Our Happy Time is not just a mediocre manga, it's plenty pretentious too. This pure cheese story starts off with some grim subject matter and continues to vomit more grim subject matter at you until you are beaten and bored. It's a cliche narrative about an inmate on death row who finds a reason to live again through love. With no exceptional visuals and no original characters, this manga reads like the pulpiest young adult fiction imaginable. There's no nuance, there's no subtlety, and the self-righteousness of the main character is suffocating.
If this manga was an attempt to argue against the death penalty it does so weakly. It presents an incredibly one-sided perspective about death row and it's cruelty and actually goes as far as to pardon murder. It paints the lead male out as a stoic hero, sadly brazen by life's overwhelming cruelty. Everyone feels bad for the handsome prisoner in this manga. No one understands him truly though, except our suicidal mary-sue whose mother used to beat her.
There's just so much extraneous schlock in this disgustingly cheap story of "redemption" and revitalization. Why was it packed with so much teen angst for a story about adults? This story deals with real issues dubiously and over saturates their significance. With rape, murder, suicide, crime and self-loathing all snowballed into one goofy mess I can't bear to give this lazily drawn shoujo drivel anything more than a poor to dreadful score.
Check back on this page often to see when it's getting it's LifeTime movie adaptation.
