Nyx

Why I did not like this: Contrary to the title and the marketing as a BL, there isn't much of any romance or any sex either. It's not about taming any bad boy: The main character is on screen together with his love interest, alone, for only just over 10 minutes out of a runtime of over 1 full hour (I went back and counted, out of confusion over what nonsense I had just watched). In those ~10 minutes, they failed to convince me that they even really want each other, or even to provide any sort of understandable reason why they might like each other. They do kiss (not deeply) a few times, but it never feels like they're really into it.

I actually thought the premise of the story was promising; The school bully is picking on the main character, whom he secretly likes. The main character clues in that the bully is actually into him, turns the tables and makes the bully submit to him instead. The bully is only too happy to do so. But it's never sexy; they even have this dog collar that they use, but there is nothing kinky ever going on, just implied. As for romance, there's barely any warmth between these two characters, just a little at the end, but we never see it develop.

Does the bad boy get tamed? There is a moderate amount of influence that the main character has on our bully, but it doesn't look significant. We don't see him ever doing anything that bad in the first place. The real bully is obviously the homophobic character, which is strange when it's the love interest that is supposed to be the bad boy. Why did Flying Penguin do that? I have the impression that they were a lot more interested in exploring LGBTQ social issues than in making a romance, and thus all the character development that could have been happening fell completely flat.

Instead of getting to see the bad boy taming, which might actually be interesting, we get a lot of mostly obnoxious side characters, ranging from silly to preachy to pointless. We do learn some details about the families of the two lead characters, but none of the family relationships are developed or lead anywhere plot wise, making me wonder why they included those characters in the first place. The friend group of silly gay students and the over the top homophobe (with his glorious crash out), I swear get more screentime than the main character and the love interest do. And we also get a weird sex ed teacher giving a long lecture about AIDS and being nice to gay people. With all of that taking up most of the runtime, it is social issues that dominate the series, not any kind of story about love or sex. Maybe it could have value outside of the BL criteria, but that's for others to decide.