>>1845958This is my feelings too. Both the Tate/Reito stuff and the Sergey stuff was obviously annoying being a /u/-fan, and also not particularly well-done in general (especially with the age-difference for the latter). But in Mai Hime it felt very much like a sub-plot to me, mostly developing Mai's character and driving her decisionmaking, just like other characters had their own sub-plots - hell, in a way Natsuki kinda had the focus of subplots in Hime since she was the intersection point for Shiziru, Nao and Haruka/Yukino. Meanwhile in Otome, the Sergey it basically outmuscled and interfered with the main plot too much, while also leaving all but those three characters out of it and, because of that, making them feel underdeveloped to me.
That kinda defines how I felt about Otome - all the characters' story-arcs felt too separated, partly because of the sheer scale. In Hime it was one small gang of powerful people in one place, most of them friends or at least acquaintances at some point. Their stories intersect organically and while the final episode was a crock of shit, I really did enjoy how the writers portrayed that, had them relate to each-other and forced them to live double-lives. In Otome, the story spans countries and even continents and there are just so, so many characters, I feel none of them got any kind of satisfying development and only the main three got any kind of focus.
