I'm working on the plotbunny that snapelike gave me about "Yoshizumi needs to get laid, soon!" and "what about setting him up with one of the discreet hosts in WMLM?" The premise of the fic is that Yoshizumi and Kenzaki are friends-with-benefits, since neither of them wants a serious relationship--Yoshizumi because he's allergic to romance, and Kenzaki still hasn't gotten over his unrequited love for fellow host Shinkawa.

I haven't read the entire series, but I know that Takaaki and Shinkawa eventually end up together. My question is: does anyone know if Shinkawa quit the Rusty Nail after he and Takaaki became a couple? ("Anyone" most likely meaning Snapelike, I suppose. ~_^) I was assuming that he did, since it would be kind of awkward for him to continue working alongside Kenzaki, not to mention the fact that the club is owned by Takaaki's former lover Iwaki. But I just thought that maybe I should try to confirm that before I finished the story. I can always go AU, of course, but I wanted to try to stick to the canon storyline.

WMLM is an interesting series--lots of complex emotions and character relationships, but I don't like it as much as Haru because I found that I really don't like the two main characters very much. Iwaki is too cold and cruel for me to have any sympathy for him, despite his passion for Takaaki. I suppose there must be a reason why he's so emotionally messed up, and maybe if I knew the whole story, I would like him a little better, but no matter what the reason, it would be tough to forgive him for the way he abandoned Takaaki the first time around.

As for Takaaki...I read the "Last Waltz" series first, so I felt sorry for him, since he seemed to be so vulnerable and unable to resist Iwaki. And yet he showed some steel, too--I think at one point, he told Iwaki something like, "You can do whatever you want to me, but I won't let you hurt Shinkawa," which I found intriguing. But then I found the translation to Book 1 on the Aestheticism website, and he seemed like a totally different character, with a cold and cruel streak worthy of Iwaki (which is maybe not so surprising in hindsight, considering that Iwaki trained him). One of Shinkawa's clients had gone into debt and taken on "shady" jobs in order to keep paying him, and her brother Urushizaki, mistaking Takaaki for Shinkawa, demands that he leave the sister alone. Takaaki basically blackmails Urushizaki into sleeping with him in exchange for leaving the sister alone, even though he knows that the girl is actually Shinkawa's client. (Although to be fair, he does ask Shinkawa to stop seeing her--which is another type of cruelty in itself, since he knows that Shinkawa has feelings for him, and is asking Shinkawa to do him a favor so that he can have sex with another man.) It's fascinating, in a twisted way, but it made Takaaki a lot less likable to me. I also didn't think much of Shinkawa for taking advantage of the girl that way--it's implied that she was working in the sex trade in order to keep giving him money. Although it is hard not to sympathize with him in the later chapters, where he's so desparately trying to win Takaaki's heart.

So it's funny, but the characters that I actually like the most are the ones who seemed disagreeable in the beginning: Kenzaki and Ishii, who were plotting to steal customers away from Schnapps and lure them over to the Rusty Nail. Ishii turns out to be not such a bad guy, and cute in a puppy-ish way, and Kenzaki is so young and earnest and passionate in his attempts to impress Iwaki, and I did like the adversarial sort of friendship that developed between him and Shinkawa, that later turned to love, at least on Kenzaki's part.

Also, what's up with so many of the characters having the same names as the characters in Haru? Is it some sort of alternate universe, or did Nitta-sensei write WMLM first, and decided to competely re-vamp the characters in a different series?