^It's not a years long relationship, is it? It's an old relationship that impacted her. The book is not about how Ayu kept on dating Max all over those years, it's about how they were together once and how it impacted the creation of one, if not the, most iconic popstar in Japan's 00's.
And I don't know why to compare her to Kokia or Koda Kumi on those aspects...
Kokia produced 14 studio albums. Ayu produced full 17 studio albums and 4 EPs on the same time spam. Also 26 national tours. Koda produced 15 studio albums and less than 20 national tours in 19 years. You won't get any other jpop star who worked harder than Ayu during ther career and 3 years without a new full album for someone who worked that hard is pretty reasonable. Even TROUBLE, that is far from being her most interesting music release, gave us some pretty personal take on her life nowadays.
I mean... Koda took her time off. Kokia took her time off. Utada took 7 years off. Namie took her time off AND retired. But when Ayu doesn't release a new full album for 3 years and doesn't release new music for less than 2 years after overworking all those women for 18 years, this is some dirty sin, some signal of failure, of shame, of how much of a has been she is. Heck, she didn't even entered on a hiatus and toured non stop during all this time.
Damn you crazy sluty desperate hag who doesn't care about your legacy and can't deliver anymore!
Sometimes it may seen so, but I don't take things personal when it's about taste. I don't care all that much if people don't like her releases I like, or I wouldn't have survived the forum during Party Queen. But I do get annoyed when people say she doesn't care about her career, or that she is lazy, or that she crazy, like you do sometimes, because this isn't disliking her music, or videos or converts. This is attacking her as a human being.
I don't think she sings as bad as Cris says everytime there is a live performance released, based on how I was able to consume her live singing, for example, and disagree with him a lot more than I agree, and there won't be this level of arguing with him over that simply because he is giving his opinion on a technical aspect of her career he trully dislikes, not defending over and over again why she isn't worth of our respect as a person.
About Chibi-chan, I won't discuss over here why things took the direction they did. It's my fault talking about blocking her openly on the forum, but we did had our own share of directly talking to each other out of here before that, so, it wasn't a decision based on forum interaction.
I rarely, if ever, agree with you either, and everytime we interact it tend to become a pretty exausting (and I imagine boring/annoying for everyone else) war of wall of texts, and there you are, unblocked.