the stock market or committing fraud or financial world domination. Big-brained stuff. I tend to read comics fast/skim-read so I found it challenging to think deeply about the strategies; even following along is tough. (Edited to add: the ending was really, really bad.)