#this is my first legitimate BL so i was unprepared for...all of it

[aflockofravens]

Not to rapidly flip into another hyperfixation but holy shit, started Heaven Official's Blessing and it's the gayest fucking thing I've ever seen.

I'm only 9 episodes in so far but holy fuck I'm kicky-feeting so fucking hard at every interaction between Xie Lien and San Lang.

Like shut the fuck up, you're so cute

(honorable mention to Nan Feng and Fu Yao; they're gonna hate fuck, I'm calling it now)

[thebookdragonsden]

The Betrayal Knows My Name - Review

Genre/Subject: Urban Fantasy, Reincarnation, Demons

Artwork: 4 stars

Plot: djaflkdjsfljadslfj

Overall: I’M PROTESTING RATING THIS SERIES GDI

Sum it in a line: pretty boy orphan gets drawn into a seemingly never ending war due to a continuous cycle of reincarnation and there’s lots of slender people and pretty, gothy artwork

Content Warning: queerbaiting (although Odagiri-sensei has done BL before and this could arguably be queercoding, since she indicated her editors did not want her to include a romance in this story) and incestuous behavior (particularly twincest)

This review is going to be SUPER SPOILERY because all of my feelings are tied up in the ending of this series and it’s difficult to discuss why I can’t even rate this story without talking about how it ended.

Pretty boy Yuki is an orphan who has mostly lived a quiet life, looking after his fellow orphans at the orphanage, raising flowers (I think), and going to school, until a series of events draws him into a potentially catastrophic supernatural war going on under the eyes of the ignorant masses.  Yuki finds out he has a whole family and all of them are stuck in an endless cycle of reincarnation, brought back again and again to serve as soldiers in a war against the necromancer, Reiga, and his army of summoned demons.  Oddly though, while all the other reincarnations have memories of their past lives, Yuki’s are firmly locked away.  Each of them has a specific ability that contributes to the war and Yuki’s is to heal everyone.  At his side is Luka, an extremely powerful traitor from the demon side who was in love with Yuki’s previous incarnation and is determined to still protect him no matter what.  Yuki embarks on an adventure to uncover his past and stop the war to save his newfound family.

So... I’ve been collecting this series off and on since it started getting released in English back in 2011.  Somewhere in there, I decided to just wait until I had it all before reading it in one go, so I was wildly unprepared for what I was getting into when poor sweet summer wyrmling me decided to sit down and do just that.  I hadn’t spoiled myself in any way beyond reading the first couple of volumes and knowing that I liked this series.

I was not ready, okay?  I loved this series.  I was strongly invested in the characters.  I wanted only good things for the good guys.  I had a few moments of legit horror while we were waiting to find out if certain characters died.  The tension was real.  I read the author’s notes and I do, legitimately, understand what’s going on here.  But that doesn’t mean that the ending of this series did not feel seriously upset me.  This wasn’t an ending.  It wasn’t even the attempt of an ending.  This was spending five minutes pasting some ending lines onto the middle of a story.

I’m not upset about Reiga flipping sides.  Again, this was a middle story thing to happen.  I’m upset that we lost Takashiro and I’m never going to find out if they bring him back.  I’m upset that one of the big driving parts of the story, which was to end the war and save the Zweilt, did not happen and the it ended with more of a “it’s okay that we’re still fighting because at least we’re doing it together” which feels like a direct contradiction of everything that they’ve been wishing for.  I’m upset that nothing really got resolved with Yuki and Luka.  Yuki never regains his memories and we never get to understand why previous-Yuki locked away her memories.  Truthfully, nothing got resolved and for every question that was answered, four more were created based on new elements being introduced.  I know Odagiri-sensei wanted to leave herself the ability to return to this story if she ever could, and to finish it in the way that she really wanted it to be completed, but the way it ended, as it stands, seriously upsets me.

So overall, I would rate this series 4.5 stars with the caveat that you don’t read the last 6 pages, and understand that this series cut off literally in the middle of it’s plot and you are probably never, ever going to find out how it ends because even the ending that exists is not an ending.