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Mar 23, 2025
Many BL series, especially less recent ones, have issues with being either fairly homophobic or having strong undertones of sexual assault, sometimes both, sprinkled with other common issues and tropes to the genre that can diminish the value and quality of the overall end product. Despite this, for a decent chunk of BL, some bad issues can be ignored if the overall story or message is still good, and if it manages to avoid the truly terrible tropes, then it can be an enjoyable experience still. More modern series also are beginning to straight up cast away past issues.
Love Stage, however, crashes headfirst into every
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single possible bad, negative stereotype it can, both within the genre and within homophobia itself as a whole, making it a truly miserable viewing experience.
The story starts out with a hook that honestly isn't terrible: The main characters were previously with each other for a bit as children, and one of them mistook the other for a girl and continued to have a crush on "her" for years. However, when they meet properly again years later, he realizes that, of course, he was wrong and he's been crushing on a boy for years. He immediately starts to think things like "well, it's fine even if he's a boy," and proceeds to sexually assault him in some weird fit of frustration about it.
If you think, hm, this may be an awfully intense and ridiculous response to that, you would be correct. And that at its core is the main problem with the show. The characters in this show are all essentially awful people, but you're not only not supposed to see them as awful people, you're supposed to root for them. Izumi, the boy that was mistaken for a girl, is a stereotypical trashy otaku type of character with little to no backbone and who repeatedly compares his being potentially with a man to being in a situation from a BL, which isn't wrong, but tonally makes even more dissonance with this trying to be a cutesy BL since it quickly establishes that he clearly doesn't find being gay to be "normal" to him. What I'm saying here is that he isn't exploring his sexuality in this series because it honestly doesn't seem like he's interested in men. He's being pushed into a relationship by Ryouma, who mistook him for a girl but essentially does the "a cat is fine too" meme at him when he realizes he's a guy (so in reality, he's not particularly interested in men either). Other less important characters are generally just annoying or weirdly mean for no real reason, such as Rei, Izumi's rich family's manager, basically just stomping on Izumi's dreams of becoming a manga artist and insulting him for even trying.
The sexual assault in the series is completely played off as 100% normal to do to another man. It is both incessant and completely unnecessary to the plot. Izumi even blames himself for it occurring to him at times. Miserably enough, Ryouma vaguely states as a random two second throwaway line that he was sexually harassed when he was younger due to his line of work...but clearly that didn't make him uncomfortable enough to stop trying to do it to someone else.
Outside of Ryouma and Izumi's weird, fairly messed up relationship, not much else is really learned about them. Sure, there are flashbacks shown on occasion, and you get the occasional vague glimpse of something, but in reality, there really isn't that much to the characters of any substance that isn't immediately relevant to their feelings and opinions towards each other, making it even harder to even attempt to empathize with them. Even Izumi's otaku background is simply used to put him in situations that push him with Ryouma more.
There's also just a completely unnecessary, irrelevant to the plot, insane scene where Izumi almost gets gangraped. This is again handwaved like absolutely nothing just happened. Just some weird cutaway scene to I guess further emphasize how he has zero interest in other men and only has a thing for Ryouma because he was effectively harassed into it.
This story is accompanied by very plain art and animation (the usual for BLs, low effort gag art with a lot of chibi and still frame abuse) and whatever sounds and music, making there essentially be nothing that makes this series stand out in any positive way. For 2014, it's certainly serviceable enough visually to not be repulsive to look at or anything, but does nothing beyond that.
Again, BL isn't known for having the most positive tropes associated with it to begin with. Love Stage somehow manages to compound them all and couple them with boring characters who honestly just suck as people and turn out as a totally unlikeable mess.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Mar 17, 2025
A short manga that doesn't know what it wants to be. Something that tries too hard to be funny on every page (almost always failing), throws in way too many references, and then tries to make a statement from the heart about enjoying the time you have with the people you love instead of losing yourself in sadness for those who have already passed.
If this sounds confusing and messy, it's because it is. Soul Spewing Wielder is a bizarre short story manga that just doesn't seem to have any idea what direction it wanted to head in or what it actually wanted to focus on.
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It tries to throw in a joke on almost every single page, if not multiple jokes, just tossing random stuff around in the hopes that something eventually sticks, but this ultimately makes almost all of the humor come off as "random XD" because there's little to no build-up and no jokes feel satisfying to have land. Coupled with characters that all kind of blend and mesh together and an incredibly simple and forgettable main character, this makes the manga somewhat of a frustrating read. There are also a painfully large number of references to other series, which makes it feel like the author was under the impression that the manga couldn't stand on its own bones without dragging in more popular series to use as gags.
This is all made worse by the manga trying to gain a serious plot around halfway through, which continues to be interrupted by the incessant need to make weird jokes, references and puns everywhere. There is simply no balance between what needs to be funny and what doesn't, and it's hard to take the serious moments seriously when they throw in dumb asides.
The art is also quite unremarkable, with all of the characters being very plain and derivative designs and personalities aside from the lead girl, who has her cute moments. If there is any small modicum of a reason to read this series, it's to experience her, but all other characters have nothing to make them stand out from the sea of other, better designs in other manga.
Overall, I can't say this is a manga that really would appeal to anyone. The story is too confused with itself on what it wants to do, and the art and characters are overall boring and unimpressive, leading to a series that has serious identity issues. Even as a short series, it's really just a waste of time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Mar 13, 2025
Red Hood is a manga that is essentially one giant mixed bag. Conceptually, it's not the most insanely unique idea out there, but that's okay if the presentation is good. And the presentation, aesthetically, is pretty good! Some of the character designs are quite standout and it's not hard to see why people would attach on to them immediately with a visually distinct style. The monsters are repulsive with a slightly cartoony/goofy flare to them, which suits them being based on fairy tales, and the overall setting feels drawn in a way to invoke typical fairy tale settings and bring things further together.
However, beyond aesthetics,
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this is where the series starts to fall apart. The first four chapters are spent meandering around in a village, which turns into being transported into another area, where the characters...proceed to meander around again. Except this time, there's a TON of characters. Like, frankly, way too many characters. It's impossible to keep up with all of them and the author tries to give too much background information on random characters in the group while we still don't really even know much of anything about the main character. None of the characters really feel like they matter at all, and most of them just passively exist, being more eye candy than anything.
Poor writing for the characters is made more obvious by how bad the exposition in general is. Pages are absolutely covered in speech bubbles, and a decent chunk of it is stuff that either can be shown rather than told, stuff that probably didn't need to be infodumped all at once, or stuff that is just straight-up not that interesting and doesn't really matter. This makes the pages look cluttered and ugly, and many of the panels just aren't consequential as a result. This tears into the otherwise interesting aesthetics of the series. The overwhelming amount of exposition also makes the pacing of the story even more janky.
Overall, this manga is just a lot of missed potential. Weak plot and characters, with a poor first few steps in the chapters, which unfortunately led to its demise. It could still be worth it to check out solely based on a character design or general art level, but it's unlikely to further engage most people.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Mar 6, 2025
I would first like to establish that I did not enjoy God Sider. Does that mean I think everyone won't enjoy God Sider? No. I think you need a specific kind of taste to appreciate God Sider.
Do you enjoy manga that's over the top with characters constantly pulling new attacks out of nowhere to stay alive for extensive periods of time? Do you enjoy a lot of blood and guts? Do you enjoy crazy character designs coupled with fantastic art? This may be a good pickup for you. The art is consistently very good and the action almost never stops. This makes for a manga
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that never really lets up on going full throttle and getting more and more absurd, so if you're into that, it can be quite the ride.
However, this manga does have problems, primarily with the story being weird fluff that exists mostly to just further the plot along for more battles (this can be a plus or a minus depending on the reader), the battles often feeling low stakes (primarily due to the stakes constantly being said to be so high that eventually it feels like the boy who cried wolf even while you're witnessing them being super high), and the characters being incredibly simplistic and hard to get interest in or even a feel for the personalities of the majority of them.
The manga is a very mixed bag where you're either going to love it or hate it, and if you prefer heavily character-driven stories (or even...story-driven stories), this is probably not going to be one for you, unfortunately. If you don't care about that and just want to see some good old fashioned violence, this has a decent chance to be up your alley.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Mar 4, 2025
This manga is created by the author of Yoakemono and unfortunately shares many of its flaws with it. In short, this is a manga that doesn't give enough screentime to any of its characters to really develop any particular emotions for them, but has outwardly nice art to look at and pretty solid character design.
The main protagonist could be interesting if everything lined up correctly, but we aren't given enough background information on him to care beyond very minor details. The character personalities are very weak, which was also a problem in Yoakemono. Outside of the protagonist, nobody has enough screentime to feel any emotion
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for them, and too many characters are introduced too quickly and then removed from the equation to really process them or be interested in them. Having interesting designs is great, but when the reader isn't really encouraged to care about the characters or get invested in them and their success, it becomes hard to care about what's happening to them.
The plot goes careening off a cliff extremely quickly. I read something from someone else-that it almost feels like the author got bored of their own plot or the editors interfered greatly, potentially an extremely early cancellation notice. And I think I agree with this sentiment. The whiplash from chapter 4 to 5 to 6...I genuinely have no idea what happened. Everything sped up 500% and it's extremely rough. Nothing really makes sense after that point, and while you can see what general story beats the manga would've hit if it wasn't axed, it's still downright brutal to read. It's overall not interesting to read and it's even worse when it feels like you hit the fast forward button so even during the big heroic moments everything feels...whatever?
The worst thing the manga does is just not capture any interest. I'll use the description I used to describe Yoakemono: "Oh. Okay. I guess this event is happening right now." Because that's how it feels. Things are just happening for whatever reason and you're supposed to care about them, but the plot isn't really able to get from point A to point B in a logical way. This is a big part of why everything feels whatever. Like, okay, this thing happened. Alright. Now this thing happened. This thing is currently happening, and you should probably feel an emotion about it.
Definitely a pass. Maybe look up the character designs, they're overall very appealing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Mar 2, 2025
This sure is one of the manga of all time. One what? Yeah, just one of them. It does nothing remarkable.
The strongest point of the manga is definitely its main character, which probably isn't great because he's pretty lacking. I was also disappointed that he started off with striking long hair and then almost immediately cut it for the typical "life changing in a different direction" moment. He looked more unique with the long hair.
The art oscillates between looking quite nice and being abysmal. I honestly greatly enjoy how the artist does faces a lot of the time, but they also frequently go wildly off-model,
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and their anatomy is all over the place. It's also extremely hard to follow the fight scenes, especially when the protagonist is using extending beads as his weapon that can make it even harder to see what's going on. It feels messy and I often felt confused about how we had gotten to the end result of a fight. It also felt like crucial panels were skipped sometimes. Character design also varies a great deal and none of them really feel like they belong in the same series.
Plot isn't anything special. I feel like there was good potential, but as early as the fourth chapter it becomes readily apparent that the creator isn't sure where to go with the series and is just kind of yanking it around all over the place. Characters just kind of exist. It weirdly feels like there's too few and too many at the same time, which I think is in part because once one is introduced, they just quickly shuffle on to the next one. The characters feel more like a checklist being ticked off of common shounen allies than they do like actual characters, with little reason to like or dislike them.
Obviously the series is vastly sped up due to getting axed, but we can still get an idea of what the story beats would've been like due to it rapidly closing up as many plot points as it could, and unfortunately it's just really, really generic and obvious. Generic honestly isn't a bad thing, but coupled with boring characters, random quality in art, and just not being all that exciting, it's not hard to see why it got axed so rapidly. Would not recommend, there's just nothing to see here that isn't done much better in other series.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Feb 22, 2025
This is one of those manga where you go "wow, this is a super creative idea" when you start to read it, because it is!
Unfortunately, it's also one of those manga where its super creative idea wasn't enough to keep it alive, and it ended up axed very early on.
Let's start with the good: The characters are, overall, very fun, have great designs, and have separate personalities that keep them distinct from each other in a way that still makes them mesh well together. The art is very nice and expressive (especially the characters themselves) and the backgrounds can get really impressive to
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look at. You can tell there's a lot put into the art and the male lead's design in particular. That might be my slight bias in sharp-toothed men speaking though! The story's main concept is also incredibly interesting, but that's also part of what I think was its downfall.
See, this is a story about both the past, and the future, among several theories about how timeflow works. It's hard and extensive to explain in text, which is a bit of a problem for a visual/text-based form of media, because it means that they have to overload speech bubbles with tons of dialogue and information to the point where sometimes it feels like the characters are just regurgitating information from Wikipedia pages. There are huge amounts of dialogue on almost every page, and it does sometimes feel overwhelming! Because of this, I kind of feel like the series may have done better as a novel rather than a manga. While I do think the art is visually very good and I really enjoy the character designs as well, I don't think the format of visual/text was used to its advantage fully, leaning too much on shoving a lot of words onto each page. Besides manga, I read a lot of books, but this just felt like a lot, as at some point it started to get frustrating to go to the next page and see another super long set of bubbles you have to go through...and then it's the same thing again for the next page. It breaks the immersion a bit and it's why I think this would've done better in a purely text-based format accompanied by the occasional piece of artwork instead, so it would feel less disjointed and flow more. There are also many, many terms used in this manga for the various items and abilities they're using that kind of mush up together a bit mentally and I think it would've flowed better to not introduce them all at once.
I also feel as though the female lead, Mirai, starts to get forgotten about for a while around halfway through the story, because for the start she's used primarily as an excuse for the male lead to exposit information towards her because she's (1) stupid (2) has no idea about most of the things going on. This leads to her early on feeling like mostly a vehicle to push the story forwards, and later on just existing. It felt like a bit of a waste of her character.
Since this manga got axed, it also starts rushing things towards the end, but it does manage to make...most of it...feel natural? And it's a shame to see all the honestly really good character designs with seemingly interesting personalities that ended up having to be pitched to the wayside because of the axe, not to mention several plot points just having to be dropped.
Still, I think this is an interesting manga overall, and the conclusion manages to still be satisfying if not a bit confusing. I'd say if you're down for something that's got a unique idea and you can handle a lot of text with a LOT of random terminology being thrown at you, it's worth a try. I'd say otherwise you're more likely to get frustrated by it overloading you with information.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 17, 2025
Bit of a weird one. I'm going to say not recommended because it got axed, but in reality this is an incredibly mediocre and inoffensive work that does nothing special, so I wouldn't say it's a miserable read, just one that made a lot of basic mistakes.
Which is kind of the problem. This is a very average shonen manga. In fact, it's extremely average. It's got essentially no standout ideas, which is fine, there are plenty of quite decent shonen that don't put anything crazy on the table. However, when you couple that with the characters being relatively boring, there being way too many of
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them introduced way too fast to get a proper feel for any of them, a few early chapters being dedicated to a sort of entrance exam (everyone's favorite trope...), and just an overall kind of lame, not particularly gripping start that makes the rest of the series not really go anywhere, you have a problem. And then it ends because it got axed.
I feel the main character is probably the biggest issue with the series, being that he's extremely bland and one note and we learn almost nothing about him. It feels like by the end of the manga we know more about his dead friend than we do him. He has almost no personal moments beyond a bit of bonding with another young boy (which is , again, more about that young boy than himself) and by the end all we know about him is that he's reckless and kind of stupid, which we know from the start. There are the inklings of a backstory here and there, but because this manga was cut short, nothing further.
The most solid thing about this manga is probably the character designs. They're pretty fun and some are visually quite pleasing, but again, too many are introduced too quickly to really be able to get to know or care about any of them. This problem is even there for the main character's best friend who dies in the first chapter; since we know so little about him it's hard to have any kind of impact when he dies and it just feels like "Oh. Okay. I guess this event is happening right now," which is how a lot of the plot feels. The art itself is kind of weak, it's definitely nothing amazing and I occasionally found it hard to follow battle sequences because they weren't conveyed well or in a way I thought was compelling.
The idea of characters having the ability to utilize the powers of animals is pretty neat, but they quickly turn it way too superhuman with things like the snow leopard just having the ability to...become unseen, which I am pretty sure snow leopards can't do in real life unless I'm about to be eaten by one, in which case I stand corrected. Despite this, they still try to explain away each power, which kind of annoys me. I'd prefer they lean all into it being unrealistic or lean more realistic, because this just feels wishy-washy. I do think the way the characters look when transformed is very cool and I kind of wish the story had been more of that like, all the time.
At the end of the day the manga just does nothing particularly unique and has pacing issues, too many characters thrown on the reader, and not enough characterization or creative use of powers to make it anything special or really, worthwhile at all. Very, very flat meh, nothing better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 9, 2025
Though my personal rating for this manga is very low, I'm giving it a mixed rating because in this instance I can see how someone else with a different sense of humor could enjoy this series. Here are my thoughts on why it's a mixed bag:
Gag humor manga is always a hard type to recommend or not recommend, because people don't laugh at all the same things. That being said, this series is particularly divisive with its humor and caused a huge drop-off in readership by chapter 2, which probably instantly spelled its demise. The theme is creative enough and could work, and is honestly
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a pretty strong concept to work with. However, its main weakness is that the female lead is (presumably intentionally) an extremely unlikeable and miserable person to be around for everyone that ever meets her, especially the male lead. Because of this, we as viewers have to see her misbehaving constantly and then receiving next to zero punishment for any of her actions. This is a pretty frustrating trope that I see people hate on quite often and I think is what turned the majority of the audience away aside from not vibing with the humor. If this trope doesn't bother you or you even like it, this could be a good choice to pick up. If it does bother you, then you're going to get burnt out from the manga very, very quickly.
The art itself is generally pretty solid if not a bit boring/nothing special, and I actually liked a pretty good amount of the (serious) character designs that weren't used for one-off gags. A few of them had me wishing the series was some other genre and hadn't exploded so fast! Unfortunately, most of the characters beyond the main duo are also pretty forgettable beyond their designs and don't have enough personality traits to be super notable. The main duo does have strong chemistry, though not always (or even often) positive, and I generally found the main character to be...fairly likeable? He has some lame moments. But a manga with only two functionally remotely interesting characters is pretty rough, since even romcoms aren't prone to going that far.
Obviously take into account the fact that this series got axed if you're considering giving this a go, because if you're looking for a satisfying story that gets smoothly wrapped up in a little bow at the end, you're not going to get it with how fast this ended. If you're okay with that, want to try out a gag manga with a very weird sense of humor, and have a little bit of time, it's worth a shot to see if your humor matches up with the series. I think this manga is a pretty good candidate for a three chapter test to see if you find it personally funny, and if you don't, just drop it and move on, because its sense of humor doesn't change at all throughout the series except to get more insane and rapidfire as each chapter goes on (likely because of the axe it got hit with).
Otherwise, if any of this review turned you off from it, I'd say just be on your hunt for something else.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Feb 6, 2025
Honestly, nothing this series did was anything another series didn't already do, but better and less annoying.
The basic premise of the manga isn't bad. People with the power to summon a specific type of sweet commit terrorism and only a select few aren't terrible people who try to ruin the lives of others. It's nothing special, but it could be great in the hands of a good writer.
So this may not surprise you considering I'm putting not recommended: It wasn't a good writer.
There are so many insane plotholes or just weird decisions in this manga. Okay, at the start it establishes that there are only
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100 sweets users because they only gave out 100 candies that gave people the sweets powers. This causes me so many questions right off the bat: How did they destroy such a large portion of Japan, and then like...why did everyone just collectively leave it? Nobody is going to try to fix what happened at all with the destruction? No? Okay. Why did so many of these sweets users immediately decide to be evil? Not even one of them went "Hmm I could help the homeless" or ANYTHING? No? I mean I guess that's not totally unrealistic, honestly...but almost all of them outright becoming criminals? How is there an entire army dedicated to capturing these 100 people-of which some of said 100 WORK FOR THE ARMY-and they can't capture them all? 100 isn't really that high of a number. A few of these questions are answered, most aren't. The ones that are answered are in such an unsatisfying way. The story also continues to have problems like this with almost every plot point that's brought up. (Also, I feel like "100 candies" is kind of way too similar to devil fruits from One Piece, but that may just be me) On top of this, the series has a pretty rough start where it fails to get into its groove for a while, and by the time it does it's clearly too late and it's already been set on its way to be axed.
Another early example of an issue: The main character says that there aren't supposed to be any doubles of a specific sweets user. For example, two different people can't use macarons. Basically within five pages she gives further information that means that that's untrue. So why even establish this as a rule when it's straight-up not the case? It just serves as a goofy vehicle to stop her from being able to use her sweets all the time, which she does anyway. Later, another character is addressed as using a specific *flavor* of a sweet. So you're telling me that of the 100 sweets users, at least two of them must've gotten the same sweet but in different flavors and somehow that's randomly okay? This whole thing is a mess.
The sweets powers are also just not explained very well. Looking at the main character, she uses lollipops. That's fine. She can also use them to do other things, like extending the lollipop stick, and these alternate things she can do are...not explained. There's no insight into why she can do this, why she knows automatically that she can do this, what the limits of the power are...there's a particularly egregious version of this for the ending, but I won't go into spoilers.
The characterization of the characters is pretty loosey goosey and not that interesting. A lot of them don't really have a solid personality beyond their single basic motivation (if they even have that), so they come off as very one-note and almost oddly gimmicky. A character even makes fun of another one at one point by saying that "your only attribute is that you're really serious" like the writer knows they've written slop and they just shrugged and went for it anyway.
Listen, making fun of your own faults can be funny, but when it's a serious flaw in your story and you just look at it and go "eh" and poke fun at it instead of fixing it, that's kind of bad. Of course, the joke was made when the series had already been put up to be axed, so at that point it doesn't matter, but that also doesn't absolve the issue that the characters are just poorly done and proves that the writer knew that they were and just didn't care.
These problems are furthered by the series trying to inject weird jokes into the story constantly, which always feels off-beat and done at at the wrong time. Most of the jokes do not land and feel awkward. Sometimes the awkward factor is done on purpose. Awkward humor, when intentionally done, can be pretty awesome, but in this case, it almost always feels forced and like the reader is being poked at like "Hey this is pretty funny right? Eh? Eh?"
I feel like the art quality also goes all over the place. The spreads are pretty nice, the combat is...okay, sometimes hard to follow, but man, the characters themselves. They are just not always cutting it. Especially the faces and facial structure, you can see them going all over the place in quality all throughout the manga. It's actually kind of funny how off-model they occasionally get, but that's not exactly a good thing since that's not really the thing I'm meant to be amused by.
It's a shame that this concept was wasted on this manga, because I feel like in the hands of someone else, it might've been able to shine. But as is, there's a pretty good reason this series got axed.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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