Jul 18, 2023
What happened with this manga is a complete shame and I feel completely bummed. Keep in mind that the manga is a solid 7/10 even in its current form, and if it hadn't been soft-axed, it would have easily been an 8+.
Because yes, I get the feeling that it was soft-axed by reading the last 10ish chapters or so. Most probably due to it not selling well.
So why would something written by Fumiaki Maruto, the author of 'White Album 2' and 'Saekano' not hit the sell/fan interest targets? Moreso, a piece of work with 4 extremely attractive adult women as the quasi-harem around our adult
...
protagonist?
I mean, heck, one of them is obviously modeled after Utaha from 'Saekano', just in her early 30s. That alone should have attracted A LOT of attention.
Two main reasons spring to mind:
1) TOO INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC FOR SOME
Owing to how 'Saekano' was structured, Maruto dives deep into the creative industry. In this case, however, he goes for mixed media - animation, manga, and literature. There is A LOT of terminology and insider knowledge involved.
The plot is heavy-handed on these, and I assume people who are looking for something more casual got tired by the sheer volume of terminology/process-dumping
2) LIGHT ON THE ROMANCE SIDE OF THINGS
The 'romance' tag could be there, or it couldn't. In the current iteration of the manga, the romance isn't really there much up until the second half...and even when it's there, it feels thrown in just for the sake of it.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the soft-axing. It's obvious Maruto wanted to spin the main heroine conflict at the latter stages of the mixed media project scheduling. And it's even more obvious he decided to drop it once he got the memo the manga's just not selling well.
This one irks me so much, because the female cast is very promising. Heck, even our protagonist isn't a bland self-insert and it would've been great to see him put in a more emotionally-charged conflict.
---
OVERALL VERDICT
'Media Mix Maiden' has a gorgeous cast, great art, and is a refreshment for those of you who FINALLY wanted to see a fully-adult cast like me. There's no juvenile drama, not a lot of cheesiness, and it's fun to learn more about how these creative industries work behind the scenes.
It's also a bummer that nobody has picked it up (in any non-Japanese language) so if you want to read it, you can do it only in Japanese. This is a further nail in the non-popular coffin of MMM.
My 'mixed feelings' verdict is simply due to the premature ending this story got. It deserved much more, and could have been a 50-60 chapter of full awesomeness.
I enjoyed it, but many might not. Try it out.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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