Henai Heartbeat
My Girlfriend Gives Me Goosebumps!

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The first time ever I felt I was going to give a manga a 10/10 from the very first chapter.

Yandere love interests have appeared many times in manga, but are always treated like dirt. Always the butt of jokes, coming in last, put in their place by the normies and end up sad and defeated, while the beta MC runs and flees from her sight at all times.

In Henai Heartbeats first chapter, our MC is told by an acquaintance that the girl who keeps following him and bumping into him is an obsessed stalker who doesn't take no for an answer. The actual Gigachad MC ... hears this and his first reaction is to find her and ask her to be his girlfriend, realizing she's the thrill he always wanted. As the story goes on, both change in interesting ways adding more depth.

The side characters are refreshing too. The normies this time are the ones who come in last and are humbled and outdone. The Mom character is one of the most chill parents in Manga, her reaction to her son having a gf is very positive and after they spend time alone in his room, she even banters with her son about not scoring yet. What a cool mom.

Anyways its cliche to call things a breath of fresh air, but this Manga is full of fun and totally destroys and subverts some of the most overdone and tired cliches of manga and turns it all around.

First of all I wanna say that I have never read a "Yandere manga" before so this is my first time reading one. Initially I thought it had a pretty interesting premise, I mean everyone who's normal would be freaked out if they found out that there is a yandere that is overly obsessed with you and stalks you. But this was not the case with the protagonist of this manga, he rather sees it more of a "thrill" and even went to date her.

This manga is addictive, even with how strange it is it's very addictive. Every chapter just always have something exciting going ... on and I'm always very interested in what Kisaki is about to do. Funnily enough she wasn't even the most twisted character in the manga, it was rather the protagonist Haruka. I've seen a lot of edgy protagonists in animanga but I've never seen one this emo before, I don't want to go into spoilers but his intentions are very dark and edgy. Despite that his unpredictability is what makes this series super exciting.

So if you asked me whether this manga is worth reading or not my answer would be yes. Go for it, it is very strange and can sometimes come off as "corny" but it's weirdly addictive and very exciting!

Unrealized potential.

If I were to pick one phrase to describe this manga, that would be it.

My Girlfriend Gives me Goosebumps starts out with a strong hook - a horror-genre loving boy not only accepts his yandere stalker, but is actually quite pleased by the thrill of her stalking behaviour. At a base level not a completely unique idea, but unique enough that the initial setup and first few chapters really grabbed me.

Unfortunately, by just a few chapters in, things started to fall flat. With the main character being too okay with his girlfriend's yandere behaviour, and the author being unwilling to escalate it even further, ... the story lost a lot of steam. While the author tries to twist the plot into being about our main character being the one who was actually twisted, the transition between one and the other just feels disorienting and not well set-up.

This manga had the potential to easily be a 9 or 10/10 if told correctly. The general ideas were all there, but the bravery to execute it as it needed to be was not. The reason we see such low ratings isn't just an objective evaluation of the quality of the story, art, and so on, it's a reflection of the weight of feelings of disappointment the audience experienced seeing such wasted potential.

In closing, I'll give the mangaka just a little bit of leeway here - halfway through they mention in-manga that it will be going from weekly to bi-weekly. My guess is that the author did not have the story fully fleshed out before it was serialized and so was probably rushed and not able to give his best ideas. Maybe there were editorial pressures to censor some of the darker directions this could have gone and, left with no other choice the mangaka had to dramatically modify the story.

While this is purely speculation, I can't help but think real-world factors played a role in the sudden heel turn the tone of this manga took, and as we know, the pressures of the industry have resulted in many a great unfinished manga (Berserk, Nana, Hunter x Hunter to mention a few...) so maybe this is in part another casualty of the brutality of the industry, and the Japanese workplace in general.