Okay slice-of-life BL, but not much plot

Since there are no reviews yet...

This webmanhua is a cute, brightly-colored short-to-medium length read, in which everyone has some sort of botanical disease where they take on the traits of a particular plant, like plant X-men. There is a cactus boy and a tumbleweed boy, and they have crushes on each other.

Story/Plot:
If you really like slice-of-life school stories where cute boys are in love, act cute, and blush a lot, this might be very enjoyable for you! Unfortunately the genre is pretty hit or miss for me. If there is a good plot, or at least a dramatic plot, I can sometimes get into it, but this particular manga doesn't have much of a storyline at all. The supernatural elements seems to only ever be used for laughs, and even the romantic element isn't particularly interesting to me, since it's just the two main characters crushing on each other.

The other problem I had is that none of the "plot" that did exist seemed to have any consequences or go anywhere. It's just silly little comedy setups, which I can enjoy sometimes, but not when it feels like there is no emotional weight whatsoever. For example, there's a couple of chapters where they have to eat fertilizer, and jokes are made about how cactus thinks this is gross and tries to get rid of it. Nothing of consequence comes from this. Then, there's a chapter where cactus has to do a beauty streamer's makeup, and he does a bad job. Nothing of consequence comes from this either. If you stop enjoying the humor (which I did pretty quickly), the manga just starts feeling repetitive and bland.

Characters:
I struggled to find the main characters enjoyable or interesting as well, as they both fall into tropes I'm personally not fond of. The cactus is a bumbling straight man type who gets super awkward when his crush is around - this stopped being funny to me after the first quarter of the manga. The tumbleweed was fun in the beginning, but started coming across as the teen girl tumblr fantasy of a gay boy, as time passed. Neither of them get much actual development, so they end up both being one-note, imo.

There are a few other characters, including cactus's guy friend, tumbleweed's guy friend, and the beauty streamer nee-san and her (girl?)friend. I got to about chapter 15, so maybe this changes later, but the two guy friends had almost no point besides to enable jokes for the two main characters, and the girls weren't faring too much better.

Art:
The art style is brightly colored and cheerful, nice if you want something to lighten your mood. However, the character designs are pretty generic as anime characters go, and there's an odd shape to how faces are handled that I'm just personally not into. It looks like the same art as "Whose Baby Is It", which I also found tolerable art-wise.

Concluding Thoughts:
I also read (and dropped) "Whose Baby Is It?", which is by the same author, and they feel very similar to me despite the different premises, and "Whose Baby Is It" having a slightly stronger storyline initially. I think this style of lighthearted loosely-plotted romance manga is just not my thing. I would say that people who like "Botanic Romance" will also probably like "Whose Baby Is It?" (and vice versa).

In terms of Chinese school-themed BLs, I had a better time with 我告老师！, which is less outright silly and has some other plot going on besides kawaii romance tropes.