Yuujin Character wa Taihen desu ka?
Is It Tough Being "A Friend"?

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This manga really started off promising but fell off recently and I don't know if it can recover.

Quick Summary (WARNING Spoilers ahead): The main protagonist, Ichirou Kobayashi, of this manga has a inkling to become the best "side character" of a protagonist after playing a side character in a play when he was a kid. So naturally he spends his life trying to find just the right story beats and find his so-called perfect "protagonist" to follow. Which eventually he does in a man named Ryuuga. As Ichirou Kobayashi is trying to weave his own version of a story we get see many tropes played ... on - quite hilarious at times too. Including the classic trope of the so-called protagonist Ryuuga with his harem of girls fighting against evil that no-one else is supposed to know about. However things get mixed up when one-day Ichirou Kobayashi find out that his "protagonist" Ryuuga isn't a he, but instead is a she. And she has been hiding as a female this whole time, trying not to show her deep feeling for our main protagonist, Ichirou Kobayashi. This utterly crumbles Ichirou Kobayashi's plans and he really doesn't know what to do. He planned to simply be a bystander character in this story, not the main love interest. He wanders around trying to figure out what to do in life and accidentally stumbles on the harem girls and accidentally starts setting up red flags with all of them one by one. This causes Ichirou Kobayashi to accidentally fall into becoming the actual main protagonist. All of this being quite hilarious. Then some other events happen and then the manga just takes a nose-dive in quality for me.

Now, where this manga started to fall flat for me was when the Demon of Greed was shown to be living in Ichirou Kobayashi as a sort of doppelganger. This character really just dragged the whole story down for me. Especially since this greed demon loves the once thought to be a male Ryuuga, and actively goes around pretending to be Ichirou Kobayashi trying to seduce Ryuuga. All the meanwhile Ichirou Kobayashi really doesn't seem to care too much? He really just kinda lets things happen at this point. All his drive as a character is gone and feels like this story just started going a complete different direction, that includes Ichirou Kobayashi allowing essentially a look-alike to cheat on his pretend girlfriend Ryuuga.

I just don't know where this story is going anymore. Unless the demon of greed is killed or just removed from this manga in the next few chapters I might just drop this one, cause it went from being pretty good to bad really quick. I really don't know this can recover at this point.

Yuujin Character wa Taihen desu ka joins the small but growing troupe of self-aware, irreverent Shonen parody comedies, and the very star of this irreverent story is the ever aware main character, Kobayashi Ichirou. In his absurd desire to be a 'mob', and 'side' character, he associates himself with the person he sees as the most 'protagonist-like', Ryuuga - who as it turns out is an actual bonafide superhuman, fighting a bunch of antagonists who are hell-bent on ending the world for some reason. But, much to Ichirou's chagrin, he is unfortunately not the 'mob' character he so seeks to be, but has in fact, ... a deeper significance in this 'story'.

Needless to say, this is a rather intriguing concept, and it is made even more fun to read by our point of view character, Ichirou himself. He sees the world as some sort of narrative, and despite his keen self-awareness of the whole situation desperately tries to present himself as one of the side characters. It is in this rather meta conflict that I enjoyed much of what I've read. The manga goes full-on with Ichirou's meta point of view by playing around with anime and manga references, throwing in Tokyo Ghoul. Dragon Ball, Bleach, etc aesthetics, as well as referencing the genre tropes and story beats to truly go all in on the manga's playful meta-commentary.

It confidently reminds me of the Eminence in Shadow, and in all of its self-aware nonsense of parodying the Gary-stu nature of protagonists.

Yet, despite my enjoyment of the manga, I can't help but feel that something is a little off here. Unlike Eminence in Shadow where there is a clear demarcation between the protagonist's delusions with the serious drama going on in the story's world, allowing both the comedic and serious elements to co-exist in a precarious, but intriguing state, it is rather unclear how much of a parody Yuujin Character was Taihen desu ka? actually is.

As the story continues beyond its initial premise, the manga has expanded to further develop the world's lore, stakes and drama. But this attempt is disrupted by Ichirou's complete irreverence. With our point of view completely dyed in Ichirou's perspective, a viewpoint where all kinds of dramatic stakes are seen as literal story beats, it becomes insanely difficult to discern where the stakes of the story lie, and worse, how genuine his interactions with the rest of the characters actually are (especially so since there are romantic comedy elements here too).

Unlike the Eminence in Shadow, where character interactions are always depicted with some distance so that we can identify the comedy in Kagenou's ignorance, and the relational stakes and drama present in the other party, Ichirou's ever-present perspective always makes all drama, lore and stakes to feel irreverent, meta, and detached from the reality of the world.

This really makes it hard to become attached to any conflict going on in the story besides Ichirou's conflict of 'finding his role in this story, as well as in the lore and drama present in the world. While for a short story, this sort of irreverence is very much entertaining and welcome, for a longer story, which is where this manga is at now, there is a need to develop different character's stakes and world lore to further garner the reader's interest. Ichirou's over-self awareness and irreverence are making it difficult to empathise with the world and the stakes of its characters, making it hard to care for anything that is going on besides the meta shenanigans going on. This can make the whole thing feel flat in the long run - in fact, it's already somewhat feeling like that to me.

Ironically, in the manga's overly meta and self-aware perspective, the importance of the 'main characters' in their own supposed story feels insignificant, making them more of a mob than the guy seeking to be the mob. I'm not sure how much of this is the writer's intention - to maybe have a wake-up call at the end of the story and show how delusional the protagonist is - still, so far it doesn't feel like the manga is heading toward that direction. Still, all in all, this is an incredibly fun manga to read. While it doesn't hit the nuances present in Eminence in Shadow's parody of its genre, it is certainly still a very fun read.