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Unfortunately, Akasaka Aka will continue to ruin all of his scripts through his insatiable desire to pretentiously try to elicit a reaction. Particularly in Oshi no Ko, you as a reader will waste your time trying over and over again to understand why Akasaka, as a writer, decided to take the plot in X or Y direction.

I'll tell you the simple answer: he just wants to be "controversial". He is at the reading stage of a fourteen year old child, still thinking that the quality of a story is measured by the amount of people it angers or grosses out. He wants to be provocative, ... to be "cool" by adding blood, assasinations, plot twists, sexual abuse, tragic backstories, and so on. Good writing is not in his list of concerns because he doesn't know what good writing is in the first place.

The very obvious and glaring problem with this manga is that it has no other purpose or goal other than working as a glorified travel brochure for Hokkaido. Every single thing —from the characters, to the romance, to the conflicts— is mediated by the necessity of, at some point, inserting a scene that goes like "look at how cool this tourist attraction is!". Initially, it's not much of an issue: you, as a critical reader might realize that the characters are as bland as a fictional water flavored ice cream; this is because none of the characters are written with the purpose of exploring a ... human mind, instead, they exist as tropes which serve the only goal of constructing the simplest of plots; an excuse, in other words. But that's OK, any manga reader has come across millions and trillions of unoriginal stories and boring conflicts (the love octagon, the family trauma, the search for purpose; we've seen everything).

The problem is that it gets egregious the closer it gets to the end (or well, to the now, as it's still being published). It doesn't even have so much of a story now; it's just the tourism pamphlet interpolated by panels of the main couple going "OMG I love her so much", "oh god, I'm so glad I am with you, Generic-kun!", "can't wait to see what the future will deliver for us", and more and more phrases with absolutely zero substance. Not even the story gets saved aesthetically; it feels like the artist just looked at an Uniqlo or Mujin catalogue, or perhaps the blandest of K-Dramas, and decided to base the whole artstyle over it. It has zero identity —no, actually, scratch that; it has the identity of a corporate advertisement. Because that's what this is. The only thing separating this from a TV ad from Nike where we see an athlete winning the race because of the shoe of the moment is that this one goes on from +100 chapters, somehow.

I give it a 3 only because it manages to not be offensive to the reader, which is the bare minimum.

It is impressive that a manga with such an interesting artstyle and such a high score on this site can end up feeling incredibly boring, inconsequential, superficial, and melodramatic. This manga encompasses many of the worst tropes that we usually see in romance Shoujo manga.

So, to summarize, this story goes around the life of several students at this upper-class academy and their romantic lives among them. It maintains a consistent light-hearted tone throughout each arc, usually consisting of a repeating formula: two characters meet each other, one falls in love while the other is hesitant, there is some petty conflict involved, they resolve the conflict, ... and then they kiss and are happy forever. It is pretty much the formula for generic happy romance stories; the kind someone would write when they don't have anything relevant to say.

Because of the fact that the author sticks to the same trope, most character interactions feel hollow; just streams of moeness aimed at the sensibilities of lonely otakus who don't get tired of drawn girls blushing for 50 chapters. The love chemistry is not fleshed out beyond a character blushing or having a excrutiatingly long backstory with her partner (say, being a childhood friend or an aunt); as a result, the personalities feel empty. But the even worse part might be the conflicts, which due to their pettiness can hardly come off as anything but ridiculous. A girl is mad because her crush didn't remember her from 10 YEARS AGO. Another one is mad because her crush (which is also her aunt, yikes) quit playing piano due to work WHEN DUH, THAT'S SOMETHING ADULTS DO.

Not a single one of the conflicts touches the personal; the gritty, the essential in a relationship. They are all like cheap fables; like children stories you tell to 11 year old kids who want to hear the "and they were happy ever after" part repeated over and over again ad nauseam. That, combined with the pretentious storytelling that tries to convey the complex romantic implications of, uh, realizing being good at everything doesn't give you a right to be an asshole —nothing is more annoying than a Mary Sue that is also self-centered like Kurosawa— with the most sappy and cheesy prose, makes this story a collection of boredom and mediocrity.