content warnings: transphobia, homophobia, image of a black man being hung
representation: main f/f relationship, wlw main character, wlw japanese side character, black side character, hispanic genderqueer side character

This comic is the epitome of something with great potential that ended up falling flat. The only real compliments I can give it are the general ideas and the art, which was good if incredibly average.

The characters weren't aggressively terrible, just really bland. They had no personality, no character traits, nothing. They were just tools used by the writer to push a story along, which is really bad when the story hinges on the relationship between two characters.

The plot was also just fine, if unnecessarily complicated in places. Issue #4 in particular was full of different flashbacks and timelines and it was hard to keep track of. A few of the twists were good, but the rest was so underwhelming that they didn't have much impact.

This comic suffers from serious pacing issues. There's almost an entire issue dedicated to the relationship between Teddy and Ano which, fine, the comic is about their love, whatever. The only problem is that their relationship happens so fast. Literally, they meet, Teddy instantly falls in love, they have sex almost immediately, and then we get a montage of their domestic life for a year. And then the climax feels so rushed that I feel like there should have been at least two or three more issues.

Quick side-note, while I enjoy sex scenes as much as the next depraved individual, the one in this felt so out of place. It happens randomly, and then there is never another one. The rest are all fade to black, which makes me wonder why we needed a graphic scene in the first place.

Finally, and easily the worst thing about this book, the dialogue. All of it is clunky and unnatural, the characters never speak how real humans would. And it was so long. Majority of the time whenever a character spoke, it would be a lengthy few sentences, which is fine in most media types, except for comics. Comics either need quick dialogue or long dialogue stretched out over multiple panels, otherwise it feels like a chore to get through. There's also a lot of info-dumps throughout the comic which detracted from the flow of it.

This book also got really preachy towards the end, and this is coming from someone who's decided to reclaim SJW. There are multiple pages of famous activists (MLK, Harvey Milk, Susan B Anthony, Malcolm X) giving speeches (again with the long paragraphs) and while it was probably meant to be inspirational it came off more as the writer trying to cram as much activism down the readers throat as possible. This isn't helped by the fact that some of the characters paragraphs of dialogue are just them talking about oppression. To reiterate: an SJW is telling you that this comic is too preachy, that's how bad it is.

This comic had so much potential, but unfortunately I don't even feel like I can recommend it.