This story has multiple points where Andrew and Marina (and others, Nokia, daughters) made poor choices, AND multiple points there these same characters could have ended all this by just saying "ENOUGH!"
This has been a running theme and my greatest peeve with this story. So many of these developments come from unbelievably convenient omissions, misunderstandings, interruptions, and people frankly not behaving like adults would.
A lot of feminization stories hit an issue of "a solution in search of a problem" where the solution is "feminization". The writer wants the solution to a problem to be feminization, and they work backwards trying to figure out what story would result in that feminization. Problem is, feminization is such a drastic change, it's really hard to have something that stands up to scrutiny, especially the more realistic you make the story.
AM has, imo, run headfirst into this issue. The story needs Elena's feminization to continue, so Marina and Elena can't have a conversation like adults. How many times have they been interrupted now?
Elena needs to have sex with Nikos as part of the feminization, but at the same time Nikos isn't supposed to be the bad guy(?) so the story needs to justify having Nikos and his daughters act like a man fucking his niece's husband is fine? Which just opens up all the previous discussion we've had about how unbelievable all that has been.
At this point, everyone just kinda pisses me off.
Andrew is a victim but also a passive idiot. He has been drugged, but he also seems to have zero clever thoughts. Maybe this is the whole "autopilot method acting" (I really hate how unclear what's stuff he can control and what stuff he can't), but at no point in time does he come up with anything other than "let's just wait and see what happens". Even thinking back, why did he establish a safe word with Marina, but not with anyone else?
Marina is also a victim, and is less passive, but she keeps asking the one person she doesn't trust, which makes no sense. From her point of view, I totally understand her reluctance to trust Andrew at this point. Andrew lied in the past, selfishly during their honeymoon committed to roleplaying as Elena for a longer period of time, and now seems to be gaslighting her by ignoring their safeword. From her POV, it seems entirely possible that Andrew at some point decided to just get together with Nikos. On the flip side, if you don't trust Andrew, then why wouldn't you confront Nikos? Instead, she calls the cousins. Instead, she tries to talk to Andrew. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
As before, I firmly believe Nikos and the daughters have bad intentions. Nothing else makes sense to me for them to happily be tormenting Marina like this.
And honestly, I don't care about the other characters at this point. The interesting characters should be the family closest to the feminization. Everyone else are just players in the narrative.
I think it would be much better if Melissa focused on a long and a short story simultaneously, rather than releasing two long stories alongside each other.
The problem right now with AM and K-Pop is that they require long rendering time between each release and the releases often end up containing nothing but story exposition without any sexual content. Consequently, sometimes Melissa will end up going weeks without releasing any sexual content because of the focus on these two long stories.
This is a big turn-off for the fans who want regular sexual content, especially if they're paying a monthly subscription and barely getting any during the entire month. I think it's a big part of the reason people lost interest in K-Pop, which has mostly involved story exposition with barely any sex up to this point.
If Melissa kept the focus to one long story at a time alongside a short story (with updates every day or so like she used to do), there would be more regular sexual content in addition to the ongoing story arc, and the audience would get the best of everything.
At least for me, I don't necessarily need explicit sexual content for this to be erotica. But being feminization erotica, I do want some regular intervals of feminization. AM has been going on so long, over half of the story has basically been about a middle aged woman who has lost her memory and is trying to figure out what's happening.
As I mentioned above, my gut instinct is that there's all this exposition to try to make the feminization "realistic" while also having a cast of characters for an overall plot that's also happening. The problem with having a larger cast of characters is that now they have to be either in on the feminization, or unrealistically open minded or oblivious to not react to the changes the feminized character is going through.
I just keep contrasting AM with "Job for a MILF", and keep thinking about how much I liked that story more. Sure, part of it is the actual novel format is easier to give exposition on plot developments. But the pacing was so much better, and the characters stood up to scrutiny and had agency in their own stories, despite being manipulated.
With K-pop, personally, I think it's a similar issue. Not that there's not enough feminization, because clearly that's still ongoing. But I think people might be feeling fatigued by just how much text there is in justifying or setting up each step. Like the whole "ear implant making Nick unable to hear". So many extra panels have been setting this up and we're still waiting for the pay off to that. Or panels having to exposition dump to explain how the two friends feel about Nick's "transition", which is time that could have been spent on outfits, or other feminization scenes.
I do think that exposition dump was necessary, but only because their reactions early on were so muted. Honestly, it makes me wonder why they were introduced so early if they weren't really involved with the feminization. Imagine if Nick didn't meet them until after he was passable and passably Korean. We could have streamlined a lot of the story that way.
