Yoh is enjoying the first summer together with Haruma as his girlfriend. But while her love life is going well, things are tense among her friend group. Touya has acknowledged he loves Yoh as more than just a friend, and Sawako tries to keep her feelings for Touya buried by getting him together with Yoh. So while they both have personal reasons for wanting Yoh and Haruma to break up, they also know Haruma is a master manipulator and want Yoh to untangle himself from his slippery web.
Maybe with Yoh busy organizing their culture fest they can find a good opportunity to expose Haruma?
I’ve categorized Love and Heart as romance and mystery, but with the release of volume 6, we seem to be officially switching this to romance and psychological. There is little mystery left to solve since we know what caused Yoh to forget Haruma, and we as readers know Haruma’s goal is to get Yoh solely reliant on him. It’s possible Haruma has even deeper machinations, but if he does, they probably would make this manga lean even more into the psych genre.
Love and Heart volume 6 kicks off though with Yoh and Haruma enjoying a date, and this inspires her to want to do something for him: make friends! Although she and Touya have hit a rough patch, Yoh wants to repair their friendship since he was always there for her, and she wants Haruma to experience that kind of bond.
In Yoh’s scenes, as she helps helm their college festival, she tries to brainstorm and arrange for Touya and Haruma to get along. Neither young man wants to outright crush Yoh’s hopes in fear of her hating him, but yeah, she underestimates how high of a hurdle that is.
Readers may get annoyed at Yoh’s cluelessness here, and the manga is at its slowest and most boring when it follows her perspective. That isn’t surprising though since the other main characters are all about keeping her in the dark as to their ugly side. For Yoh, her dark side is her melting into the form of the stereotypical naïve shoujo protagonist — one who has feelings of jealousy over Haruma having a whole past she doesn’t know about and disregarding the idea of Touya having romantic feelings for her while extolling his virtues when he is accused of sabotage.
But when the manga limits Yoh, I find myself addicted. The art does well to show off Haruma’s yandere side even though Yoh may disregard them as tricks of light or whatever. And for all of Touya’s and especially Sawako’s bravado, their attempts to expose Haruma are not going well. Still, Haruma may be “winning”, but much to his dissatisfaction, he is also still far from reaching his goal. And now, a wild card may throw a wrench into his plans.
The culture fest may be a stable of school romance, and romance fans are still treated to heavy helpings of Haruma doting on Yoh before and during the (ongoing) event. But if you wanted more steam between them, well, sorry; the true heat in Love and Heart volume 6 is between Haruma and Touya/Sawako. And that suits me just fine.