Really? Seemed pretty realistic to me. Yeah, his personality and decisions were pretty inconsistent a lot of the time, but there were quite a few real-life situations found in there, too.
Oh, then you didn't see the big (though quickly resolved) twist in the last few chapters. I gotta admit, that part actually caught me off guard, but it played itself out way too quickly (as did the events of the finale). Based on what I learned from Bakuman, though, the author had probably already been dropped and given a finishing date by then, so he had no choice. lol
It was too much for one person to still be truly realistic when you are focusing on the concept of this being a slice of life.
In Suzuka it was about a shaky relationship between two people who have a lot of potential in athletics. People who strive to achieve something in sports, especially in something like athletics where there's hell of a lot of competition, need to make sacrifices. It's inevitable, especially on the field of relationships. Teen pregnancies aren't unusual either. Especially when you place this in a Japanese context, these are situations that are very easily relate to.
But in KMIM the further the series proceeded, the less realistic it became and the more the series seemed to have lost its sense of direction. A city girl goes to some rural area out of the blue living with people she barely knows. She then starts flirting heavily with the son of the people she's living with, but that guy rejects her all the time because he has been in love for years with another person. He finally tries to make some moves on that girl, but then everyone goes to hell. The girl reacts quite stupid, pretty much ruining a potential relationship. To make things matter worse Haruto reacts on the decisive moment in the worst possible way, not even thinking the situation through in the slightest (and he keeps doing that the entire series) and gets all the blame for it, while the girl herself was as much responsible, if not more, for this screw-up, but Haruto gets all the blame. Finally Haruto succumbs to Eba's flirting, but what happens? She ditches him suddenly to go back to Tokyo claiming she found someone else and Haruto decides to follow her on a reckless impulse.
Up to this point it's still doable as the author has to avoid to just have the same scenario as in Suzuka, but then it become preposterous. Haruto makes a new friend, his only real friend in Tokyo and of all the millions of guys in Tokyo he is the one who is with Eba now and why? Because she pities him as he has an incurable disease and he's on death's door and then two have some weird non-sensical competition. He suddenly dies and Eba decides to not see Haruto again.
This was just too much, how can that be even called realistic? It's also from this point on the series started to become more and more random. Haruto finally had again the perfect opportunity to make up with the girl he originally was in love with for years. The situation was perfect and what happens? He bypasses her for another girl he met in Tokyo of which he didn't realize she liked him till someone said it. What follows is one of the most boring and couth relationships, that lasted several years, in the history of manga. *** is almost a taboo and even kissing and holding hands are a rarity. Their relationship seems to develop at a snail's pace if there was already any kind of development, but she does forgive all of Haruto's stupid mistakes, no matter how suspicious they are. He got himself blackmailed to go into a love hotel simply because a girl he originally helped, framed him and she needs some 'inspiration' for her manga and when they go outside who appears of all people? His girlfried and then I'm not even mentioning all those times he got suckered by Eba's sister.
Then he meets Eba again on a group date of all things and suddenly he ditches his girlfriend for Eba, making all those chapters about those few years they were together utterly pointless, some kind of sick joke, leading all of his friends dropping him like a stone, but it's fine as long as he's with Eba. I found that sickening in more than one way.
What has followed since then is nothing more how Haruto is living with Eba, how their relationship evolves, but with no particular purpose in mind and this combined with fast time jumps. Finally, to make things complete, everyone he knows actually has got his stuff together, except him, while he was supposed to be the most mature and responsible of his group. Especially his best friend, a character that annoyed me from the get-go as he tries to hit on every girl he sees and seems to cling to his girlfriend simply because for once a girl said yes, making it feel like he isn't even sincere about it. To top it off again a teen pregnancy, even breaking that 0,1% change that a condom fails.
All his friends has got it together and have their life on tracks, but he hasn't the foggiest and he still succeeds in getting into messed up situations because he doesn't think. What was the point of having all those chapters? They went nowhere. The series died. In Suzuka you had a climax, here it was a slow and painful struggle for its demise. To me the author just tried to milk this out as long as possible.
What should have happened was that at the time that guy died and Eba decided to not see each other, that Haruto went into a relationship with the girl he was originally in love with for years at the start of the series and see how both of their characters evolved. Even if the ended up with Eba again, it would have been connected with the original roots of the series and how their characters changed since then.
