I appreciate that the "How Do We Relationship" leads are of that specific stage in personal development that they know they have their specific issues they have to work through that are more theirs than society's and don't want to burden their partners with them as a result of that, but lack the sort of personal management skills to actually do that properly.
What I think helps make the comic more engaging than agonizing is that it helps that most of the issues they have are tied to social taboos and not a more general attachment issue that shows up every chapter1.
I also appreciate that the story's leads' new partners also get to be fleshed out and dynamic too. Like the story arc isn't that they're two lonely, alienated people who found each other but had very different relationship goals and thus drifted apart and found new people and were happy the end. Their new partners have their own personal hang-ups and difficulty in expressing themselves; they're different people with real but different problems. If what the leads had wasn't romance, they still wound up having learned a lot about themselves and each other for the experience, and developed into even more important emotional supports for each other than when they were dating.
It's nice to have a more grounded relationship-focused book (per the above I don't know if "romance" is something we'd all agree describes the series) where the characters find themselves stuck in metaphorical muck that doesn't come off with just a couple sexual encounters. I'd much rather have these kinds of stories even if they're not as sexually charged; watching characters working to achieve personal growth and sometimes (frequently?) failing is much more interesting. We have to think about how we deal with these issues.
Anyway it's good. Now to dissasociate for the next half a year so the wait for vol 11 doesn't feel so bad
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Speaking of which, if you fell off the Kase-san bandwagon, this is a great time to get back into it. There's, like, catharsis!
