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Jun 24, 2025
these hoes did not deserve that saccharine of an ending after frustrating me for 140 fucking chapters. "oh why didn't you just drop it" well i did, okay? 10 years ago when i'd first come across this and naively thought it really was a romance between a this guy and his "kuudere" upperclassman according to this one reviewer. she was not a fucking kuudere. i had been betrayed.
and then all these merry years later my brain suddenly got an itch to see how the story ended. so i started re-reading. it couldn't have been that bad, right? maybe it was a bit trashy but NOT
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THAT BAD, RIGHT? RIGHT??!
it was just as i'd left it, and then even worse. the main girl is incredibly, colossally, stupendously annoying. it's always the same genre of miscommunication - she doesn't want something that the guy wants (and is very loud in voicing it), they have a fight, she is mad at him but also guilty but also completely mad at him, something happens that makes her realize the "real reason" why the guy wanted said thing, they have an awkward encounter, she professes her real feelings and how she never really wanted him to not have said thing, they kiss in public and make up (and make out in later chapters). all of it happens in the span of ONE CHAPTER. and it is COMPLETELY repetitive. it's the same shit, same shenanigan, same cheap-ass trope again and again and again, chapter after chapter, for one hundred and FORTY fucking chapters. as if the story couldn't have ended within hundred or even less. there's so little substance and whatever there is, gets milked to high heavens and back cuz that's the only thing the author knows to write.
the main guy only has two expression, one of them being the lack of it. the other is a smirk-smile. and he doesn't really show any variety even after a hundred chapters, except for crumbs that come only at the very end. you have to stick through a ton of bullshit to see CRUMBS. his dynamic with the other love interest is pretty intense though, and very interesting. honestly this could've been a good basketball manga cuz that side of the story is pretty cool, when compared to the mess of a romance anyway. what even was the point of the romance anyway? the main girl was unsure of her relationship with the main guy throughout the ENTIRETY of the run. she did not even have enough balls to decisively say yes/no to what she liked/disliked; even at the very end, there's not enough growth in her character to warrant the length of the manga. her indecisiveness was a major character flaw so it would have been interesting to see her get better; the execution just failed.
the other love interest plainly lack self-respect. his moments are obviously comedy fuel and just plain badly executed. you'd think a guy in a manga targeted for women would have enough sense to stay away from another guy's girl. that he would respect the girl's boundaries. what was it that women claim to have been wanting from men all these past centuries? emotional maturity? well, not in MY shoujo. so we get a guy who's practically cuckolding himself, and another guy whose only good trait is persistence, but instead of using it in his job searches, he uses it to harass a senior.
2 stars: one for the basketball scenes and one for usami
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Jun 7, 2025
in which i rant about the show's cardboard cutout of a male lead
ah how do i even begin. i watched this purely on a whim because i was craving something supernatural. the show delivers on that, with episodic mysteries that are both interesting and sometimes terrifying (the bloodstained labyrinth case is the only one that scared me; it was also the most interesting case). however the execution tanks entirely because of how the cast is utilized. we have our cookie-cutter dark-haired shojo love interest - a parapsychology researcher and one of the primary characters. his personality is bollocks and sucks worse than a filled-up vacuum
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cleaner begging its master to clean its innards. his completely bland persona is supposed to be a point of intrigue for us, a source of mystery, a hint to some troubled past, as often is the case with dark-haired shojo guys. we are supposed to gush over him despite his rudeness just like our main heroine. problem is, he is intensely unlikeable with that ever-present aura that screams "i am better than you". to be fair, being unlikeable is itself not an issue; there are plenty of such characters in media who become fan favourites. the issue is that he lacks any sort of charisma or charm to actually warrant having a shitty personalty. this man makes me want to punch his face repeatedly due to the sheer audacity that he displays at every turn of the story.
this man is also amazingly intelligent, having single-handedly solved a complex case right after waking up from a supernatural "coma" that had rendered him useless throughout the start of the case. he just read some files that the others had gathered as research for the case and announced that he knew all there was to know. never mind showing even a hint of gratitude for the people who gathered all that data, and never mind showing appreciation for the others for concluding the same WHILE THEY WERE RUNNING AROUND TRYING TO PROTECT THIS BITCH OF A GUY FROM THE EVIL SPIRITS IN THE HOUSE. he shows NO emotion whatsoever throughout the ENTIRE run of the show, behaving like some bored genius stuck with lower-than-average IQ people. if your main character is not interested in the story, why should readers be? nothing about that man is "broody" or "intriguing"; take away his face card and you'll get what i mean.
and it's even more disappointing when you consider the rest of the cast who are actually interesting and genuinely have potential to be great. takigawa is a full-time bassist and part-time monk, ayako looks like spoiled and rich but has interesting power related to nature (however nerfed), john is an actually capable exorcist who handles most of the tough jobs, lin is a shiki-user and masako is a pyschic as well as tv personality at a very young age. even mai, our heroine, has interesting powers related to the dreamworld and it would have been a delight to watch her grow into them. my only complain is that she runs off headfirst into danger too many times, but that's a habit she could easily grow out of as the story progresses and she learns to trust the others.
i know a lot of people found mai to be "too emotional" and the one that always hits her own foot with the axe (like when she gave out her full name to the antagonist in the school case) but i disagree. further, i blame the man. seriously, just how bland is our dark-haired genius that displays of emotional intelligence is considered to be "too emotional"? all the problems - the flaws - in this series can be put squarely on the shoulders of kazuya or shibuya or naruto or whatever the fuck his name is. he can at least inform others of his plans or intentions; the most bare minimum is to at least ASK people to trust him. but he never does that because he is oh so smart and better than everyone else. he is really not; the rest of the cast just don't get enough moments to shine. takigawa IS smart, being able to deduce our mystery guy's identity solely via observation and logical deduction (manga only). ayako IS capable; she just gets nerfed all the time and relegated to being comedy fuel. john, lin and masako have actually proven their worth multiple times throughout the series. even yasuhara who joins only halfway into the show is a better character than the main guy; his interactions with the rest of the cast members is fun and memorable, and he is also shown to be adept at collecting info relevant to the case quickly.
and mai would've been a thousand percent better if the shibuya guy was not around. what even was the point of having him in the story? his only use is in the inciting incident in the first arc, and that's it. he doesn't add anything to the story, personality-wise or interaction-wise. his intelligence and knowledge could easily be given to other characters in the show and the cases will still get solved. hell the cases themselves are pretty elementary; i could figure them out within two episodes. there was no reason for the other characters to remain as dumb as they were other than god's hand making them stay like that to make shibuya out to be some kinda genius. which he is not.
they took an entire cast interesting characters and nerfed them in favour of ONE guy. yasuhara, a complete rookie, completely obliterates him in terms of likeability and charm, while also giving us some of the most memorable moments in the show and STILL staying in the background with less screentime than the gloomy cardboard cutout. if i wanted to see people practically worship a male lead, i'd rather read bad shojo and cry over how the second lead was wayyy better. i mean come on we all know yasuhara is.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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May 12, 2025
idk what to say about this. see, the reason i picked this up was because of pretty-lady-on-the cover syndrome, and also because i thought it'd be like a paranormal-activity-of-the-week story featuring an exasperated high school student who somehow ended up working at a mystery shop by some strange twist of fate. i realize this is very specific; i sort of have a fault that way - judging books by the cover, putting things into boxes. xxxholic did start out like that, until the story plunged into the unknown icy waters of CLAMP's other work, tsubasa, and twisted the two tales so far up each others'
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asses that i found myself skimming through at least 70% of it.
xxxholic, by itself, is amazing. the story, the setting, the premise. sure watanuki is annoying as fuck at the start, and the use of standard animanga tropes does not help. but he grows. his character development, the person he becomes in the last quarter of the tale - all of that is almost perfect. "almost" i say, because a focus on just the central characters in xxxholic would've made the payoff much more satisfactory.
there's a certain melancholy in the ending - of being the only one alive at the end of a tale spanning more than a century worth of waiting. waiting for a loved one to return. i love endings like that, characters who have given up their humanity for something otherworldly, waiting for who knows how long in the space between our world and many others unseen. waiting while those you knew are long gone: a cycle of the familiar becoming unfamiliar becoming familiar again, and so on. the mind's memory may fade, but the body's memory is forever. it remembers.
and that's why it is so disappointing to see what xxxholic became. it breaks my heart to see so much potential - really, it IS my kind of story - wasted, and for no good reason. think about the emotional impact xxxholic could've had if it had been it's own story, untouched by crossovers. i haven't read tsubasa, and perhaps i never will, and maybe it's just CLAMP's style - really, who am i to say how creators should create the things they love. but i feel i can never shake off the disappointment that i felt when i got closer and closer to the ending of the manga, after starting out happily thinking it'd be a new favourite, only to end up skimming pages after pages in mild but growing frustration, THIS close to dropping it, but sticking it out till the end and realizing that this really WAS my kinda shit all along - but only at the very end.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Feb 21, 2025
do you like the colour lime? do you blast nirvana's smells like a teenage dream at full volume in the shower? do you prefer your characters with an impeccable sense of style and your manga artists with a solid eye for detail that can capture said style? do you like slowburns that burn so slow that no one other than voracious readers of ao3 fanfics written without any profit motive would get? do you want to giggle and squeal under your blankets at night because GODDAMN IT aya same
then this, my beloved reader and fellow good taste-haver, is for you
this shit singlehandedly changed my view
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on the colour lime, and if it doesn't change yours then what even was the point.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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