Soredemo Boku wa Kimi ga Suki
Forget Me Not

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Coming into this manga blindly, I had really no idea what to expect. However, it's a manga that's definitely unique, as it transverses the life of Serizawa. He makes mistakes, lots of them. At times you would hate him for it but come to accept that such decisions are a learning experience. It is a story about the hardships of romance, the consequences of your choices, and the act of moving on in life. It teaches that if you don't take the chance, if you simply give up and let ego take over, you will eventually split away from each other. So go and contact ... them, go and call them before it is too late.

Although the manga tore me apart, I loved the realistic approach and lessons it teaches.

tl;dr: A manga with a series of depressing stories about an emotionally stunted man's relationships that feel like they'll eventually get somewhere worthwhile but never do so.

This manga is structured in such a way that it starts near the end of the story chronologically, but the vast majority of the manga is flashbacks that go through a very long portion of the protagonist's life through a series of stories each centered around different relationships he's had. The way things start make it kind of seem like he's a terrible person because the whole set up makes it seem like there are enough girls that he ... was in a relationship that hold a grudge against him that just that description isn't enough to narrow it down, and furthermore in the first flashback story he quite simply is awful, though to be fair I suppose he is just in middle school.

However, I didn't really feel like he did anything to qualify as being a bad person after that. In the second flashback story, things end badly, but it's more due to circumstances than his own failures, wherein if he was a better person he could probably have salvaged things better but it doesn't really feel like the situation is a knock on his character. Furthermore, the manga shows that he does grow from this eventually, so despite it being sad this story felt reasonably satisfying. In the third flashback story he is awful for a bit, but it is easy to see why he was that way since he was wronged as well, even if the other party didn't have any particularly negative intentions. However, he learns from this and turns it around by doing his best to fix what he screwed up, and furthermore he also learns from the experience of being wronged and is shown to make sure he doesn't end up doing the same to others, which actually makes him coming out looking like a pretty good person. Thus, this story didn't really feel sad at all since it seemed to focus on character growth and thus was satisfying.

This is where the manga starts to change however. The stories so far had been pretty short and seemed to be bittersweet with a sense of optimism towards the end. What follows in the fourth, fifth, and sixth flashback are stories that are much longer and purely bitter and depressing. In these I still wouldn't consider him a bad person, just really bad at relationships where he seems to be trying to do his best to be considerate and kind but it pretty much always backfires. Yes, he's stupid and doesn't understand others that well, but it feels like his heart is in the right place. It also doesn't feel like things are completely his fault either, as in almost all cases, as is often the case with relationships, the blame rests on both parties.

The thing though is that due to his childhood, which is given in a flashback within a flashback, he has emotional issues regarding his father betraying his mother that seem to make him especially sensitive. Thus what happens in all these cases is that the relationships end up collapsing, but the other parties manage to pretty easily pick themselves up and quickly move on, while he's generally shown to end up taking a tremendous amount of emotional damage and never really being able to move forward, continuing to make the same mistakes in the future. Thus it doesn't feel like there's any character growth, optimism, or anything positive that comes out of these stories regarding the protagonist. They're just painful to read and I just feel sorry for him.

I'm not a fan of depressing stories, but I understand that they often serve as the best build up to good endings, and that's pretty standard for stories centered around flashbacks. Furthermore, all of it is very well written and engrossing, so it feels like the type of story that will ultimately get somewhere. Unfortunately while it feels an attempt at this was made, it was a failed attempt. In the last two chapters, the story has gone full circle and the flashback has arrived back in the present where it attempts to wrap everything up, but it does a pretty awful job of it. I don't believe that the manga was axed, but the ending feels about at the level a manga that was. The plot thread regarding the woman he didn't know the identity of turns out to be of minimal importance. There's an attempt to reframe everything that happened in his relationships as being his fault and him being as bad as his father, but that's a major stretch that rubs me the wrong way to be quite frank and feels like it was done just to justify the original set up where he thinks a lot of girls justifiably hold grudges against him.

And that realization, despite making no sense, is used to spur him to character growth that results in him doing something completely random that I think is supposed to suggest a happy ending, but it's just so random it isn't clear how his actions make sense from his supposed character growth or plot wise how it's even supposed to be a happy ending, so it all just feels incredibly forced. It feels like it did try to give some purpose to all the stories that came before but simply failed to do so in a convincing manner, which thus makes the ending really unsatisfying and fails to make the majority of the manga feel like it was worth the time and effort it took to read, to the point that I kind of wish I never read this manga.

In the end, the only thing that makes me feel like this manga was not a complete loss is that the art is really good. It's particularly good in terms of how the heroines are drawn, and really good at showing their expressions and quirks.

The art is fine. Sometimes it's beautiful.

The main character is incredibly engaging. Some of the heroines are fleshed out well, some are one dimensional, all are run over by the plot.

The enjoyment is a roller coaster of emotions that feels like it's building up to an incredible payoff. Instead you get kicked right in the balls.

I can't believe it ended like that.

Slight spoilers ahead:

... This is an omnibus story that goes through a bunch of relationships in order.

I don't understand why the girl the manga spent the longest time on acted the way she did once she started dating him. Her personality completely flipped. I can only weakly assume that she got bashful about realizing that they were dating so she stopped the playful banter and was too embarrassed to show any intimacy. But that's completely different from her character, unexplained, and doesn't really fit with the information we get after the fact. Although I can forgive a lot of that because the point of the manga is that you can't know why people act the way they do. It's still jarring to have that moral delivered in such a heavy handed way by dismantling a perfectly good character. Especially after his high school girlfriend had the same arc but shorter and actually justified.

The "mysterious girl" premise of the manga is a total red herring and an excuse to flashback though the guy's whole life story. Although that sounds like a clever and engaging story element, it has mediocre execution.

He does the same thing to the girl on the phone that he did to the girl at the Ramen shop even though she chewed him out so much about it. Although even that was just a variation of the same mistake the main character repeats every arc.

The main character drives himself into a corner repeatedly for over half his life in a deeply gripping, believable, and emotional way. This manga is so absolutely fantastic in this regard that I can forgive everything else about the characters and the plot. It doesn't hurt the portrayal of this deeply flawed MC that he continues to make almost exactly the same mistake over and over again. You've spent 7 volumes with this guy hoping to finally see him grow and be happy. He never changes from this self destructive behavior until the very last chapter, which is split into two parts and a hundred pages.

We get one panel of that (maybe) paying off.

I have never been so utterly disgusted by anything in my life.