Hoshikawa Ginza Yonchoume

This was just a little too much. I'm open-minded, but there's just something about bringing up your own intended spouse that reads as incredibly creepy. I wouldn't necessarily mind the situation quite so much if they were less apart in age, if Otome were at least 16 or so--well, okay, no, that'd still be pretty freaking squicky. But 13? C'MON. It doesn't matter if the relationship is chaste; there's still no way that that's going to work out emotionally. I wanted to love the characters, and indeed that is a stronger part of the work, but they also wind up too cliche. But really the last volume justkilled it for me entirely. I don't know that I can say this without spoilers, so look for spoilers in this section: -------- There are a series of Drama Bombs that serve to: 1) Show how fragile this relationship really is; 2) show that Otome has had some psychological impacts from her inappropriate relationship, in that she's willing to accept really awful things done to her by other people; 3) prevent us seeing character development between the two protagonists. I also absolutely detest long time-skips. Our ending features a time skip of ten years. WTF? What have they been doing all this time?? The author's note does not make this any clearer or any better. Whatever this series had going for it that had me engaged, it lost me through these developments. -------- I can't hate this story, but I wish I had back the time I spent reading it.