IBWHIP is a curiosity. Overarchingly? Enjoyable, fun story. It's fun to see all the different breakups, and the amount you put your whole body into the various minigames and other intricacies of presentation is incredible. 

Some of my gripes are purely aesthetic. They don't count to a meaningful degree as part of this review. My pain (haha), at all the acronyms, and the repetition of things like "Heard" are partially me just being Skinner going "Am I out of touch? No it's the children who are wrong." These are stylistic choices, often for characterization (I'm still shaking at the amount of 'Nine-Hole' name dropping), and it's fine that I'm hurt by them. That makes the characters more real, that they have these foibles that make me wince just like how I wince whenever someone says "rizz" as though that phrase doesn't inherently make someone have the inverse of the charisma that they thought they had in using that term (but that's also me being Principal Skinner again heehee).

The rest of my gripes is the other stylistic choices that I feel are undercutting characterization. The amount of textual modifications fights against their usage. The common rule in literature is that you go sparingly with those, unless they're providing a purpose. You do italics for thought in a conventional novel, because it can be an easy short hand to clarify between that text and "regular" dialogue, but it's not necessary nor a universal standard.

All of the text wavering, dripping, rainbow colors, strikethrough-- they were used too much. It made their usage mundane, and undercut when they were put into play. For a conventional story, one isn't italicizing a stress word--the sentence is supposed to carry enough on its own to naturally inhabit the emphasis that stress word carries.

In IBWHIP, everyone is using strikethroughs, rainbow text, wavy text, etc etc. While this is an aesthetic choice, these are detracting from the text to me because they aren't characterizing the cast. If only one of them could speak in strikethrough (ostensibly that would be Dwain as our main PoV character, given we're in some form of 1st person). He shouldn't be able to tell what the other are undercutting--that would only be "assumption", so to speak. The text modifications temporarily fix the work into like 3rd person limited omniscient, and I find that clashes with sort of the ethos of the work (or at least, a part of it), in that we can't know what other are thinking (barring the PoV shifts, but that then flips us around to not knowing what the other side is thinking so that still works out well).

Frankly, it felt like you found a new toy, and wanted to use it as much as possible, and I get that. It can be exciting, but I find the textual modifications were so present that they undercut the narrative when they occurred. The text should speak for itself where the visuals don't. It's a visual novel-- we already have visuals to convey what the text can't. Modifying the text again is like showing a lack of confidence in the words.

If only Matteo spoke in the flamboyant lettering text? Still probably too much, but that'd function as an idiosyncratic sort of quirk that is uniquely present for his text, and reinforce his sort of aesthetic? purpose? presence? you get the point, hopefully.

That's my main thing that takes this down from 5 to 4 stars, because that's something that can be edited, if so chose, and while it is a very `Unagi` series of choices, I think they can be kept if done with more purpose in their execution. The haphazard usage whenever was technically appropriate was very wrong to me. It distracted me, not so much because it happened, but because it kept happening, and the usage wasn't merited, to me. 

The only other thing was you had a suspiciously George R.R. Martin amount of focus on food, which isn't inherently bad, but I didn't need the exact "here's what we're eating". The nice part was the elements that informed the relationship between Dwain and Tanner, their little performances and banter. I don't need a cookbook-- the fine details of those scenes food-wise can be parred down. It's about the time they spend together, not the exacts of what they were doing. On the other hand, that attention to detail is very much you, so I do get it (even if I died at the various moments where you put things arbitrarily(to me) in list format), but I felt the balance could be shifted more, to still have some of those specificities that you were having for what felt like some verisimilitude, while focusing on the more important bits (the characters in the scenes).

And that extended dream minigame was curious... I think it went on too long for the purpose of Dwain wanting to dream longer (from our perspective*). It was an interesting character building moment, but not everything always makes the page in the end, as I couldn't see any further narrative purpose to that scene other than Dwain liking and remembering his dreams (which I suppose feeds in a way into the Overwinter moment, but I think that's a loose association between the two).

Also also also, also, those weren't haikus. Haikus need seasonal references!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Those were closer to senryus!!!

But I don't mean to gripe about that my thoughts aesthetics, even though that's like over half of this review. 

I love the heart put into this. I love the dedication to the idea. The excessive efforts for brief gags. The thoughts are very much underlying an Unagi worldview, given my time interacting with you, and it's fun to see how those get reflected in the text. The building of the cgs per the gallery? Fuck that's too much work, man. To have them basically all layered? I weep at the idea of trying to touch that myself. The music notation present at all times? Fun! 

I'm invested in the cast, even if I want pretend not to see the children. They're all pretty distinct characters, with their own foibles and wants (Mona, my word, the mouth on her. Vicious). The conceit of the work makes sense. Ending a relationship isn't easy, especially when you care about the other person, and the idiosyncrasies of the difficulty lead to the more and more curious break-ups that occur throughout.

I'm excited as to when IBWHIP comes back, because your POV is such a curious one, even if some of it you know... pains me. As I very well know, sometimes pain is good.