Mar 27, 2018
If you're interested in really heady sci-fi and philosophical concepts, this might be worth checking out if that's all you're looking for. To say the least, Murasakiiro no Qualia is ambitious. After a somewhat slow start, it blows up into hyperspeed in directions you might not expect and never stops. The best part of the manga is seeing what insanity the author has thought up next, but in the process it loses a lot of what would make that kind of story interesting in the first place, making the whole thing feel clumsy, rushed, and full of unrealized potential.
This manga is apparently a novel adaptation,
...
and it shows. It's very text-heavy and ultimately prefers to tell rather than show, which hurts in the manga format. So much of the manga is spent explaining and discussing scientific theories, and in the latter half, an astonishingly small portion of the manga is spent showing what happens in the story. Instead, a few panels may represent what happens, then some textboxes will gloss over a few points and move on. It gets old really fast, and it becomes impossible to connect with the MC's struggles. Eventually, it doesn't feel like reading a story anymore--but a story about a story, and it's as dull as it sounds.
Now, if you have already read the manga and say, "But that's the point of the story!" I realize that, but that alone doesn't justify its execution. If you set out to write your story in a boring manner and succeed, the story isn't any less boring. The author/artist could have conveyed the story in a number of more interesting ways, such as expanding on ideas that could have been their own story arc but instead were only given a few panels. The MC has a lot of focus, so perhaps it would been more interesting to focus on other characters' perspectives, providing new insight on an otherwise sterile thought experiment of a manga.
The story is also pretty bad at justifying its use of these concepts, which creates plot holes. It's most easily seen in the latter half, when the author decides to take increasingly daring leaps of logic in order to keep the plot interesting, but even without that, there are times when the characters seem to know way more than they should, or they're more right than they should be. The strength of your suspension of disbelief will matter here. For most of those little instances, I don't mind that middle school students happen to know a little about some weird theories, but I would like to see more into how they came about these theories or how those theories affect their lives, rather than taking it all for granted.
But while I think most of these problems occur in the latter half, I would rate the manga even lower if it didn't have those things. The beginning part is just kind of boring without any noteworthy points. Meanwhile, though the latter half has its fair share of issues, there are some interesting ideas that are thrown around played with, and seeing the author attempt to bring those ideas together into a semi-coherent story was entertaining.
The ideas themselves are interesting, but the way they are presented is not. There aren't that many manga like this...but I would still look elsewhere for heady sci-fi stuff.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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