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.
Sep 23, 2024
Murasakiiro no Qualia
(Manga)
add
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 ... |
