#touhai

so i want to first stress that i didn't hate the entirety of yakuza fiance or anything, i really enjoyed yoshino as a character. she's fantastic. and there were moments that were just so much fun, like her whole thing of making the guys switch and mend each other's shirts. genuinely good and original writing imo!

but the general, i guess... grittiness and sense of danger that should have been there just sort of didn't land for me? that's not to say the characters aren't in tense, dangerous situations. they often are! but so often the things that happen and the things the characters do to make them seem dangerous/edgy just felt a stiff and formulaic to me

like instead of actually coming off like he's a yandere freak about yoshino, kirishima often felt to me like the... i don't know, the concept of a yandere freak? there was something about his freak that just didn't feel entirely authentic to me, i guess

one example of what i mean is the whole thing with yoshino's kidney. this happened fairly early on so my memories are a little hazy, bu iirc he said something to make her feel like she owed the family a debt, and since she refuses to owe anyone, she sold a kidney to pay him back immediately

(baller move by yoshino btw. i truly have no complaints about her, love her)

but then some time later yoshino's cousin (or some sort of cousin-esque relative?) shows up and it's revealed that her family deals in black market organ trafficking, so kirishima knows she probably helped yoshino with the supposed kidney sale

i remember kirishima and the cousin getting a chance to talk alone, and i think he said something like... he was looking for yoshino's kidney just to know where it wound up? maybe? but then realized when he saw the scar that she definitely didn't have an organ taken from her

anyway, point being, i remember feeling that the whole exchange had so much potential. like the cousin was delightfully unsettling too, she could have easily been more of a freak about yoshino also. give us some yandere vs yandere action please!

but mainly i felt like if kirishima really committed to the bit he could have been like "yeah i was looking for her kidney because i wanted to have it transplanted into me so that a part of her would always be with me and if she's not a compatible donor for me i could at least eat it. her kidney :3" like man come onnnnnn if you're going to be a sicko be an actual sicko! they don't even have cannibalism <- shrek meme voice

kei from touhai on the other hand, like... i would not say touhai is objectively Better because it is such an absurd, ridiculous mess lol. but it commits to the bit in a way yakuza fiance, to me, just didn't. kei isn't just some kid poser being tossed around in the yakuza world, he's out there like... actual committed to losing a toe to play mahjong, disemboweling himself and all. deeply concerning child but he delivers on the premise of the series

i guess i also have higher standards for yakuza romance in general because the bar of excellence for me is saezuru, which is conceivably BL (and i mean it certainly is) but has such a genuinely great yakuza plot too. like it's tense, it's tragic, it's romantic, it's heart-wrenching, it's haunting, it's beautiful

(disclaimer: i have not caught up with recent chapters so idk if my feelings will change once i do, but i highly doubt it, this has been the bar for like. many many years lol)

(disclaimer 2 electric boogaloo: tw for like. everything. in saezuru. just all the things all the tws)

so anyway. sorry this got really long and rambly lol, the basic tl;dr is just i feel like kirishima's freak did not feel authentic. i don't mean that as in, he's faking it. i'm sure some of his personality is bravado, but i don't think he's a complete sham

it's just there was an almost... shallowness? to the story? like i just couldn't shake the sense that the writing kept doing what it thought would seem edgy, without actually wanting to. idk ultimately, to me, it just felt like a series with no heart