Ao no Flag review

night3angel3
Apr 02, 2021
This manga was the best thing I had ever read, right up until it was not. Incredible story, but the last chapter felt like the worst kind of betrayal--a knife to the chest of every queer reader who really empathized with the narrative.

I highly suggest reading it, but never touching the ending; if done this way, you'll be left with an incredible experience.

(Spoilers)
It starts out looking like a typical love triangle, and reads that way for a while. And it's a cute love triangle, a very enjoyable shoujo-esque romance. But then it slowly starts getting more complicated, and as characters develop it feels like the cast cumulatively goes through every letter of the LGBT acronym (some characters seem to hit every letter on their own). All of this is paired incredibly insightful, mature, and thoughtful explorations of gender, attraction, and the dynamics between those things, along with lots of great queer solidarity.

And then the ending goes "PSYCHE, screw you actually, we're subverting everything we built up to make it a bunch of straight couples + one BL, hahaha isn't that the only queerness people like?" It felt like maybe the publishers put a gun to the mangaka's head and demanded everything be reigned in. It left me feeling hollow and empty after an all-day high where I couldn't stop reading (I literally finished all 54 chapters in 1 day because I couldn't put it down).
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Ao no Flag
Ao no Flag
Autor KAITO
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