Tsubaki-chou Lonely Planet

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I can assure you, you'll never read a romance as great as Tsubaki-chou Lonely Planet. I started reading this manga not betting a penny on it. I would start reading, then drop, then pick it up again from the beginning. The pacing is painfully slow at the beginning, and the story can seem tedious and cliché at first look; but i can say with total certainty: This is one of the best mangas I've ever laid hands on.

I confess I was skeptical of the whole age-gap thing, I suspect it would go like that one shoujo manga about the girl and her mafia guard dog. ... But, Tsubaki-chou is not creepy at all. Our male lead is actually someone very moral guided. He refuses to be touchy with our main character. He's someone really respectful of her age and I find his shut-off nature to be quite sweet.

Tipically, I don't like stories in which our main characters are total opposites, I like them to have at least something in common.
Our main leads don't have anything in common, but yet, their dynamic just works.
It's rather sweet how we, as the reader, learn to understand our male lead as we progress on the story by our protagonst's side.
Even If they have such different personalities, their personalities complement each other. He brings rationality to her, she brings him patience and admiration for the small things in life.

While I was reading, I found myself appreciating the slow pacing of the story. It just feels like we're really into our heroine's perspective, you know? She's the type of person who enjoys a quiet life and wants to pay attention to the little details. The manga pacing puts us in her place.

I am really satisfied at how the autor toke their time to make side stories for each one of our side characters. I am really glad that each of them had their screen time to shine and conclude their stories, not leaving anything open for interpretation. That's something I like very much.

The author dealt with the age-gap in a very respectful and realistic way. Their writting was really sensible and careful. We could see clear differences in maturity in our protagonists attitudes and our male counterpart would mention it, as well.
We were able to see them grow as people together. Even while being an adult, he still had things to learn about the positive and simple side of life.

The teachings of the manga about patience, respect and understanding makes it very great for younger audiences, too. I say for sure that this is a story I would give to my pre-adolescent daughter to read (If I had one, of course.)
My only regret about the story is that I didn't read it sooner. I really could've used the teachings it brings during my adolescence, haha.

If you enjoy learning about human relationship, this is a very good read. I cried at the end from pure emotion. I laughed so hard at many other moments. I felt an warm feeling everytime I would see them being so genuine in their love. I'm quite embarassed to admit I feel kinda light-headed and empty after the ending. I wish I could savour this story all over again. Really wish it, someday, receives an anime adaptation.

Thank you, everyone that worked hard in this story, thanks to the author as well. And, thank you to the scan people who translated it so I could read it (Since it didn't came to my country, although I do plan to buy physical copies of it.)

It's cute, however the only real justification for these characters liking each other is that he likes that she cooks and cleans for him and she likes that he's the first guy that was nice to her. Toss the age gap into the mix and you get a manga that gets progressively more worrisome as it goes. Normally, I would try to ignore Red Flags in reading romance, but they don't let you forget the age gap! He calls her "kid" and she calls him "sensei". It's just weird.

Additionally, it feels rather forced and rushed. They start dating with little enthusiasm. If I'm going to ... endure a 11-12 year age gap, I want it to be for a good reason.

I like the characters a lot, and the issues they traverse are very real and important. It has a lot of good ideas, but it just doesn't make my heart flutter. Several times I found myself cringing at being reminded of just how weird their age gap was.

The FL would be better in a highschool romance and the ML would be better if he wasn't dating a highschooler.

I'm not a particular fan of shoujo, but I still sometimes read them, and admittedly, some of them are pretty good. However, most of them are pretty bad.

For example, Tsubaki-chou Lonely Planet is a pretty popular one. Whatever, I'll give it a try. I mean, the problem with all these romance novels is that they give the same sort of vibes no matter which author you read about: girl main character gets swept up in a hot guy's pace somehow, thet somehow get into a special relationship in weird circumstances before it eventually sprouts into love. Am I missing something?

Tsubaki-chou Lonely Planet employs all the ... cliches possible, apparently. I'm not going to lie, in the few chapters I read, there were some good points, like the art. While not groundbreaking, it's pretty good, clean, and clear-cut, and that's enough for something like a romance manga. Characters...are not that cliche, I guess, but the story is so cliche that I just couldn't go any further.

The "I'm somehow living with a hot guy cliche," the "eccentric hot guy personality," and most importantly, and the last straw for me, was "bad guy comes and hot guy saves me!!!! and now i love him!!"