Orange

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I loved the simplicity of this complex story. The settings and characters were simple, and the laid-back nature of those made the time-traveling and sci-fi elements easier to digest. I love it when a story doesn't have to have some epic action or characters to get a meaningful message across.

I liked every character, and I felt that I understood each one of them without having anything be predictable. As someone who never really cries at media. . . I teared up at a few points. The small love triangle was really interesting. I appreciated that it wasn't at the forefront of the story, but ... gave some interesting context to the actions of the characters.

I would recommend reading the sequels "Orange: Future" and "Orange: To You, Dear One" as they give a lot more depth to the other characters. They aren't at all required reading, but they will provide a lot of detail that you wouldn't get otherwise.

I was told I'd cry when I read this book. I cry...all the time. I'm probably crying right now as I write this.

I felt very little when reading this. The character motivations were so thin. I didn't understand why I'd like or dislike anyone in particular. The two main characters are main characters because...they are. I didn't dislike it. I was just let down because of the high expectations.

I did really enjoy the epilogue thing? Volume 3? Whatever that was. That was good times.

I wouldn't say skip it - but maybe if you're into a heart wrenching fantasy teen romance, this isn't as strong ... as I was lead to believe. Just read it with a grain of salt.

Once upon a time, I watched the anime adaptation of Orange, and it was said by many that it was a poorly made work and how the manga was way superior. Knowing that the manga is pretty short, I decided to find out just how good the manga is.

It was worse. Worse than the anime.

The most criticized part about the anime version was how badly drawn the characters were, in which they often came as lazily drawn faces and became totally off-model, and what do you know...

The manga is the same!

I was like... "what!?", it was claimed that the manga had clean and ... beautiful art that the anime version was a shame compared to it. I really fail to see how this is true. By "clean", Orange manga has very "clean" (read: empty) art, where backgrounds are non-existent, character faces are also lazily drawn, and when there's drama, the art did little justice to portray those scenes.

Shoujo manga often has these... blings blings and flowers around, and honestly I do not mind them, since they did well bringing the context out to the reader, most notably how the female lead realizes that she's in love with the main guy, badum badum oh how her heart flutters every time she sees her prince charming. These "accessories" are really handy to have, despite how cliché and often they are used.

You don't see any of these in the Orange manga, which is supposed to fall in the exact same category as its shoujo romance sisters. When our main girl sees the main dude, at most we see her blushing, and that's it. Empty.

Enough with the art, another major factor to make a successful romance drama is to have great characters, which the reader can connect or sympathize with, so that we would root for them, and cheer when they finally got together.

But in Orange? Everyone's a cardboard.

Everyone can be summarized in just one sentence. Naho is too dumb to do anything on her own, Kakeru is too blind to know how much his friends cared for him, Suwa is way unrealistically kind, and the other three are pretty much irrelevant for most part of the plot. I really fail to push myself to root for the main couple, and when they finally be together, I was like "yeah, okay". Their romance is totally hollow, I fail to feel why those two like each other, and why they should be together in the end, I really can't.

For the story, the time travel thing failed to make any real sense and I just treated it as a plot device in order to make the story exist. Sure it is interesting to see how a letter from the future could instruct their past selves to correct the mistakes. In some parts, okay they fixed it, it's all good. However, for most parts, it's a hair-pulling affair where it becomes increasingly frustrating to see how idiotic the characters could act. As an example, the irrelevant 3 knows main girl is dumb, yet still they left her alone to deal with emo main dude and ultimate screws everything up and dragged the story unnecessarily longer and took it to a painstaking direction. They should've known better that this very same mistake happened before in the past, yet they repeated it, goddammit.

By the time we reached the ending, which is unfortunately, a pretty standard happy one, there is literally nothing to be rejoiced about, nothing to be cheery about, really, what is the point about all this?

When the art of the manga isn't that good, all you could hope is to have a good plot and good characters to make it up, but Orange ended up as a great disappointment, especially the manga.

At least the anime had decent backgrounds, voice acting and OST.