I just get angry when I think of this. I don't expect bad people to get their comeuppance in every story I read, you don't even have to make comment on it, I don't think there needs to be a character that wiggles their finger and says: "that's bad, you shouldn't do that". But I'm just confused what the intention is here, the message seems to be that the people who would make those types of comments don't matter, because it's your life, and even if there is something in your life that others would consider deviant, or perverse, or abnormal, staying true to yourfeelings is what will ultimately fulfill you in life, but this story has a pedophile in it, two actually, the friend of the ml, and the teacher that gets a student pregnant while she was still in high school, maybe it is just that the author doesn't consider sleeping with high school students to be that big of a deal, but I don't know how much I'd like that.

I just don't think pedophilia is on the same level of excusability as getting back together with someone who cheated on you, or letting your husband sleep with whoever, all three situations are abnormal but there is clearly one that stands out, two of them are consensual, those are the situations where the message of the story can work, but there is one that really stands out. "What a mess of a group we are" is our final commentary on everyone's situation, and I just don't know if "messy" is the appropriate word. You have to consider the friend; he is around 25 and he had his "first trip as a couple" with their partner as a "high school graduation gift", someone who he had met 3 years prior, so someone on their last year of middle school. I will assume this was in the story to show that our ml doesn't have a strong sense of morals, because he only cares that they got caught, which is inconvenient to their career.

What confuses me is, why are we then presenting the story as if we're dealing with tragedy? It's fine if a story has bad people, but on a metatextual level, why is the story being framed as if we're supposed to care about the well-being of these people? "I refuse treatment and yet", "we laugh over trivial things", "all we can do is cherish the present", I don't care, I don't care for their tear filled reunion with marveling gazes and shoujo sparkles, "This kind of gossip has spread all over the island... but now I can brush it off like it has nothing to do with me", I don't know maybe they should listen, it's not like every gossip is wrong, at least listen to the law when they say not to be with minors. The characters may not care, but I feel the author should. When everything is dismissed, hand waved away by the characters, it feels like everything is excused with a "well its our lives, you can't tell us what to do".

That's not even getting to the structural problems, the pace is horrendous, this is specifically bad in this story because there is so much drama packed in so little time; we jump around so much we don't have time to settle with the new situation in someone's life before we move on to the next. There is no satisfactory conclusion to any plot line because they have no time to be developed, nothing has depth because there is only so much you can say if you need to immediately move on.

There is no reason to read this, there is no angle you can use which gives you one, the unconventional mindset of the characters is made uninteresting by its shallow exploration, they are not people you can root for, there is no meaningful commentary on their actions. There's just not much value in this work.