Lost and Undefiled

To be honest, I had no clue how to approach this. After the absolutely awful prequel "Renai Fuyuki Todoki", I wasn't even considering reading "Lost Virgin", but then figured I could just drop it if it turned out to be too stupid. So I'm saying this here: skip the prequel, read only this. My biggest problem with "Lost Virgin" is the mangaka retconning Emoto, the antagonist of "Renai Fuyuki Todoki", into a mopey crybaby with a....not even "dark" past, really...whom we're expected to feel sorry for. Morally grey characters can be great, and it's true that Emoto didn't have much of a personality in the prequel,but this development feels tacked on because the mangaka probably figured that a sadistic rapist would be a hard sell as a love story protagonist. I'm sure the redemption arc would've worked much better if either Emoto was developed more in the prequel, or he did something less bad. Instead, we get another case of "rape excused because of minor dark thing in the rapist's past" (I really want to say what it is, because it's incredibly minor and stupid, but I'll hold off on it because of spoilers). Fortunately, Chouji/Chouko was a great character who made up for the unpleasantness of...whatever Emoto's character was supposed to be. The good part is that the art is great and the sex scenes are hot and more consensual than in the prequel (which featured straight up rape at least twice), but there are also instances where sex needs a "push" to happen. And, taken together, "Renai" and "Lost Virgin" are a mess in terms of tone; it's like the mangaka realized they're basically PWP and sprinkled some angst in there to add some depth. I think "Lost Virgin" works 200% better if you choose to ignore the prequel and pretend like everyone has a near-blank slate — which is what I did, otherwise there's no way in hell I would've given it such a high rating.