Gravitation

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Gravitation was my first yaoi/shounen-ai ever. And it didn't disappoint me.

I love Shuichi. At first I thought he'd become annoying, but his "annoyingness" turned out to be very funny, and the way that he never gives up on his dream is actually really inspiring.

I love Yuki. I also thought he'd become annoying and he also turned out to be way better than I expected. He might seem like a really cold character at first, but the way that he "melts" around Shuichi is really adorable and heartwarming...and even funny sometimes.

I love the way that they complete each other. Shuichi brightens up Yuki's world with ... his cheerfulness and Yuki shows Shuichi how hard reality is and that achieving his dream will not be easy.

And I love the absurd cartoony comedy this manga has. Reiji is one of the reasons why this manga is so much better than its anime.

If any of the things I mentioned above interested you, go ahead and read it. It's a nice and fun little read.

I don't usually write reviews but I gotta say, you have to read the entire manga, all 54 chapters across 12 volumes to truly appreciate it in a bad way.
If you only read the first half you simply could not possibly understand all there is to hate about it. I read it because I am now the unfortunate owner of the whole series in physical print after finding a sweet sweet deal. It's not better than the anime. I love the anime because its so bad its hillarious. The manga tho, the manga, how should I say, the 90s and 2000s was a peak time ... for anime in which horrible manga would be adapted to anime in a way that actually greatly improved the story. (We see this in Descendants of Darkness which I also am the unfortunate owner of after a sweet sweet deal as well.)

While not great, I did find the first 8 or so volumes fairly entertaining and quick to read. But my god,, volume 9 or so, the introduction of the America arc, absolute dog-water. That was when the complete tonal shift happened. Tho mostly a gag humor BL manga, the first several volumes have some touching or dramatic moments that aren't totally usurped by sudden gag humor. The introduction of that America arc absolutely destroyes it tho, just a total gag humor mess, not clever in the slightest, the writing just goes out the window. And to the very end the MC is a total bumbling idiot. The anime atleast gives him a win in the finale, but the manga, he blows every chance to the very end, totally unsatisfying and pointless for the sake of gag humor.

Art: Changes by volume 5. Volumes 1-5 have that kind of 90s simplistic feel to them, 6-12 take on that more dramatic anime eyes 00s art style. I prefer the 1-5 art style tho because Shuiichi actually atleast looks like a 18-20 year old and not an actual child while the later volumes art style deages him.

Characters: Kinda the whole point of a story is to have well developed characters, you won't find that here. There's funny characters, but thats all they are. Very one dimensional. The characters that are supposed to have depth are so poorly written its not compelling at all anyway. Except for Hiro, the real MVP, the only consistently respectable character.

Story: Dog water. It's funny, if you really like gag humor, the first couple volunes are even alright. The second half is nearly unbearable tho because the author forgot how to write or stopped caring.

Overall: 5/10 just go watch the anime, its really amazing how directors in the early 00s were able to take a manga with marginally no concrete story and make a show that was semi-watchable. Oh, the music for this series performed by Kinya Kotani is also pretty good.

Gravitation is a romance (allegedly) music (allegedly) BL manga. It’s one step away from being a great parody of the yaoi genre, but unfortunately it’s wholly unironic.

It suffers from many problems. The first and the most obvious is that the story just doesn’t make any sense. Both plot-wise and character-wise.

The main problem with the duo of main characters is that they have absolutely zero chemistry. They have no reason at all to like each other, it’s as if Shuuichi got hit by a fujo brainwashing tech which makes him fall in love with the first bishounen he sees and so he did. Both Shuuichi ... and Yuki are also extremely annoying characters, but for such creatively different reason. One of them is a crababy. No, really, that’s like the main emotion you’ll see here, get ready for it. He’s also *really* dumb, to the point it makes you question how he even survived so far. Yuki on the other hand is the the cold one, to the extent of just not giving any signs of affection at all. He gives off the vibes of tryhard, but I’d say this is just author’s failed execution of writing a “cool” character. Author’s failure is what also seems to be behind the lack of chemistry, as it seems like she heard “opposites attract” and went with that, while forgetting that it’s because the opposites are supposed to complement each other, not repel.

Regarding the plot, it’s only for the first few volumes at most that the story maintains at least some sort of coherence. After that, it’s wild west of random bullshit. And not in the funny entertaining way, but in the “huh, the author really didn’t plan any of this through”. Conflicts that should have been main focus of the manga are solved within few pages while whole volumes are spent on filler as only once in a while the manga remembers it’s supposed to be about music.

Talking about music, it’s very obvious that the author did no research regarding the industry. And of course, don’t expect any interesting band scenes like an actual music manga would have.

Another awful thing is just the frequent tone whiplash. You get unfunny gag jokes inserted into what seemed like a serious scene, the characters randomly start being dumb, and sexual assault is treated as serious life long issue when it happens to one of the characters but as a minor inconvenience and almost a punchline when it happens to the other one. It's also pretty weird that the characters keep trying to convince others and themselves that they are not gay, they are totally straight but just happened to fuck dudes?

Unsurprisingly for the genre, the art is terrible. The characters suffer the most, as they are drawn inconsistently, a single character frequently looks differently through the whole manga (seriously, just compare even the volume covers alone) while other characters area easily mistaken with another whole different characters, and that’s across genders. The “le random faces” drawings is a cringy humor while backgrounds are almost non-existent, making this into really low artistic effort.

To summarize it, expect a wattpad story written by 13 years old level of quality.