Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata: Koisuru Metronome

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Absolute masterpiece. A love letter for romcoms. A gift for all Utaha fans.

I put off reading this manga a long time ago, but I regret it. This made me love Utaha even more than before. I definitely maintain that she is the best heroine of all, the most gorgeous, the sexiest and the girl who should have won in the original route. But as Utaha fan, I'm satisfied with this ending. It was so perfect, it's everything I expected. Utaha was happy and I am too. I was glad to have read this beautiful story.

I hope one day this manga gets an anime adaptation from ... A-1 Pictures. If it happens, I couldn't be happier.

tl;dr: A spin off that has a great heroine and a solid plot centered around writing light novels, but drops the ball in terms of character and relationship development.

Koisuru Metronome is a manga spin off of Saekano which is a light novel series that also has an anime and manga adaptation as well as two other manga spin offs. Koisuru Metronome is heavily focused on the light novel author, Utaha. Unlike the Eriri spin off, Egoistic Lily, this one has a completely different story completely unrelated to the original story. The plot line has nothing to do with creating a doujin as the original story ... did. And none of the other heroines appear in this manga at all, though it is confirmed in passing that Utaha at least knows Eriri. As such, beyond some references here and there you won’t miss much by reading this even if you aren’t familiar with the original story. Though I would still recommend watching the anime for the original simply because it’s good.

This manga’s plot is centered around the protagonist, Tomoya, serving as Utaha’s editor. While they both are still high school students, school life doesn’t really matter at all. The focus is on Utaha’s writing, with flashbacks explaining how she came about writing her first work, Koisuru Metronome, and then walking through her working with Tomoya and the illustrator Mayu to write her next work, Pure Love Hectopascal. Similarly, to how the original story went into details on visual novels, doujins, and comiket, this spin off goes into details on the light novel writing and publishing process. This includes describing the writing process that Utaha personally has, but also going into detail on the general relationships that editors have with their writers as well as with the publishing company and how that can affect their writing. It also eventually goes on to describing how the anime adaptation process works, and how being a mixed media franchise can make things much more difficult for the author. It’s a very interesting look at the light novel process that gets somewhat into the nitty gritty, but is still pretty easy to follow.

Watching Utaha face various complications in her writing but pushing through is handled pretty well, While it doesn’t go into incredibly detail on the novels she’s writing, it provides enough detail to understand the gist of her thought process when writing and how it leads to where she chooses to take the story. It goes into enough detail that the problems are clear and concrete to the reader when she gets stuck and the reader can understand how she’s able to overcome them. Her relationship and investment in the novels are clear, and thus her managing to succeed is pretty satisfying.

The character aspect I felt was much more of a mixed bag. On the positive side, Utaha is still great. She was my favorite heroine in the original, and most everything that made me like her there is still here. She’s pretty witty and usually cool headed, but she gets jealous incredibly easily and is in general really prickly. Over the course of this manga, she becomes an even more fun character, especially when she has swirly eyes. Still, it didn’t really feel like she had much of a character arc. She grows as an author, but the way it was framed it didn’t really feel like character development. The same applies to both Tomoya and Mayu. They grow as editors and illustrators respectively, but it doesn’t really feel like that translated into character development. This is especially disappointing in the case of Tomoya as he has a pretty great character arc in the original.

The dynamics between the three is where I feel the manga was most noticeably weakest. The relationship development between Tomoya and Utaha wasn’t handled all that well. There’s basically no progress for the vast majority of the manga due to Tomoya shrugging off all of Utaha’s advances, only for it to be super rushed at the end. It has a solid enough ending, but it’s nowhere near as strong as the ending to the original. The relationship development between Tomoya and Mayu was even worse. It’s a love triangle that felt really half assed to the point of being unnecessary. It’s clear from the fact that this is an Utaha focused manga that Utaha is going to win, but if a love triangle was thrown in there should have been at least some effort put into making Mayu seem like a possibility that wouldn’t be terrible. As is, the emotional beats related to her just don’t land at all. And the last edge of the triangle, the relationship between Utaha and Mayu, was also really weak. One of the best dynamics in the original series was the bond between Utaha and the illustrator Eriri. They fought more than they didn’t, heavily in part due to both being in love with Tomoya, but they still became best friends. It was incredibly deep and well written. In comparison to that, the relationship between Utaha and Mayu just feels really shallow. The two relationships are somewhat similar, but the one in this manga is completely lacking in intensity. As such, it’s just kind of dull.

The art in this is pretty great. It’s much better than the art in the manga adaptation of the original, though I would say I still prefer the art in the anime. Also, as can be seen across pretty much all of their work, the artist really likes tights so Utaha is a perfect fit.

I wouldn't really consider this manga a romcom, it's way more focused on the inner workings of the light novel and anime industries, romance plays a comparatively minor role.

If I had to describe this manga in a sentence it's about a young light novel writer, Utaha, who is being worked to the bone and is having to deal with corporate greed meddling with her art (also she happens to have a one sided crush on her editor, Tomoya).

There are very few romantic developments and on top of that, as I've already mentioned, they're all extremely one sided. It's not because Tomoya's the dense type of ... MC who's completely oblivious, the opposite actually, he is aware of her feelings, he just chooses to ignore them for the sake of professionalism.

The only reciprocal expression of love in the entire manga is found in the last chapter and not only does it feel forced, it's very underwhelming as well.

I have been fairly critical so far but I don't believe this manga is all that bad, I simply feel the way I do because I was convinced it was a romcom so I expected romance.

However as a manga about the light novel industry it's pretty interesting, although a little shallow in terms of detail. Personally I would've preferred if the author went all in with the light novel industry theme and shed light on this world much more than they did.

So in conclusion, it's a decent-ish portrayal of the light novel industry with some very sparse romance seasoning. If you're looking for a manga that'll make your heart skip a beat this is not it, but if you are curious about how light novels are made and would enjoy a little bit of drama to go along with it then this for you.