If you're looking for one of the most wack and morally questionable manga with lowkey the weakest female protagonist and most contradictory male protagonist with actually morally questionable real parents...well you've come to the right place.
{Spoilers. Come back to this once you've read it and revel in how terrible you feel?}
Honestly I'm not sure why I finished reading this manga all the way through. I felt both uncomfortable because of the themes that were explored in the manga and also annoyed at how spineless Ai was. And kind of grossed out by the whole incest thing. But by the end I was kind of numbed to how morally wrong incest was that I just don't know what ended up happening and I think I'm just still stuck in a state of disbelief that this was allowed to be published in the first place. Sure I think I've read some stuff on people that were cousins twice removed or something. But never a brother-sister relationship. Before I get further off track, here's my wack synopsis.
So, there's a brother and sister named Yuzuru and Ai respectively. They're only a year apart and inseparable. He always picks her up from preschool and she clings to him as an loving and sweet younger sister does to their responsible brother. Their family is pretty perfect, except their parents fight a lot. So they divorced and each took a child. Yuzuru grew up in America with his journalist(?) dad. Ai grew up in Nagano with her mom. And this was pretty fine with Ai burying how much she missed her brother deep inside and Yuzuru yearning for his younger sister up until he moved back to Japan. They reunited and...all this time Yuzuru has been harboring convoluted feelings of love for Ai. Ai has also never been in love with anyone else. And so they develop romantic feelings for one another. Despite their close friends finding out and thinking "Hey, maybe I can be the love interest instead and we can stop this morally incorrect thing from continuing." But they don't stop. And they just continue to commit incest.
What's super questionable is just how Yuzuru and Ai act. They know it's wrong, but Yuzuru's mindset is just "I want to make her happy" but he's also selfish and doing this for himself when he says "I'll die with this love kept a secret" when he tries to date Ai's friend, but quickly crumbles when Ai confesses to him. Once he sees her tears he just melts. Absolutely no resolve. Even though it's morally incorrect. And Ai is absolutely ridiculous as well. She just tears up a little and everyone softens towards her. And whenever something mildly inconvenient happens she just freezes and either lets the other person hit, yell at, or accuse her without saying or doing anything in her own defense. Absolutely ridiculous. Please don't let her be your role model. She's so incredibly frustrating. You'd have to read to understand, but honestly I don't want you to have to read this.
And then when their father dies while on a trip to America that's really sad. Because their mom's already found out and has to separate them herself. And Ai's response is just "I've been forsaken by God, this is the price of my sin. Give me back my dad and I'll stop" if I'm recalling correctly. But before she said "Let me be forsaken by God." So, which is it? Hard to tell.
The ending was a definite plot twist. It came so suddenly that I would almost call it a cop-out. Yuzuru turns out to not be blood related to Ai. So it's not morally incorrect to be together anymore. Which I guess is a sigh of relief. It definitely was to me. But even just mentally thinking that you're siblings is still a little bit of a grey area to me. Also, his parents were actual blood related siblings who actually committed incest to create Yuzuru.
And I suppose we can go into the whole argument of why incest is illegal in the first place and heck it might even be a human construct. However, as a law-abiding citizen, it just doesn't seem right.
Would I recommend this? Not really. Even if it wasn't about incestuous siblings, I would still say that Ai is frustration enough not to read. There are definitely better stories to read out there. Go read some others because this is just too long and too unfortunate and slightly cliche and contradictory for me to recommend.
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