Emma

every characters are happy, so i am

but i really want to know how they fought (and won?) with that old guy
 
Aside from romantic arc it's great.

Somehow, the way she writes straight relationships lacks spark in my eyes: there's a lot of respect and mutual admiration from portrayed parties, but chemistry and emotional side is rather cleverly substituted with class- and interpersonal drama ; in other words, even though the attraction allegedly starts internally, from an outsider's point of view it seems like it's maintained mainly through the external factors, and when there're none, it feels "warm" at best, never "hot".

It's not that I want or like pointless melodrama, but even Dorothea's supposedly sensual and sexually charged relationship with her husband fails to convey its allegedly meaningful carnal aspect.


*Conclusion I came to through comparing plethora of examples penned by Kaoru Mori with side dishes like Anis&Shirin, the amount of effort and meticulous attention to detail she's always putting into drawing female form vs overall blandness of male characters - super pronounced here, in Otoyomegatari, and especially in "Everything and something", but also other small details scattered through her whole body of work, like Monica's ambiguous gayness extending beyond being a siscon.*


Other than that, an amazing costume period piece from a talented author.
 
To be honest I didn't like the story as much as I thought I would. The story jumps around especially towards the end making things confusing
 
I need an entire series dedicated to Hakim's girls and them being cute and doing dumb shit 🤡
 
Coming from the author's other series, Otoyomegatari, which I'm a really big fan of, I really don't like how inconsistent this one is with respect to historical depictions. I get that the focus of this story is romance and in this regard, it hits most of the right marks. Even so, I can't get over the fact that Emma 99.99% would have been a concubine for Jones and the whole premise of this manga, under historical context, would have been avoided.

I'm not saying "oh logic has no place in fiction" but rather that the premise of this manga fundamentally breaks the suspension of disbelief because its premise is fundamentally flawed.
 

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