I can understand the praise which all the other reviewers shower on various aspects of this series. The cinematography. The acting. The writing. The music. From a thoroughly dispassionate standpoint, I am able to give "good" ratings to some of those dimensions too. Anyhow, I leave it to The Shipper's many enthusiastic fans to praise it to the skies, as they do. But I found the series so intensely disagreeable that my feelings of shock and unease will probably stay with me a long time whenever I think of The Shipper. In brief, it gives us a very weird message about life and death, and a bitterly homophobic account of human love. The one and only love story here is a heterosexual love story about a girl trapped in a male body. This might lead to an interesting exploration of trans identity, or an attempt to look at a non-binary self-understanding. But no. She's in a male body, that's all, and the nature of the relationship is utterly conventional heterosexual girl/boy romance. As for the same-sex possibility here (no point even referring to the concept of "BL"), it is literally killed off, stone dead. There is no chance of love between males, the storyline seems to say - it's doomed. Fatal. Something which has to be terminated, erased. As happens here. The only way love could exist between two seemingly male persons, the series tells us, is when one of them in reality is a woman - meaning it's not really any sort of "m/m" relationship at all. It's a hideous and cruel message and it's what this whole series is based on. Hence my low rating. Yes, I should have abandoned it long, long ago. And I did. But I came back to see how it ended. I'm sorry I did.

Footnote: I realise I am not in a minority of one. Fortunately. There are a couple of other discerning viewers who were equally alert to, and dismayed by, the crude homophobic message conveyed by The Shipper. Meanwhile, however, I've read the other reviews here, and I'll say that I'm - well, intrigued. One could say they exhibit a ... striking unity. First of all, there are a great many of them. A huge number of reviews. All for The Shipper. OK, very well. This suggests that it was an exceptionally popular series, watched by a very high number of viewers. Was it? I'm not sure I got that impression ... Next: many, if not most, of the reviews are rather close to identical. They seem to follow a set formula. Read along, and you'll quickly get the picture. The reviewer immediately announces that the series isn't "BL" - and always finds space to make some dismissive comment about BL fans. Then we're told that The Shipper is a vastly superior product - with more than a few reviewers going out of their way to pour scorn on BL, yaoi, m/m romance, LGBT material etc. Next, they tell you that this series is an edifying moral lesson, or a series of inspiring moral messages. Finally, they award it a series of 9s and 10s.