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Feb 17, 2025
Nice story, held back by poor English translation
Suki nante Iwantoite has a good premise, and executes it fairly well. I like that it's about adults, and not another high school story. It explores interesting themes related to orientation, Trade, and the uncertainty of gay relationships. Unfortunately, Yaoi-Sekai's English translation is pretty weak. Visually, it looks professional., but the English translation itself is maybe a little better than you might get from Google Translate. Sometimes it can make it a little tough to understand what's going on, and a lot of times, it leaves the reader with the impression that you have a vague idea of
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what the characters are talking about, but any nuance that might have been there in Japanese is most likely lost.
Yaoi-Sekai always puts a notice on their translations asking users "Please don't re-translate", which seems to suggest that they know that their translations are lacking. It probably comes across as entitled to whine about the quality of the free service they provided that made it possible for me to read this at all, but my point in this review is that I don't think I would recommend that other English readers spend their time on this translation. The most interesting part of this story is what the characters are thinking and feeling about each other, and this translation makes that difficult (at best) for the reader. The spelling errors can be overlooked, but "vague' feels like the best word to describe the writing as a whole.
Exchanges like:
"No, what's with 'normally'... I mean, it's not like that..."
"Eh...? Somehow..."
"He's harsh...?"
give you a foggy impression of what's happening, but the inadequacy of the writing leaves you feeling like you're missing out. A professional translation of this would be great, but I do not recommend Yaoi-Sekai's, unless writing is not important to you.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 1, 2025
The Wolf Story is Bad; The Vampire Story is Good
Four-fifths of this book is "Kindan no Koi wo Shiyou", a romance story about a woman who meets a "wolfman". In this story, a wolfman is a guy who is a wolf most of the time, but can turn into a handsome man when the moon is bright. They begin a romantic relationship immediately, and that's pretty much it. I did not like this. The characters are extremely bland, and the tone is bizarre for a romance manga—even though it is ostensibly supposed to be a sexy story about a "forbidden love" between a woman and
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a wolfman (the English title is "Let's Make Forbidden Love"), the tone is almost always farcically comical: "Omg, we were kissing, and he turned back into a wolf! Darn it!" That happens in every chapter, I think. Then there are sitcommy situations that arise from having a wolf boyfriend. Aside from that, what happens is, our heroine walks outside, is approached by evil thugs, and then the wolfman appears to beat them up and save her. The artwork on the cover of this manga is cool, but the art in the novel itself was a problem for me. It's almost always so minimal that it's nothing but the character who is currently speaking appearing over a white background, which made it kind of hard for me to tell what was actually happening sometimes.
After that is a single-chapter story, "Vanpaia ni Onegai" / "A Request to the Vampire", which is about a suicidal malnourished woman who meets a vampire, asks him to end her life, and he refuses, because he doesn't want to drink the blood of somebody who's so unhealthy. This is actually such a fun idea, and I think it's executed fairly well. But somehow this is chapter 1 of 1 for this story, and it turns out that there are TWO full-book sequels to the wolfman story!! Life isn't fair!
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jan 29, 2025
Thematically, it's poignant and life-affirming. Very sweet and uplifting message. I loved the ending. It kind of feels like "Blue Velvet" a little bit.
It is a very short manga, though, and while I wouldn't say that it fails to to justice to the gravity of the dark subject matter, this story goes by quickly. We don't get much of an opportunity to get inside the characters' heads, and feel what they're feeling; we're kind of speed-running from plot-point to plot-point. It might have been more impactful if we got to spend more time with the characters, and be privy to their thoughts beyond narration of
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what is happening/summarizing what happened. But perhaps it was intentional to have the characters loosely-defined enough for readers to be able to identify with them
I would recommend it to yaoi fans who have been through a lot, and struggle with feeling pessimistic.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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