Love and life are always doomed from the very beginning. We all die and those we love will all die. The signs of this fact are all around us if we just had the strength to not look away. But Sundome doesn't look away, it tells you it's doomed from the very beginning, in bright bold letters. Nothing is unexpected and everything goes according to plan in its own miserable and profound way. It's a manga about jumping headfirst into love, regardless of the pain it will bring, and the end that's guaranteed. It's use of femdom as a metaphor for letting down your walls, allowing yourself to succumb to it, to give everything you have to love, and to let yourself be a tool towards it, is nothing short of incredible.

It's odd that something so beautiful would come out of what is on the surface pornogrpahic, but there's nothing at all arousing in this. It's an incredibly intimate experience, but all the explicitness feels like an expression of the usual teenage-boy hormones, and that intimacy. It's almost funny to read reviews that call it unnecessary or crude. They've completely missed the point, the characters don't get aroused from these depraved acts themselves, they become aroused because someone they truly love was willing to do it with them. These kids aren't exploring the bounds of sex or good taste, they're pushing how far they will go for each other, how madly you can swim down a river headed towards a waterfall.

There's a lot here that I imagine will turn people off, the fact that the art is incredibly flat and simplistic, the very repetitive nature of the plot, and the simple fact that the characters don't change much over the whole story. But that story structure of slowly diving deeper and deeper into devotion, of giving himself up more and more each time, is so incredible. For me in just a few volumes, Sudome captures the shortness and brightness of life in a way that many other "serious" manga never could.