Kekkon suru tte, Hontou desu ka
365 Days to the Wedding

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The topic of when two people decide to do a fake relationship/wedding/marriage has been around quite a lot. However, here we have two people who value their peace of mind and want to keep it.

For my part, I liked the character development. However, what bothered me at times was at some points it felt like the author stepped on the brake and set their relationship back a bit to get it going again. In some cases he skipped ahead a big chunk. But it didn't completely ruin the overall impression for me.

The side characters weren't annoying and moved the story forward. The artwork made them ... spread apart well, not like other manga. The artist really played with nature, drawing the mountains beautifully or even parts of Tokyo, where I even remembered walking through some parts when I was there a solid amount of years ago.

I think some things in the manga weren't worked out, or were forgotten, and it would be nice to resolve them, but everything can't be sun-drenched :-).

There are a few moments I would very much like to reread and will remember fondly. For me, definitely a piece I would recommend. The finale was in the spirit of the manga, so for me, satisfaction as well.

It's fun, characters are pretty, and the story as a whole is pretty bubbly. This is a really down to earth manga, so don't go expecting a lot from it.

All in all, I really liked it. It's not like I'm waiting every week for the chapter to drop, but It's a nice surprise when I see that a new chapter was released.

Also, the story pace is really "realistic" to say the least. I mean, we, the readers, can predict what's going to happen because we are given the whole story before our eyes, unlike the characters who only see their part. That being said, it's ... nice that the story goes almost as If the mangaka went through this in his life, with realistic developments, on a realistic setting. Heck, maybe a novel format could work better for this kind of story.

7/10. Nice read.

‘Are We Really Getting Married’ aims to portray a semi-realistic romance wrapped inside a wholesomely unrealistic premise. And while it can be argued that, in fact, it does pull off that ‘realistic romance’ vibes, it does so at the expense of almost everything else, but namely entertainment. Contrary to what the high minds might think, there is a good reason why ‘realistic romances’ rarely, if ever, blossom into anything more than niche past times. Even some of the most fanfare-inducing ones, like 500 Days of Summer, aren’t really ‘realistic’, just grounded.

There is really just no simple way about my final conclusion after 35 chapters of ... reading this manga: plain and simple… it’s just boring. It commits the worst cardinal sin of all pure romances, and though some people, as evidenced by the overall score, might find the blooming ‘realistic’ love to their liking, I do not. I do not like reading ‘realistic portrayals of love’ due to one simple reason: most authors, for some reason, seem to think that ‘realistic’ means ‘dull’ and ‘boring’. As such, they tend to make the characters in question extremely mundane, and that is all fine and dandy, but then they go ahead and make the stories hundreds of pages long. And that’s no good.

The story of ‘Are We Really Getting Married’ is held together by flimsy threads that are really there just as plot devices that push our two leads together. The narrative fluctuates between ‘eh’ and ‘meh’, and all its desperate attempts at bold portrayals of everyday occurrences are really just… well, meh. The story repeatedly goes in circles, but it’s a romantic story, so the narrative aspect really isn’t that important. There is little to evolve upon in terms of romantic narratives, which is why most, if not all authors focus simply on creating interesting characters. And characters here, well, are not.

What’s-his-name and what’s-her-face, in summary, are just boring. There is nothing uniquely interesting about them, nothing that makes me root for them, nothing that inspires me, nothing, nothing, nothing. It’s just a dull guy and a dull girl awkwardly falling in love like horny high-school teenagers despite being in their mid twenties. There are no quirks that make for decent comedy, there is quite literally 0 chemistry between the main pair–like, legit, you could pair two planks of wood and they’d likely have more chemistry than the two of them–and if, again, this is the ‘realistic love’, then I simply never want to love in my life since I’d be bored off my noggin’.

But, as is the case with most of these ‘realistic romances’, this story isn’t realistic. Forgoing the stupid premise, why is it that every single ‘realistic romance’ sprouts some of the most boring, uninteresting, and dull characters in existence? Because real people, believe it or not, are not boring. They don’t have singular quirks like ‘I love physical maps which is a weird thing, look how quirky I am’, or ‘I have a cat’ as personality traits. But whatever, it’s like I’m shouting into the void at this point, to be honest. I have no clue what’s happening in Japan, but these constant depictions of beyond socially inept grown adults are honestly just kind of… sad. It’s as though these characters haven’t ever interacted with people past 3 sentences their entire lives, and, even if that’s true, I just don’t care about them to watch them get to the 4th grader’s level of communicative skills.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a reason why most romantic manga have at least 1 of the 2 leads be an extrovert as such a character can carry a monotonous dud. That’s why all shounen romances sporting black-hole dense teenage boys with 0 personality have girls that steal the show and mostly become the reason people read the damn thing, or why every shoujo manga sports an awkward girl who orgasms at the sound of a dude’s voice while all the hot bishounen howling at her steal the pages around her. You can salvage 1 dud if you surround it by gold, but if everything you’re flaunting is just dud… well, what’s the damn point?

Anyway, I’ve ranted enough–I don’t see this as a realistic romance, or much of a romance to be honest. As I mentioned, chemistry between characters may as well redefine the definition of that word, and while art is nice and readable, it doesn’t come close to salvaging generic rom-com story and beyond dull main duo.

Cheerio!