Kagami no Kojou
Lonely Castle in the Mirror

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3 / 5 stars

Went into this fresh, not having seen the movie. Perhaps it would be better to actually see the characters spending time together rather than reading it, to make it more believable that they have grown to care a lot for each other and help heal their emotional wounds.

Not really what was promised in the premise, they go about it in the most boring way possible (just ignoring it until they’re like “hey, maybe we should think about it” suddenly). Lots of padding and explanation-dumps. One of which I was like, “that’s your theory, how do you figure that and not this instead?” ... and then turned out to be completely wrong immediately (i.e. a waste of time to read, especially with me in the back of my mind thinking “do people really not know this concept that it needs to be explained to this degree??”) and my own guess being correct. Once they return to the original premise, it gets interesting, but by then, you’re 3/4 of the way into the book, and have probably figured out at least one twist (the one I mentioned, probably, as well as a very bad execution of foreshadowing/hint where things are listed and one sticks out all “one of these is not like the others! It’s DEFINITELY not significant, pay no attention!” They could’ve masked that better, it wouldn’t have been hard)

The message is lovely and all, but the execution was not. And I dunno, for all the teens railing against the “bully victim” label, this story really seemed to paint them as classic bully victim cliches that I’ve seen in many other manga/anime.The girl who gets shunned by the other girls for supposedly stealing the ringleader’s boyfriend, the fat boy who is forced to “buy” his friends’ company and convinces himself that’s not what he’s doing/fat boy who it’s kinda OK to hate because he’s got a backwards-ass way with girls, a girl and her stepdad and (trigger warning) and her going wayward as a result, an otaku who’s full of himself and looks down on others as a cope for others doing it to him, a boy who takes on way too much responsibility for his sister’s death when his parents can’t handle it, a girl who placed way too much pressure on herself and then failed to live up to it… only Subaru was kind of a twist on “not going to school because his or family’s delinquency and absent father/parents” by having him kind of put on a show of nice, polite, well-adjusted student because that’s what he yearns for, but we don’t really get much of him. None of these characters are bad in and of themselves, and it’s not like there wasn’t realism to them, but I was hoping for something a little more for all the praise this story is getting. It’s the same schtick of bully stories I’ve seen/read before, “we’ll face the future and keep moving forward” blah blah blah. The only thing I give kudos for is how it discusses that there’s other alternative paths in the Japanese education system for those who are struggling in the conventional one.

I did like this. I really did. Just not raving about it.