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Nov 9, 2023
A completely average smut.
The manga consist of few pages of empty dialogue with no depth or craft, serving no other purpose other than to get the two males to interract followed by fewer pages of sex. This repeats until you get to the end of the volume.
The art is not hideously ugly, but it’s certainly very much on the low effort level of the quality scale.
This is so generic and forgettable that I could just copy this review, post it under bunch of different BLs and it would still apply. And I’m approaching the disappointement point of actually doing just that.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Nov 9, 2023
Baby Shark and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race.
Somewhere in a meeting room, execs held a meeting on how to squeeze out more money for minimal cost. I imagine that’s how this movie was born.
Well, to call Baby Shark's Space Adventure a “movie“ might be a bit of stretch. It’s a set of music videos loosely tied together by an extremely basic and low effort story. The songs of course aren’t original, they are a collection of Pinkfong’s viral children song, the most known of course being Baby Shark, which you’ll have the displeasure of hearing four and a half
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times during the movie. The movie is one giant commercial. Like, seriously, they literally included the company name in the movie title.
The animation ranges from the most low effort kids cartoon 3D CGI known to man, to corporate clipart. The only part that doesn’t look awful is the short pixel art section.
I think that it will have long-lasting lobotomizing effect on the kids unfortunate enough to watch this.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Nov 8, 2023
„We have Freesia at home“
Trigger is another of the kind of manga about how what if we just allowed some people to kill others. It takes the usual character of a vigilante and repurposes him to work within law and „order“ rather than outside of it.
Trigger starts somewhat week, as it seems like this will be about trying to portray this as a good idea, but luckily this isn’t the case (that much). Instead the manga has more of a short story format as it showcases different people and how they dealt with the responsibility of being chosen for the job of licenced executor, which
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was actually well executed with the various approaches showcases. Showcased is both human psychology and the flaws of this system.
I have two complaints regarding the pacing. First, the start of the manga which shows how the system came to be should be longer, as it shows people accepting the psychopathic system too quickly. I understand that the writer wanted to get to the actual story before the reader got bored, so I would propose to instead start with just simple explanation of the system and then right into one of the stories and only later delve deeper into how the system came to be. Either that, or only elude into start of the system without going into too much details that would test the suspension of disbelieve.
What I really liked is how who I would consider a villain in this story (which is debatable) is written, as from his point of view he is acting reasonably and for the good, and he did lay out his logic and thoughts and does actually follow his own rules, which is already better than your average antagonist.
Overall, this is a nice short read.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Nov 3, 2023
Gravitation is a romance (allegedly) music (allegedly) BL manga. It’s one step away from being a great parody of the yaoi genre, but unfortunately it’s wholly unironic.
It suffers from many problems. The first and the most obvious is that the story just doesn’t make any sense. Both plot-wise and character-wise.
The main problem with the duo of main characters is that they have absolutely zero chemistry. They have no reason at all to like each other, it’s as if Shuuichi got hit by a fujo brainwashing tech which makes him fall in love with the first bishounen he sees and so he did. Both Shuuichi
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and Yuki are also extremely annoying characters, but for such creatively different reason. One of them is a crababy. No, really, that’s like the main emotion you’ll see here, get ready for it. He’s also *really* dumb, to the point it makes you question how he even survived so far. Yuki on the other hand is the the cold one, to the extent of just not giving any signs of affection at all. He gives off the vibes of tryhard, but I’d say this is just author’s failed execution of writing a “cool” character. Author’s failure is what also seems to be behind the lack of chemistry, as it seems like she heard “opposites attract” and went with that, while forgetting that it’s because the opposites are supposed to complement each other, not repel.
Regarding the plot, it’s only for the first few volumes at most that the story maintains at least some sort of coherence. After that, it’s wild west of random bullshit. And not in the funny entertaining way, but in the “huh, the author really didn’t plan any of this through”. Conflicts that should have been main focus of the manga are solved within few pages while whole volumes are spent on filler as only once in a while the manga remembers it’s supposed to be about music.
Talking about music, it’s very obvious that the author did no research regarding the industry. And of course, don’t expect any interesting band scenes like an actual music manga would have.
Another awful thing is just the frequent tone whiplash. You get unfunny gag jokes inserted into what seemed like a serious scene, the characters randomly start being dumb, and sexual assault is treated as serious life long issue when it happens to one of the characters but as a minor inconvenience and almost a punchline when it happens to the other one. It's also pretty weird that the characters keep trying to convince others and themselves that they are not gay, they are totally straight but just happened to fuck dudes?
Unsurprisingly for the genre, the art is terrible. The characters suffer the most, as they are drawn inconsistently, a single character frequently looks differently through the whole manga (seriously, just compare even the volume covers alone) while other characters area easily mistaken with another whole different characters, and that’s across genders. The “le random faces” drawings is a cringy humor while backgrounds are almost non-existent, making this into really low artistic effort.
To summarize it, expect a wattpad story written by 13 years old level of quality.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Oct 22, 2023
Shoujo isn’t exactly my favourite genre. Still, once in a while I give it a try, and once in a whole there is a title that surprises. Sacrificial Princess is one of those.
What’s interesting is that usually when a shoujo manga is good, it’s because it’s closer to other demographics and is shoujo more on a technicality. In this case though, it’s really a pure shoujo manga, simply with actually good writing. And by that I don’t mean that the author added sex and violence to make it appear more mature (I’m looking at you Nana). No, the characters and the themes are the main
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strengths of this story.
Sacrificial Princess has a non-toxic romantic couple, something that is unfortunately quite rare around these parts. What’s even more unexpected, in the good way, is the positive portrayal of feminine and masculine traits of the couple, which complements each other as the pair bring each other up, rather than the usual forced drama clashes of man’s vs woman’s view. Indeed, here we have both soft feminine approach to problem solving and strong masculine approach working in tandem in a beautiful painting of a power couple relationship.
This all work even better within the framework of the story of court politics and fantasy discrimination. This is not just a nice way to spice up the story into something beyond just an ordinal romance, but also a great opportunity to explore the side characters and give them as much character development as possible. In fact, one of the main themes of the story is how people can change, and it lead to some actually touching moments exploring love and sense of belonging.
Story-wise I also appreciate that it doesn’t leave plot elements unsolved. This is a story-driven manga and it both aims and achieves tying up plot threads both main and side.
Art-wise I have no complaints, the character design is fitting and the arstyle can portray both serious action moments and cute wholesome moments.
Overall this is a great read that I believe can interest most readers of all demographics.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Sep 27, 2023
Most light novels that serve as a side story for a populare anime/manga franchise are just cashgrabs, with nothing of much value and with the set expectations of „You’ll get to read about your favourite characters more“, which is what the fans are mostly content with.
The Tokyo Ghoul novels are nice in a way that they would work as a short story collection even if not connected to already successful title. Which is to say, even if you didn’t know any of the characters and only have the knowledge that this takes place in word where both humans and ghouls exist, the content still works
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out on a literary level.
Many spin off LNs fall for the trap of overfocusing on canon events, so it’s nice that this one is more about ideas an human relationship stories that are applicable beyond the scope of the given copyrighted world
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Sep 24, 2023
This is your average OVA with your average filler story. It' a side story with no bearing on the overal plot progress, there's no depth other than just being a stand-alone short story and no depth is really expected. This is mainly for people who just want *any* additional content with the characters they like.
The character design, especially for the main characters, makes them look somehow ET-ish, though that is not fault of the OVA alone. Other than that, the visuals are okay, about to be expected with the tighter budget of an OVA.
But hey, the cat was cute, so at least there's
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that.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 22, 2023
Junjou Romantica, the series that portrays wholesome and interesting romance between the well drawn characters… in some alternative universe, maybe. Instead, what we have here is a rape within the first 22 pages of chapter 1, and it being portrayed as a great way to start relationship.
Seriously, the manga cuts from explicit portrayal of rape of underage looking character to the assailant and the victim just talking over some tea, not acknowledging what just happens. The scenario is pretty much A: "Hi I brought you a soup" B: “Welcome to the rape cave lmao” and then they just have casual talk after? The rape into
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romance pipeline didn't even give the poor dude a time to breathe, just instant brainwashing for BL purposes. Maybe one day writers of BL will find out that gay people don’t start dating by raping the person of interest.
“Something happens but it literally doesn’t matter in any form to the story” is what you can expect a lot from Junjou Romantica. The goal of this manga is not to tell a story, but to come up with some short exchange before sex, and then to draw said sex. That is the depth of storytelling you should be expecting and even then you will most likely be disappointed.
But the story isn’t the worst part of this manga – ultimately that is just the average yaoi storytelling. What this manga excels at is the horrendous art. I shit you not, the very first chapter features a beautiful artwork with anatomy so hideous that one character’s finger is very literally the length of other character’s head. And this is far from the only case. This manga make you realize that the “yaoi hands” meme is not in any way an exaggeration. I don't think you can understand just how terrible the art is without seeing it for yourself. It's on a level that makes you feel like starting a charity called "Lessons on basic anatomy for BL authors". Art this bad couldn't have survived outside of yaoi genre - or maybe could have as some bottom of the barrel shoujo manga. Only in the latest volume or so does the art start to look slightly less goofy. Yes, it took about two decades of publishing for the artist to improve from eyecancer imagery to tolerable doodles.
If only it was just the artstyle itself that's bad but no, the composition is absolutely dogwater. In fact, you might have better chance of understanding what is going on if you were trying to divine it from a bowl of dog water instead of from the actual pages of this manga. The only joy I derived from art of this manga is screenshoting the worst parts and reposting them in a group chat for comedy.
Circling back to the story, most chapters consist of some silly relationship drama straight out of hallmark movies, followed by a kiss, followed by some (badly drawn) sex. But hey, it has penises, which does satisfy the usual needs of readers of this type of fiction. There is no reason at all to care about the story other than just liking boys fucking each other.
I think that the only reason Junjou Romantica is even this popular is that it’s from early 00’s when demand for BL skyrocketed, but also when most BL manga were just 1 volume long, so the demographic longed for long running series, even if said series is basically just recycling scenarios from the other shorter titles. There is literally nothing original or unique about Junjou Romantica, not even anything at least slightly out of the mold.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Aug 31, 2023
Out of the “big three”, Bleach is undoubtedly the most… bland one. I honestly believe that it only counts among them by accidental association of filling the void of the third realace.
Originally I planned to make this review much more wordy, but as the author couldn’t bother to put more effort into the manga, I too won’t got the extra mile so instead I’ll just describe my thoughts on the series shortly in no particular order in form of short rants:
First and the most glaring issue is the protagonist. Ichigo has boring character, boring powers and boring goals. Which is to say, Ichigo’s character
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is that he wants to protect his friends. That’s it. And that is also his goal – Ichigo has absolutely no agency on his own beyond “Well, I guess I’ll have to go beat up the bad guy to save my friends” or occasional “Well, I guess I’ll have to get stronger so I can go beat up the bad guy to save my friends”. Literally every part of the plot is caused by an outside force and Ichigo is only a bystander caught by all of it in accident. He also somehow has the most boring character design out of the main cast beyond maybe Origihme. Regarding the powers, Ichigo is pretty much just spamming one strong attack but making it stronger each arc. It’s like Saitama’s punch but unironical.
Ichigo is literally just a dude that won a genetic lottery (through multiple retcons), and demolishes everyone with barely any training. Like seriously, right in the first arc he fights multiple supposedly strong enemies in row with very basic knowledge of the world and only few days of training, somehow not only survives but also wins. This makes the hyped up characters looks just weak and ruins my capability of taking anyone allegedly strong seriously since even the elite gets beaten by a literal novice. Like imagine if Naruto was a kid outside of Ninja village, then he gets the most basic ninja training possible, one that doesn't even cover *all* the basics and proceeds to crash Leaf Village and beat up Kakashi. That's essentially what happens in Bleach.
Also, back to Ichigo’s character, despite it being the most simple barebone characterization it could be, it still manages to not make sense? The whole "no that wasn't actually me who defeated you, so cut off my arm to make it fair" is also incredibly stupid. The only agenda Ichigo has is protecting his friends, yet he's also willing to throw it away mid-battle for... pride? His characterization makes no sense. Was that supposed to make him seem righteous? Because it only makes him seem dumb. I get it if he was portrayed as overly proud or something and if it’s presented as his character *flaw* but no, it just comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere.
Regarding power system in general, it’s made very unclear. For series about swords, there is very little actual sword fighting and the swords really serve more like magic wands. The characters don't even seem to try to fight seriously anyway - instead of trying to slash artery for a fatal wound, instead we get chest/arms/etc wounds just so the fight can go on longer and the protagonist can get up after remembering his friends or something. That said, later characters are shown to survive getting their insides gouged out by just somehow recovering off screen, so I guess there are no stakes either way. The special powers just do random things that look cool higgledy-piggledy. Your sword just summons a giant poisonous baby? Sure, why not, might as well.
The only actually good part about Bleach is the art, in particular the design. Many of the still images look cool, and many of the outfits look cool. I respect the drip. I especially adore the chapter title pages which are among the most creative I've seen. Honestly, the art is the only thing that made me still pay attention to the pages. That said, and artbook made out of the cool-looking pages would be more enjoyable to read than the actual manga they belong to.
Because man, the fights are bad. There are absolutely no stakes, you don't wonder whether the protagonist will win, but how much overpowered the protagonist will turn out during the fight. The fights have the strategical elements of Michael Bay movies. Powerups aren’t foreshadowed at all but just given out when needed. Any supposed drawbacks or risk for main characters are irrelevant - like seriously, both of the times the main characters are told that the powerup will cause them to lost their powers forever they get them back literally the next arc. The only time the drawback is actually finalized is for a side character that nobody really cared about.
Ichigo’s fights are especially terrible since they pretty much go all like “Haha I, the villain, win!” *Ichigo starts thinking of his friends and shit, stands up from his beaten up state, receives a new power and wins*. The repeated situations of Ichigo dying completely outclassed, then suddenly getting a random-ass powerup and winning gets really tiring, none of it feels earned.
Not like the side character fights are any better, but most of that is because thy just… don’t matter. They are fillers because each new arcs drops a whole group of new characters that don’t actually contribute to the story other than so the previous group of side characters have someone to fight. I also hate how often the series is like “Oh I am the mighty Glorbglorb and my grand Chakachakaboom has never been defeated in 300 years!” and then the character just gets one-shotted. It’s just silly. It’s all so silly.
Regarding the story… well, there is barely any story. Bleach storyline is pretty much the equivalent of mashing toy soldiers against each other and making up cool sounding attacks. Other than the intro there are basically 4 arcs, three of them being practically identical in story and the last one being almost the same too. We have 1) Girl gets abducted so Ichigo crashes Soul Society to save her 2) Girl gets abducted so Ichigo crashes Hueco Mundo to save her 3) Girl gets assaulted so Ichigo crashes the Xcution society to save her 4) Ichigo crashes Soul Society again, but this time on the side of Soul Society and to save not a girl, but the world. Such stunning and creative writing.
The Fullbringer arc (the 3rd one) is the most silly - it's Bleach's attempt to temporary become a JoJo rip-off. And it also *really* feels like a filler mad just so there’s some excuse to give Ichigo his powers back.
By the start of the final arc, I was completely disinterested in the story and kept reading simply because I don't really drop manga. The amount of cool art decreased, which as mentioned previously was the main thing that kept me going. The fights while still being basically the only content of the manga degraded into mostly talking - like "Oh I will do this" "Oh no he will do that... but we will actually do this" and then few panels of the actual fights - if you're lucky. The influx of even more random characters makes it that most fights have also be an infodump about the characters powers. Also the villain of this arc manages to be even less interesting than Aizen, which is a feat in itself. In general it’s clear that the author didn’t plan out the story more than 3 or so chapters ahead.
Regarding the finale, one one hand I would like to say that readers shouldn't be surprised how abruptly the manga ends, given that the protagonist has literally no own goal to accomplish. On the other hand, the way the final fight was just cut off was so damn disrespectful lmao. It really feels like Kubo finally just gave up of trying to come up with something that makes sense.
The good thing is that at least I wasn’t as massively disappointed as with Naruto, because Bleach lacked potential right from the start. On the other hand, there is really no reason to even read Bleach in the first place. If you’ve read any battle shounen manga, you’ve already read Bleach in some other form. Oh I guess you should read this manga if you for some unfathomable reason wanted to watch the anime, because manga is average, the (first) adaptation is just absolutely terrible. So I guess that’s one reason to read the manga.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jul 23, 2023
Many works seem to believe that just mentioning suicide automatically makes the script better. It does not. Especially when it’s not really elaborated upon, just thrown in the mix for some free drama. Unfortunately, some readers will fall for this bait, and proclaim the story deep and dramatic and whatever.
So, what is Given actually about? The thing is, I struggle to summarize it. Not because it’s complex, but because what I consider its biggest flaw – it doesn’t have a point. With most of fiction, you can usually grasp what the author is going for. Sometimes it’s to explore deeps though. Sometimes the main point
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is just see some cool mecha action or cute girls doing cute things, and that is okay too (when it actually delivers the premise, of course). Given simply feels lacklustre. Now of course, you could make a counterpoint that the point of Given is just to be a BL. You could even paraphrase my previous point and say it’s supposed to be “cute boys doing cute things”. But as lot of yaoi, it can’t help but attempt to seem like it’s more than that.
The central theme is of course boys being gay. But there is also the storyline about them being in band, which so far isn’t exactly engaging, and is easily topped by works actually focusing on the band aspect, like Beck or Sakamichi no Apollon. There’s the aforementioned suicide, but as mentioned that theme is exploited rather than explored. There is, I guess, some attempt of high school romance drama. Instead of doing good at one point, it attempts many and success at none of these. At least in my experience, this makes Given a confusing read, because I feel like the “goal” is constantly changing with focus all over the place. And not in a good way like some more experimental works, but in a way of unexperienced writer. And of course, it falls in the usual BL trope of “Well wouldn’t you know, pretty much every male character is gay or bi, what are the chances, huh”. I would have liked to say the relationships are realistic and feel natural, but you know how it is. Similar to shippers, the writing of Given just needs two supposedly likeable characters to be around each other to make them into pairing.
The story goes from a start about music to some smutty relationship content – which only dons the appearance of being there for the story, but it’s really just the usual “uwu boys together”, even with the attempts at making it “deep” as mentioned above. It then circles back to the music towards the end, as if remembering that it was supposed to be about music. Some sort of idea of pitting the music and the relationships against each other was appearing, but I wouldn’t consider it well executed. I was going to say the ending was alright, or at least not bad – despite my enjoyment negatively impacted by the fact that the work couldn’t make me care about any of the characters (more about that further down), and that it felt all ultimately meaningless. But the very final page really killed the vibe, what a distasteful and tone-deaf way to end it, huh.
Going back to shipping, I’ve read that Given started as Haikyuu doujinshi. While I haven’t been able to confirm this, it would make sense – a fanfiction doesn’t need to create personalities, it takes them from the original work. But turn the fanfiction into an original work itself and now you can’t just reuse the personalities, for obvious reason. So you’re left with a bunch of characters of little personalities, personalities that readers imagination used to fill with the personalities of the original characters they are based one. It would certainly check out.
The characters are… uninteresting. I can’t actually remember a name of single cast member and I've literally just finished reading the manga. Design-wise Haruki is the only one that stands out, and even that is mostly thanks to his hairstyles. Rest is just Generic Bishounen A, Generic Bishounen B etc. Yes, I still did have to look up his name.
The art is easy the best part of Given. It shines with double page spreads and I especially loved the colored drawings at the start of each volume. Unfortunately, “best part” doesn’t necessarily mean the whole manga is great. In this case, it just means that it’s the only aspect I would call good.
Ultimately, this is definitely among the better BL manga. But as a manga in general, it’s at best slightly over average. So as usual, if you're a fujoshi you'll likely have a grand time, but readers of regular manga will likely be disappointed.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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