I thought i was well past the point of getting emotional to the point of crying, over a manga/anime, and feeling a sense of profound emptiness after finishing a series after decades of being a weeb, but then i discovered THIS. This series is an epic romantic tragedy, not entirely in chronological order. As usual, the hallmark of a good series to me is one that makes you feel a very broad spectrum of strong lasting emotions, and i did. Envy, rage, hate, hopelessness, sadness, regret, frustration, stress and a few moments of bittersweet bliss. Set in the late 1800s at a posh boys school outside of asmall town in france, Serge battour finds himself living in the same room as gilbert, who sells his body for various reasons, and he finds himself getting emotionally attached to him, and also the story of both of their entire lives and how they were shaped as people.
Indeed, this series is full of every taboo you could possibly think of, to enjoy this series you need to have a MORBID sense of curiousity and an open mind (able to entertain ideas without necessarily accepting them). It is also very emotionally intricate/mature, so i can imagine a lot of younger people might not fully be able to "get it", i know i probably wouldn't have when i was 18-20 years old. So this series i imagine is for a more mature audience, in the sense of emotional and mental development.

The art is breathtakingly beautiful, which is why it took me as much as a week total to read it despite it only being 17 volumes, i like to read slow and really savour all the details.

I'm not usually someone to hate characters. In my entire 10+ years of being a weeb, i have never come across a character that i truly hated with a burning passion, no, not even characters such as the collectively despised Griffith from Berserk. He is a character that i can sympathize with because i can understand his emotions, although i don't condone his actions. At the top of my head as u write this review, i cannot think of a single manga/anime character that i truly hate. But it happened in this series, i absolutely hate Auguste, the cold blooded calculative sociopath, but i also hated Bonnard almost as much, although he seemed to treat Gilbert somewhat better than Auguste, he still raped him when he was still a child, and trying to pursue him despite knowing full well what kinds of hell he'd been through. What was even more aggravating and revolting to me is how he started taking the moral fucking high ground towards the end of gilberts background story. And this says a lot about the character work in this series in general, all of the characters are written so perfectly, including the side characters such as Pascale (one of my favorite side characters from this series).

Overall i don't think i could praise this series enough. Forget Clannad, forget kanon 2006, this is THE romance tragedy series that your heart desires.