Murasakiiro no Qualia (Qualia the Purple)

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Japanese: 紫色のクオリア

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Type: Manga

Volumes: 3

Chapters: 21

Status: Finished

Published: Jan 27, 2011 to Aug 27, 2013

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Demographic: Shounen

Serialization: Dengeki Daioh

Authors: Ueo, Hisamitsu (Story), Tsunashima, Shirou (Art)

Statistics

Score: 7.82¹ (scored by 4,031 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #1245²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #1720

Members: 12,458

Favorites: 342

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7.82

Ranked #1245Popularity #1720Members 12,458

MangaDengeki DaiohUeo, Hisamitsu (Story), Tsunashima, Shirou (Art)

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Volumes: /3

Chapters: /21

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Synopsis

Despite her harmless exterior, Yukari Marii, hides a deep, dark secret: her pretty purple eyes see all living beings as robots. Initially considering it to be nothing more than a quirky eccentricism, her friend Manabu "Gaku" Hatou soon realizes there's more truth to Yukari's words than she first thought. Despite her weirdness, Yukari's diminutive cuteness instills in Hatou a deep desire to protect her. In contrast, Yukari considers Hatou a "super-modifiable all-purpose robot."

Yet, Yukari's starkly unique view on the world has made her a lonely person, even causing her old friend Nanami Tenjou to act cruelly towards her. After an incident, Hatou finds out that Yukari is not the only one with a unique sight, termed a "Qualia." When Yukari is recruited into an institution for children with Qualia, Hatou is soon plunged into a conspiracy she must claw her way out of.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Murasakiiro no Qualia was published in English as Qualia the Purple by Seven Seas Entertainment as a 3-in-1 omnibus volume on June 13, 2023.

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Characters

Hatou, Manabu

Main

Marii, Yukari

Main

Foyle, Alice

Supporting

Tenjou, Nanami

Supporting

Reviews

Jun 14, 2019

Fall

Recommended

The only reason I read this was because it was recommended for fans of HakoMari, which I suppose I was at the time. My love for HakoMari has failed to hold up against the sands of time, but I still have a soft spot for Qualia the Purple. Not necessarily because the story is any good, or that the characters are close to my heart. I think you could enjoy this story just as much if you read it in that "so bad it's good movie" sort of way, but that's not what I'm talking about either. I guess, for me, this manga is more ... than the sum of its parts. It's got some interesting things to say, but even the author themselves says at the end, "I just drew this manga because I read up on quantum physics lol."

I guess this manga was my first real introduction to quantum physics, and I kind of understand how it works now, but given that this is a manga, I'm sure some of it's just pure bullshit. But that's the beauty of a well-written sci-fi manga: you can't tell if it's pure bullshit or not!

Or maybe I'm just an idiot. That's possible too.

So anyway, this manga does a drive-by on some interesting themes like abnormalities, time looping, individuality, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm a fan of that approach, but I'm sure to others it just feels like the author got a bit over-excited reading through wikipedia pages one afternoon and just decided to throw a bunch of shit together. There is, at least, a through line for the entire story. There's a point. It's not just a mish-mash of weird ideas (although, yeah, that's what it is), and I really have to commend what a good job the author did with characterising and developing the main character. I like it when the protagonist isn't a pussy, but they're also not a Mary Sue either. In fact, you could say that our protagonist is the most normal abnormal character in the story, which is what makes her so easy to empathise with, and so easy to cross the line along with her.

The art's also pretty okay, but there's nothing exceptional here. Character designs are probably the best part, but not to the point of being particularly memorable. Oh, but there are some neat visual metaphors toward the end that I really enjoyed.

By the way, this manga is actually adapted from a novel, and it's pretty easy to tell. Because this story should probably be a lot longer - although maybe it was like that in the novel, too. It sets up a lot of stuff in the beginning, but it never delves into it, and we only get a single answer to the many, many questions this novel poses. And yeah, I guess there's an ending, but it doesn't really feel like one. I don't necessarily have a problem with the way the author ended it, but I do have a problem with them not continuing the story from there. I can appreciate that they wanted to end it before it bored everyone's socks off, but maybe plan your story a bit better...

Both times I read this manga, I got the feeling that I was watching some serial show where the writers would keep introducing newer, cooler stuff on top of the other cool stuff without properly exploring the stuff before, and by the time they got to the last arc, they'd be out of time! So much of this story feels empty; like it's missing a bunch of characters and it's only including the footnotes. The entire setting from the first volume is completely thrown away, which I get is actually an intentional nod to the MC's mindset, but it feels wasted. Oh yeah, and the technobabble is interesting and all, but man was I starting to fall asleep two thirds of the way in.

If I were to rewrite this story, I would make it twice as long with half of the explanations and more cool character moments. Because that's what I love about the series: the way characters interact with each other. The cast of characters is not particularly enthralling from the get-go, but damn can the author write character drama well. The art helps a lot here in conveying the expressions of characters. The story goes to some dark places sometimes, but not to a gratuitous extent. There's always a point to the MC's actions (and the actions of those around her), and it's made clear by the end. Well, most of them.

Oh, and I suppose I should mention the "big bads" in the story, who are kept hilariously vague throughout with similarly vague and hilarious motivations for why they do what they do. They're good enough. They're just there for our MC to fight against. I honestly don't remember what they're called, so I'll just label them "The Syndicate" and move on.

I must say, unquestionably, the best aspect of Qualia is the main character. Not just because of her personality, but because of how the manga goes to great lengths to show the depths of her mind and develops her to such a point that she is constructed, deconstructed, and then re-constructed. Yeah, by the last third I was starting to get pretty bored and annoyed by the shounen-esque levels of escalation, but that last chapter made it all worth it for me. Even if I feel like it's not a proper ending. Her arc ends in such a satisfying way that it makes the entire journey worth it. That is, of course, not to say there weren't some great moments in the middle of the series too. The beginning, though, is lacking. Primarily because they don't come back to it in any meaningful way.

So yeah, I like the series, and I don't think the story is all that great or the characters are especially great or anything, but I just love how the writer used them. And when you cut through all of the psychobabble, at the heart of Qualia is a really simple theme and moral that, even though it has been presented numerous times throughout countless stories, has never been so heartrendingly poignant than here, with as many nuances.

I realise that sounds pretty vague and pretentious - probably even if you have read the manga - but I can't expand on my feelings without spoiling it. So I won't.

If you're a long-time contributor to Wikipedia (or just like reading a lot of words and feeling like you're learning stuff), you'll probably like Murasakiiro no Qualia.

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Mar 22, 2016

tomateunmate

Recommended

This review contains some spoilers since you can't explain why this manga is good without falling there. I don't think that general ideas can really spoil the levels this manga reaches but if you want them to hit at full force I'd recommend that you read it and stick to it until you get how distant the start and the end are.

The main issue is that it can be divided in two very distinct parts, and even if both of them are strong the turn it takes really hurts both. The first part is a nice classroom sort-of-yuri comedy/drama. A regular girl falls in friendship ... with the weirdo who sees people as robots (not in an utilitarian sense, completely literal to the booster pack and exchangeable parts). People stand in their way, problems arise, some drama, they build gunpla and eventually manage to become dear friends and even connect with other people.

The second half, though, is full blown sci-fi of the best kind. A small element is incorporated in a regular setting and it's slowly expanded until the point it breaks the universe. The escalation this second half has is incredible and it deserves to be seen just for how far it goes. I didn't exaggerate when I said it breaks the universe. It's an author exploring a premise to every possible degree, something that you can see many others completely failing to do while getting praised just for the initial concept.

The problem is that both parts don't really need the other. When I finished it I checked a couple of one-shot stories set in the initial part and I had already forgotten that this had been a happy school days gag manga. It took me to write this review to remember the drama from the past that closes that part of the story. I could only remember the last chapters, and when I first saw a recommendation for this was through a page of nearly the end. It was basically luck that I had forgotten why I was reading it and stuck for the girls in highschool beginning. I assume this comes from the original LNs and I really like the idea of the author first making a funny high school story just to hit the readers with a completely different sequel. But when you read the manga you don't have that clear distinction.

The art isn't too good although the gunpla look great and in the second part it's up to par to make the reader understand the story. Over all it feels like a subpar mangaka adapting a cult classic.

In many elements it resembles Madoka, it surprised me that the LN had come a year before that anime. They were probably responding to a cultural desire of almost-yuri + expansive concepts that affects the universe. Just like you have half a dozen Harry Potters in the couple of years before and after the book came out. In any case, I'd say that if you enjoyed Madoka you'll probably like this too.

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Sep 25, 2024

Calcar

Not Recommended

I gave Qualia the Purple 1.5/10 score. I try not to underrate or overrate anime and manga that I give a rating to, so after assigning a score this low I feel like I should write out my problems with this work if not for anyone else but for myself.

The author engages in a very poor writing technique that I don't even have a name for, by injecting in manga already existing scientific/philosophical theories/concepts, usually through one character explaining it to the other. It happens multiple times and what to me feels very cheap is that it reads very formal, almost like it would be ... written in a textbook. It's fine to have maybe one important to the story concept explained like that but not several, especially in a manga that is not very long. It can be totally fine if the aim is to write for children or students and to help them memorize the information better, however I don't believe this was the writer's intention. Not sure what the exact goal of including such verbose and detailed explanations in the manga is. It could've been done to substitute the plot or it might've been the result of the author genuinely not being good at writing. By the time manga throws in the third concept it reads like something from an essay of a student who was desperate to meet word count requirement.
So what could've been done to avoid long-winded theory explanations? There are probably more ways to do it but here are two very common ones. The better approach is to just show the theory in practice perhaps with some explanation that is kept to a minimum. Or a little easier way for the writer is to rely on reader's legacy knowledge or curiosity instead and maybe include brief reference(s) to a particular concept; it might make the plot more challenging for the reader to comprehend, but the story would feel more original.

Well okay, but were those scientific/philosophical theories/concepts explanations necessary for better story understanding? In my opinion not really. A couple of them (Fermat's principle and Philosophical zombie) shown in an applied example I think could be understood by the broad public just fine, or at the very least explanations of these concepts could be severely shortened. The other one (Schrödinger's cat/Wave function collapse) was given a general explanation of and is kind of the main theory the manga is centered around. However the way the author incorporated personal interpretations of said theory in the story was definitely not justified and basically allowed the writer to stretch the internal logical consistency of this manga's world to any lengths necessary to make the plot more "fun-to-read"? More "interesting"? Quirky? In my opinion if you want to do something exceptional like this you have to explain how you arrived at such conclusions using the framework that was set earlier (mentioned scientific theory), otherwise it just feels like a cheap excuse to advance the plot in almost any way that seems enticing with very little thought given to the sustainment of internal consistency.

So what about the rest of the writing? To do a proper, fair analysis of the story you'd have to go through the entire work from start to finish, however since I'd like my review to have minimum to no spoilers I'm just going to share my opinions without much elaboration, though I do believe I'd be able to substantiate them at least to some degree.
As I already mentioned somewhere around halfway through the plot the author sets such in-manga universe rules that allow to even retroactively justify a lot of silly and ridiculous events that happen throughout the story, in my opinion it was done very lazily for the sake of convenient plot progression. But this mostly has to do with the sci-fi part of the manga.
What about the slice-of-life/comedy/drama parts?
Four characters that seem to be present in the story more than the others have very common personalities for anime/manga and their interactions with each other are quite predictable for their archetypes.
Character that had the most development (even though still very limited) was the protagonist. At some point she acquires significant amount of knowledge however still keeps making pretty questionable decisions.
This is more of a subjective topic as different people can interpret messages and ideas differently, but in my opinion thematically the work is very plain. It didn't seem that the author had any particular interesting convictions, ideas or concepts to share through it.
There are instances of characters, mainly the protagonist, engaging in somewhat morally wrong or ambiguous actions, however they feel to be in place mostly for the shock value, ethics were barely explored if it all.

There are also a few problems in the manga that affected my score to a very small degree, however I still decided to point them out.
Sometimes the text feels overpowering in terms of driving the story forward, a lot of drawings feel rather supplementary, barely needed.
A lot of panels, especially in slice-of-life parts of the manga, feel very anime-cliche, trying very hard to represent a frequent animation trope or facial expression, body movement commonly used in anime. Almost like the manga artist was trying to lay the groundwork for potential future animators.
The art style is very run-of-the-mill, I personally didn't find anything that would make me be able to distinguish this mangaka's style from some other people's works.

So, in conclusion, this manga gives an impression of a highly derivative and low-effort work. There's almost nothing you can't find in other similar works. However what makes it so much worse than the average is that it isn't even technically well-written. Internal consistency holes that become internal consistency voids and unwarranted long-winded scientific/philosophical theory explanations that the author didn't put enough effort to incorporate in the story decently left me with little to no appreciation for this work.

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Poll: Murasakiiro no Qualia Chapter 18 Discussion Stark700 - Mar 8, 2015	18 replies	by razisgosu »» May 19, 2024 12:26 AM
Poll: Murasakiiro no Qualia Chapter 9 Discussion Stark700 - Jun 29, 2013	2 replies	by JB-94 »» Aug 18, 2023 12:40 PM
Poll: Murasakiiro no Qualia Chapter 7 Discussion Stark700 - Jun 17, 2013	2 replies	by JB-94 »» Aug 18, 2023 8:31 AM
Poll: Murasakiiro no Qualia Chapter 4 Discussion Stark700 - Jun 4, 2013	3 replies	by JB-94 »» Aug 17, 2023 6:46 AM
Poll: Murasakiiro no Qualia Chapter 11 Discussion Stark700 - Jun 30, 2013	7 replies	by potatoturboswag »» Dec 17, 2020 2:51 AM

Murasakiiro no Qualia
Qualia the Purple
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Qualia the Purple
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