First of all, to answer why is this manga so hated: the author mixed ecchi with dark shounen (I could call it a seinen, but let's be fair, it is not stretched that far). But don't let it stop you from reading it.
Usually ecchi audiences want the kink and light jokes and overall a non-serious vibe. Ecchi goes really well with slice of life anime, comedy, magical girls and all those frills.
On the side, seinen and dark shounen fans want the thrill, the fights and psychological warfare. The ecchi part of this anime can be very off-putting for these guys.
There is a small group of
...
people that can enjoy both. Looking at what the author has in his portfolio, I can tell he wanted to have a bit of fun with his usual skills, but the effort he put on some parts of the story is so much that it breaks my heart the he chose to add ecchi to it. Personally I skimmed those scenes to get to what it matters.
And I am no hypocrite, I do watch sometimes your casual weekend ecchi, but comedic one.
On to the story:
Battles: the battles are so good and well thought that I believe this is one of the best in class. The qwasers have the ability to control an element of the periodic table. Within the bounds of this rule, the author went to greatness and beyond. There are no two battles in the same way. The chars constantly learn new skills, constantly try new strategies, they combine powers. It is crazy how far they go. In the vast majority of shounen, the chars keep using the same 3-5 magical skills for hundreds of chapters/episodes with slight variations. The author re-done the whole chemistry and physics classes from school to create this manga. I think that a game adaptation of the battles (without the ecchi) would be insanely good.
Characters: Ok, here I do believe there could have been some improvements. It's obvious that the traditional shounen characters were added to the story. I think that making the age range more towards adults would have made the characters more believable. If Sasha was around 19 and Katja around 17, they would be more believable. They seem a bit too mature and their thought process is a bit too advanced for the experience that they could have had.
But! The author tried to do character growth for almost ALL the characters. That is insane. Looking at loved to death series such as Code Geass, where only some characters have growth, and even those that have, they reach a plateau sooner or later, or Death Note, where again, you can see the pattern of only some characters having character growth. Obviously some does not land that well because I believe the contract was to have the manga around 100 chapters so a lot of the story was condensed. The same trimming process cut the backstory of the characters far too short. Most of them needed more pages to make the story more coherent.
Story: I like that it did not go to the mindless ecchi side and also it did not slip into misery olympics shounen despite the tragic circumstances of the chars. It has a lot of plot twists, I tell you that. I found that delighting. I can tell that the author hoped for a long anime, but that, sadly did not happen. It really needed more chapters to add more motivation to why some things happen. Like why are qwasers adhering to Athos or Apostles, what's in for them? Currently they are fighting for the reason that they do in this manga, but it did not really give me an answer to "what do they do when nothing happens? (when there is no project going around)". It has a pleasing combination of sadness/joy/thrill/relaxed moments that made me be able to finish reading it. I watched the SnQ anime the same time I started reading D.Gray-man manga. I know the authors are different, but I did draw some parallels between them due to some common elements used. But DGM slipped into misery olypmpics and the latest part of it is so suffocating sad that I can barely read it without getting depressed. Also now that I know this author has some ties to Code Geass, I've seen some common things between the stories that I cannot unsee.
Anime adaptation: dear Lord, it done this manga NO JUSTICE. It done it dirty. It removed the edgyness and added more ecchi, more merch-y fillers, dumbed down characters. So sad. If the animators would have removed all the ecchi-ness altogether and rewrote the some transfer to some other things, fixed some plot holes here and there, people would lose their minds over the series like they done over Code Geass. You can't convince me otherwise, it had so much potential. But alas, it wasn't meant to be.
References: I see people upset over the fact that the Russian culture is not understood and misrepresented. Sorry, that's anime fantasy for you. The majority of authors pick and choose some cultural elements and run with them, doing some Disney-sification on them. Same goes for Christian Orthodoxy (I was born into it so I can see where it got right and were it did not). The expectations of the public was too high on this side. Maybe with a longer manga, the author could have expanded and better researched these two topics.
The chemistry research done for this is awesome. [spoiler] The Van Allen belts? Bro, I love you [/spoiler]
Overall, to enjoy this series you need to ignore the ecchi and put it in the old school shounen where it could have been.
Dec 13, 2023
Seikon no Qwaser
(Manga)
add
First of all, to answer why is this manga so hated: the author mixed ecchi with dark shounen (I could call it a seinen, but let's be fair, it is not stretched that far). But don't let it stop you from reading it.
Usually ecchi audiences want the kink and light jokes and overall a non-serious vibe. Ecchi goes really well with slice of life anime, comedy, magical girls and all those frills. On the side, seinen and dark shounen fans want the thrill, the fights and psychological warfare. The ecchi part of this anime can be very off-putting for these guys. There is a small group of ... |
