Title: Love Me, Love Me Not Vol. 11
Author: Io Sakisaka
Publisher: Viz Media
Language: English
Format: Physical
Pages: 192
Genre: Slice of Life, Romance
Publication Date: November 2, 2021
The Story
I can sum up this volume in one word:
FINALLY!
I don’t “spoiling” this because if you’ve read the series up until this point, you know that it is painfully obvious that Inui and Akari would get together… otherwise, what would have been the point of the entire series building up to this moment? Ryosuke was nothing more than a diversion much like Kikuchi was a diversionary character in Io Sakisaka’s other work, Ao Haru Ride. So, after all of the drama and the teasing, the obvious happened and the two of them are now a couple.
The volume also centers around both couples having an at-home date, only separately. Rio and Yuna spend it with Yuna’s parents while Akari and Inui are stuck home alone watching a movie but… they do just about everything but watch the movie!
During the volume, Akari’s friend Kano shows up and gives us an update on Ryosuke after he was turned down. She also mentions something that serves as a bit of foreshadowing for the ending of the volume that, honestly, took me by surprise!
Characters
The obvious huge development here is that Akari and Inui are a couple now! YAY!
However, Inui did receive some big development after confronting his parents. It seemed as if it were a hopeless battle at first but he actually has a glimmer of hope as his father doesn’t want to take the issue any further…. Right now. He offers a time for the two of them to talk properly and even shows Inui some respect for standing up for himself! That moment was the catalyst leading to Inui confessing to Akari!
On the other side of things, Rio stood up to his father and lectured him about how staying silent is hurting things more than actively doing anything. He also said that their mother is at fault, too, but it gets him to realize that it’s hurting him and Akari when he thinks that remaining silent is protecting them. That little talk gets Rio and Akari’s parents to make up with each other and things seem to be just fine now!
Ryosuke took the loss pretty well but he kind of had to. He’s just the diversionary secondary character to add some synthetic drama to the series. Of course, he was going to lose… we all knew that he would but it was weird seeing him being so pushy one second and so submissive the other. Leaving Akari with some words of encouragement showed a bit of sportsmanship in his loss but still, it was the obvious outcome for his character and it went exactly as it should have.
Yuna was just there this volume. I can’t really say anything more than that because… there’s nothing to say.
Then, there was this random girl who lives in the same apartment complex as everyone. She keeps seeing Yuna and Rio together. She watched them hug in public twice and watched Rio feed Yuna a pancake. Apparently, she’s a gossiper and Rio’s mom sat him down and talked about the rumors going around about the two of them. I’ve only met this character for a couple of pages now and I already want to dump her in a box and ship off to F-Off-Land. Like… Rio and Yuna are just innocently being a couple and enjoying each other’s company! If you’re THAT lonely and have to make it miserable for others because you, yourself, cannot find happiness, then I suggest you hit up J-List… they are your friend in Japan after all and I’m sure a certain section of their website will help solve your problems.
Final Thoughts
I thought about going with the “It’s About Damn Time” option at the start of my review, but “FINALLY!” worked just as well. Just glad that volume after volume after volume of teasing is finally over and we get our star couple of the manga… which… and this might be something I should save for the next volume’s ultimate final thoughts but… makes me feel a little disappointed because Rio and Yuna were built up to be THE couple of this series and they took a heavy back burner once the focus shifted to Akari and Inui. I feel that there could have been some better balance between their progression and development but, in the end, we still got the pairings that were ordained from the start.
I honestly thought that we were going to get everyone together and have the final volume serve as the epilogue but we’re not out of the woods yet. The ending to his volume took me by surprise and now everyone has to face the most daunting decision yet. It adds a gut punch to your happy feels and now I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing how this series winds up!
I want to give my predictions but doing so would blow the ending to this book and I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just give a generic prediction of “it better not happen” and leave it at that.
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This item was provided for review by VIZ Media
