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Nov 24, 2023
Well this was awful. There's something there in the idea but it's one of those annoying works that spends most of its time lamp shading tropes and acting like it's above them while not really trying on any other front besides the art. You'll constantly see people talking like freshman college media essays in the story. Very awkward talks of "Ah your role is a knight and I am a demon king and this is how the story goes. It is our inescapable fate fate fate." Blah blah blah.
It tries to do the throwing you into a world and you find out the things, but
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it never really establishes a normal. Fights just kinda happen as people do stuff. Fights are less things that reveal character or have effort put into them as much as flashy "this person got chopped or other person got chopped in reverse uno." The world itself is just robo norse world with very awkward fan service added in that doesn't fit the tone. I don't mind fan service but maybe don't shove in an awkward ass shot while someone's giving exposition. Maybe don't make ten author notes about how people should feel sorry for you and how you spend more time trying to creep on schoolgirls than writing the manhwa. Honestly the author notes took off a full point from how intrusively bleh they were.
In the end it's at least trying something different from a lot of more common manhwa but that's not enough for me to score highly.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jan 21, 2023
This is a special series. It's the quintessential teenage manga, written by a mangaka with an innate belief in the world and the people around him. There is no pretension here, the mangaka regularly chiming in to talk about his own experiences, the fighting breakdowns having the same feel as advice from a close friend who just genuinely wants you to be safe and happy. It's himbo fight club, all the characters wanting to genuinely improve themselves and find the things they can't put into words. It's earnest, it's simple, it's stupid. And I do mean that, it is very stupid at times, but that's
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part of the charm. It keeps everything grounded and fairly small, the entire series a constant through line of the main character's journey of self discovery. There are parts where the title is said as a revelation, and they land. There are parts where you can feel the author maneuvering things, and they land. This manga is much like the protagonist, here to clobber you with his earnestness till it becomes a favorite.
I've never read something that is simultaneously a 5/10 and a 10/10. You just find yourself rooting for the mangaka to keep going. It's near impossible to hate this manga even with all its flaws visible because it's honest about them. All I can say is if you're looking for earnestness and positivity, take a trip to the Holyland. For surely, Yuu is waiting there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jan 1, 2023
This is a teenage manga, sort of like The Outsiders where it's all emotions and melodrama and angst. But if you get to it beyond the point where it can be carried by nostalgia or the novelty of it being your first dive into seinen, what you get is one of the most poorly written, logically devoid messes of a story I've ever read.
If you know anything about prison corruption your suspension of disbelief will shatter before the chapters hit double digits. It has a corrupt guard and doctor who regularly abuse the prisoners. In comes An-Chan, the kind of vague badass misunderstood soul who
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is definitely not a stand in for the author on how badass he'd be in prison. He's in prison because his dad committed suicide. No not some kind of misunderstanding where people got the wrong idea or even anything like him protecting his mom from his drunk father after coming back from the war broken. He yells at him one day, says that after he went back home his dad jumped in a river while he was doing stuff and now he's in prison. I swore I had to have misread something because that makes no fucking sense, but even the people that recommended this to me said that's why he was there and why else would the prison guards know about that personal info? Oh yeah this is a big source of tension between An and the other members of the rainbow block. Sure they're in prison and two of them are there for ATTEMPTED MURDER, but they can't believe their new best buddy in the reformatory could actually do crime I guess.
See, An-chan has a problem, the corrupt guard and pedophile doctor need him to die. At first the author implies it's cause he talked back to the guard, which I guess makes this the world's most polite prison ever since it's the most banal kind of threat that most prisoners yell out. At some point the author realized that this was incredibly stupid and had to add more to it. See, our totally not an author self insert badass has proof that the guard and the doctor are terrible! It's something so damning it'd destroy them instantly, so worrying that they must kill him before his term is up and he can show it to someone! It's... a note from an inmate who killed himself that says they're very very mean and that's why he's committing suicide. Damn if only all those people suffering abuse in prison knew they just needed to write a strongly worded letter to end institutional corruption what idiots! Good thing none of his friends are in prison for fraud and could be one of a hundred ways to get a flimsy note thrown out in court or something.
What follows is possibly the stupidest plot to kill someone I've ever seen. See, in the real world when a place is as corrupt as this one, there's a hundred ways to kill a prisoner. Claim they were escaping and you had to shoot. Start a fight in the mess hall and strangle them "accidentally." For some reason the guard and the doctor decide they can't kill him directly. They have to find the most ineffective, indirect death imaginable, finding an excuse to get him into an isolation cell. Mind you he punched the guard a few chapters back during a fire, which in the real world is usually how corrupt guards justify beating someone to death, but this isn't the real world. This is writer's bullshit plot world where anything and everything is bluntly moved to create "drama". See, the way they plan to kill him is so stupid, ineffective and unbelievable that you truly have to see it to believe it. The plan is to overwater him like a houseplant. No I don't mean to drown him. No I don't mean waterboarding. No I don't mean proper water torture. They put a small rubber hose into his room, put the drip feed on medium low and a puddle that looks about a half inch deep will kill him from exposure somehow even though he's in a room in what seems to be summer or early fall at the latest. Also for some reason he's flopped facedown in the avoidable puddle so the artist can try to sell us on the danger. Might as well just leave him out in a rainstorm and say the plan is to have him drown as his stupid mouth hangs open towards the sky for how believable this crap is.
I could go on. I read about 100 chapters into the series, hoping things would change. There is no character consistency. Every situation is either the most extreme way it could go or incredibly boring. Oh you want to be a singer and someone fucked up? What if I broke this thermometer in your throat? Your friend is nicely suggesting "hey you lied to me and stole some money, but it's fine I just want you to give a bit more thought about what you're doing here." Well of course you should yell at them about how their parents died in the nuclear bombings right off the bat. You can feel the hand of the author in everything, every forced argument, every sudden turn in fortune. One of the main seven boys dies in a way so contrived they might as well have just drawn the author descending from the heavens to shoot him dead. Then again the narration style can best be described as Jeb Bushian in the way the author sometimes pops in to remind you "not to laugh at how sappy this is" or to think about "how hard this must be for them."
In the end it's just dumb. Any villain is just a boring asshole who makes ugly faces and wants to be a dick with little to no motivation. It wants to talk about serious themes and deal with uncomfortable topics, but all it can do is cartoonishly portray them while beating you over the head incessantly with how tough life is. I couldn't reach the end of the Rainbow, but knowing this series, I'd probably just be greeted with a cauldron of shit at the end.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Dec 1, 2022
Vagabond is a strange case. It's hard to suggest a manga when I think the first third is mostly average despite the beautiful art. It sounds like a big commitment to say the first 90 chapters have little going on, but it's a fast read at the start, and I would almost recommend for some people to skip to 128 where it changes gears completely. But I got what I wanted out of the last third, one of those amazing philosophical deep dives into why someone is the way they are, though despite what most say, I really do think the start feels very superfluous.
It's
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hard to properly rate something that takes this long to deliver, and I say this as a fan of slow burns. I honestly think the start needed to be slower weirdly enough. It has the story of a monthly but a weekly page count, making it so that the overall plot for the start feels glacial but the moment to moment goes by very fast, leaving it in a halfway state. It's too slow for the plot to engage and too fast for the moments to grab you. It's all very beautiful but I need a lot more than just excellent art to grab me. Thankfully the series got there for me, but not because of the start. It takes the author doing something completely different for a stretch for everything to finally click into place. Finally the pace feels right, the chapters feel substantial. I've heard a few people say that's the point but there's a difference between intention and quality.
At the very least it was never terrible. Compared to other series I haven't enjoyed, I breezed through the start quickly, feeling almost nothing, but it never was a chore. If you're not feeling it, skip to chapter 128 and see how you feel. That is how far in it took for me to feel it "got good" and I was definitely rewarded for it. It's a work that is full of insight on refining yourself, understanding the world, what it means to lie to yourself and lose your way. Much like the journey of the characters inside, even if it was aimless for far too long, the story finds itself just in the nick of time. Now please Inoue... give us more REAL!
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 29, 2022
I'm so utterly confused by all the praise. This is Twin Peaks with the editing of Moulin Rouge all packed together in a mystery without mystery. There's barely any investigation, just go to a place, get exposition and there's the answer to the mystery.
I keep seeing people calling this protagonist smart and capable when it takes him THREE EPISODES to notice that one of his eyes is a different color. None of his friends notice, his adoptive family just accepts it and you think it's just heterochromia until he suddenly goes "Wait did I always have a blue eye?" The only people that notice
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something as obvious as this are him and the main villain and if you think that's the worst of the inconsistencies you are in for a ride.
The script is full of inconsistencies. You have what feels like Dale Cooper as big titty anime girl drained of personality for some reason talking about the strange local delicacies and culture to her recorder. A few episodes later you find out she and her other personality grew up there. Characters have no consistency. They will be as dumb or as smart as the plot needs them to be. The main villains literally win at one point, murder everyone but the mc cause of his power and an ally who can conveniently be there to restart the loop.
In the most recent episode, the main villains who have a tracking device on the mc and just need to kill him quick to win for some reason take an hour to just go at him in the dumbest way possible. People keep talking up the mind game aspect when the villains just do a charge with all their followers at him in an open field, then go into a trap that they know is a trap cause they just assume no one can hurt them. And then they get hit with all of it. The protagonists have basically won here, but then the main god antagonist who has been shown multiple times to just be awful to the main cast gives a quick 'don't' and that's enough to make the mc's stop killing her long enough to escape and drag out the episode count even longer as the mc gets shot by the villains. And somehow the mc despite being guarded by his manic pixie childhood friend girl to her surprise reveals he made a bulletproof vest in like ten minutes off screen somehow. Not borrowed from the useless cop side character, he made it off of google with no one noticing on his side so we have a dramatic beat.
And oh god the fan service. I like fan service. But it needs to fit. Every episode it tries to keep a serious tone while having stupid pointless fan service that keeps getting clipped back to at least once almost every episode. It reuses the same face slam into titties and little sister panty shot throughout during scenes that are trying to be serious. Hey is it true you tried to kill me? Here's a panty shot of when I fell into the water while we discuss this.
Annoyingly I love doppelgänger horror. There's so much fun you can do with it from Body Snatchers to Lake Mungo. But this does nothing. It constantly overcomplicates simple concepts to sound smart. Oh hey the mc needs to live x amount of time for the universe to make a new save point or else he'll probably die forever. Sounds simple right? Get ready for a four minute scene making this sound like a quantum physics problem. Also I can't state how many times it goes "We are perfect copies of a person." while the clone acts like a dead stupid husk of a person.
Alright I went on long enough. I don't want to be mean to the fans of this, I just do not understand at all what people are seeing in it besides it looking nice and some of the girls being pretty. All the mysteries get dumped out early on, the tension is constantly undercut with bad writing and it has the mental effort of two people sitting at a chess board and trying to beat the other to death with the board. Fuck this show 1/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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