Deep Love: Pao no Monogatari

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I really love this manga. I haven't cried for such a long time until i read this manga, including the eariler sequals which would mean deep love AYU NO MONOGATARi , ect. This manga showed me about all the dark and sad side of the world. How cruel peoples can be, but this manga showed me no matter how many pain you will go through in your life, you must always go on. There is always a light somewhere out there for you. Pao experience the worst pain anyone could imagine, yet he still moved on. If I was in Pao's position, i would end ... my life right there, but he didn't. One of the most inspiring things i ever experience in my whole entire life. Its a HAVE TO READ manga for you peoples.

Well, this manga is definitely very sad. It is a short but interesting story with a lot of positive aspects. Art was nice. Most focus was given to eyes of the characters because they play an important role in the story and it really shows. Characters are likeable. Although many of them appear briefly, the author does a good job of making us relate and care about them. Although the ending was sad, I think it sends us a beautiful massage how, despite living in a very harsh world, there are always beams of light in everyone's life and the most important thing is that ... you remain kind to others and absolutely never give up. My favorite scenes were ones with Pao and the homeless woman.
However, even though this manga has its good sides, there are two reasons why it doesn't deserve a higher score in my opinion:

1) It tried to be heartbreaking way too hard. A lot of times bad events felt very forced and weird. If something can go bad, have no doubt that it will go bad and even much worse. Even if something good happens to a character we care about, it will soon be followed by a tragedy. Homeless woman gets hit by a random car. Parents commit suicide with their daughters (this one still doesn't make sense to me). Pao gets kicked a 1000 times. Pretty much everyone dies. I know this manga tries to tell a story about the cruel world we live in (even more cruel if you're an animal) but I think it went a bit overboard with the tragedy
2) Second reason is something that I don't think a lot of people had trouble with, but it personally bothers me. I don't really like the way Pao (and all other animals actually but primarily Pao) is portrayed in the story. Pao is WAY TOO intelligent for a dog. Now, don't get me wrong, I love dogs and they are far from stupid but unfortunately they are not nearly as intelligent as Pao, especially if they're puppies. Pao understands humans perfectly, he knows exactly where to go and what to do without even being told to. He is basically a human in a dogs body, the only thing he lacks is being able to actually talk to human characters. I personally consider this to be kind off a "lazy writing" because, in my opinion, it is much harder to convey dogs emotions and actions without having them talk and just straight up tell us about what they think or feel

Pao no Monogatari is quite a monumental second installment of the Deep Love manga series. There was a time when I despised Ayu no Monogatari (the first installment) for trying far too hard to make a tragedy out of everything, where everything that can possibly go wrong, will undoubtedly go wrong under Yoshi's (the author's) direction. There was a time when I thought that Yoshi's characters finally had their fair share of blood, tears, and sexually transmitted diseases, and that the later manga of the series would spearhead a heartwarming and hopeful tale of healing and reconciliation. Pao no Monogatari surprised in many ways: it ... made me actually appreciate Ayu no Monogatari to some extent, and it set concrete expectations for Yoshi's writing prowess and the future direction of the Deep Love series.

Let's address my first point. Ayu no Monogatari maintained an excellent weight of mood through its character design and detail. The main character of the manga, Ayu, always had this uncomfortably sad, empty feeling to her character, and even as the plot events progressed in an unabashedly harsh way, it felt powerful, and it hurt. It hurt seeing how the characters suffered, and it hurt knowing Ayu's unfortunate, nigh defeatist outlook on life. All this could not have been possible without the evocative detail in the character expression, and in particular, how Ayu is drawn. You'd know if you've seen it.

Now can you guess how Pao no Monogatari made me realize this unique strength of Ayu no Monogatari? I'll save the suspense and niceties: it's by being a completely, utterly inane and worthless shell of what Ayu no Monogatari was. The art that happened to be the saving grace for Ayu no Monogatari's otherwise suffocating narrative was completely trashed in Pao no Monogatari. Ayu now looks like a generic blond shoujo heroine who could be easily placed in a silly romantic comedy without any design changes. In fact, all the characters have different designs from the original, and the designs have mostly deteriorated in quality and severely undermined the visual weight of the work.

But surely I can't complain about the merits of a work solely through its less-than-par visuals, can I? What about the story? Pao no Monogatari is split into two volumes: the first volume details Pao's life as he grows up with his family and endures through pains and trials, and the second volume is a retelling of the events of Ayu no Monogatari through Pao's perspective. Now keep in mind, Pao is a dog. With a dog as the narrator and 'voice' of the story, it's a challenge for the mangaka to properly use expression and realistically limited comprehension to craft set pieces. After all, a dog neither knows the human language nor can fully understand the dynamics of human interaction and society. But a dog's perspective can be portrayed well! Unfortunately, Yoshi opts for the laziest possible approach in having the dog characters literally talk to one another, think in Japanese, and experience the exact same intellectual capabilities and social dynamics as a human being. In simpler terms, Pao and the other dogs are quite literally portrayed as humans, expressing deeply profound philosophical statements as "Why were these dogs born if they're just going to die?" and showing beyond-impressive emotional insight. This horribly cheesy way of giving the audience emotional cues is an insult to everyone's intelligence, and immersion-breaking too, as Deep Love is meant to be a dead-serious and sentimental realistic fiction.

Of course, the above is mere nitpicking compared to the central issue with Deep Love storytelling: how the tragedies are utterly forced, unnatural, and nauseously repetitive. Without calling out what happens specifically, it's quite commonplace within every single Pao chapter to have some character commit suicide from grief, die from the cruelty of those around them, have their entire family killed, or be physically and emotionally mutilated by…something. Every. Single. Chapter. There are only angels and demons in this cast, and Yoshi takes the cynical expression 'no good deed goes unpunished' to an entirely new level: anything positive that happens is bound to turn into something grossly depressing. How dare anyone help our embattled protagonists of a Yoshi story? And since the first half of Pao no Monogatari is about dogs, you get a very healthy dose of puppy-kicking cranked up to max level. Puppy kicking! Can it get any more cliché? Maybe it's Pao's fault for being a living magnet to the dirty soles of despicable humans.

I won't even go into detail how the second half of the story deviates horribly from the original story and thematically undermines everything Ayu no Monogatari was trying to achieve, because it's pointless to gripe about such light offenses given what I've already said about Pao no Monogatari. As a heads up, Host (the third installment) and Reina no Unmei (the fourth installment) return to Ayu no Monogatari's more competent art style, but they do not fix most of the storytelling issues I mentioned above because, well, the entire Deep Love series is endowed by Yoshi's brilliant prose and construction.

Restraint and subtlety are two qualities of storytelling that tend to be botched by many anime. For most of those works, however, they don't need to be strictly subtle because of their stories' nature. For example, generally speaking, shounens are primarily concerned with showcasing their badass protagonists. That's okay. But for a work that tries to tackle heavy subject matter like morality, prostitution, and coming-of-age, the average standard is no longer okay. Nothing, NOTHING I've ever experienced has simultaneously lacked and needed these two qualities as much as the Deep Love series. To handle such mature subject matter with such juvenile writing is both insulting and utterly shameless.

For one of the most appalling works I've ever read, I present my first hate review.