Do you like cute, fluffy rom-coms? Yes? Great. Do you also like more dramatic stories with a bit of an edge? Yes? Great, then this is the manga for you. I think it's fair to say that the recent score-bombing of It's a Little Late says a lot less about the quality of the manga than it does about the fragile and overly-sensitive nature of a large section of the manga community. Or, to be as charitable as possible, it says that a lot of those score-leavers would answer "yes" to my first question and "no" to my second. I think it's also fair to say thethe wildly out-of-proportion reaction that the more recent chapters have received are a testament to how well written the earlier, fluffier chapters are. If chapters 1 to 20 were really just cookie-cutter, generic rom-com slop, then I doubt the fluff-only people would have been quite so outraged at the latter dramatic developments.

It's a shame, the author is really trying to do something different here, and so far they seem to be succeeding too, but a lot of the people who have read it don't like what the author is doing, and a lot of the people who would like what the author is doing haven't read it. There's a huge mismatch between story and audience here. However, for those of us lucky enough to be both a reader of the manga and a part of its intended audience, it's a rare treat. It's a story that manages to capture a whole range of emotions and experiences, and acknowledges that very few things in life are simple, clear-cut, or black-and-white. I also expect that ultimately it will tell a story where our FMC triumphs in the end, which surely is good storytelling - in any other genre it'd be expected for the MC to have some adversity to overcome before achieving their aims, I don't really see why in rom-coms that should be any different.