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I stumbled on and caught up with the manga just as it was starting to wind down to the end, and really enjoyed it.
It’s a sort of odd thing - at first glance, it seems quirky and edgy, with the loner boy meeting a vampire and most everything happening at night, but if you dig a bit deeper, it’s really surprisingly vanilla - in a lot of ways, it’s just a young romance between an awkward boy and a genki girl, neither one of which has any real experience. But it’s not even just that - it’s surprisingly high quality vanilla. The characters and their interactions are very well done and the whole thing works really well.
And then there’s an entirely additional layer of vampire intrigue and horror on top of that, and it too is notably well done, and incompatible though they might seem, the intrigue and the vanilla romance mesh together surprisingly well.
Unfortunately though, the ending leaves a lot to be desired. Kotoyama notoriously can’t or won’t commit to a specific ending, and that’s the case with this one too. And as if it wasn’t bad enough that the original ending was unsatisfyingly open, he then did a timeskipped epilogue that somehow managed to still be unsatisfyingly open.
Still though, all in all I was very impressed.
I joke this sort of work is like Neapolitan flavour: it’s vanilla, but it has one or two interesting twists (like you said, the vampire intrigue) to make it more interesting.
And I fully agree with what you said about the characters. Specially their interactions! Like, Kotoyama improved by a lot in this aspect, you don’t see Hotaru or Kokonutsu changing meaningfully because of the other, but Nazuna and Kou do. They grow, a lot like the ones in Sono Bisque Doll. (…that had a better ending. Yeah, I also agree the ending is a bit unsatisfying.)
Unfortunately, I get exactly what you’re saying about Kotoyama but I discovered it backwards. After reading this I was so impressed I went back and read Dagashi Kashi, and… yeah … he improved a lot between the two.