Mangaka Taizan-5 debut in our beloved Weekly Shōnen Jump was received with high expectations. The young author began his career with ''A Story After Everything Went Well'', a one-shot published in 2020, and soon afterwards published two other good one-shots;''Hero Complex'' and ''Kiss Shitai Otoko''. But it was in 2021 that he achieved his first success, in his very first serialization, the excellent ''Takopii no Genzai''. His fantastic art style together with his engaging narrative ensured the young author's initial success, and his new publication in Japan's biggest comics magazine was a sure bet by Jump's editorial staff, who seemed to have found an outstanding talent, it was unlikely to turn out wrong. Unfortunately, that's what ended up happening. Due his incapacity in some aspects, in others because of external circumstances beyond his control. What went wrong with Taizan-san's new work, and why did it go wrong? Is Taizan-五 a deceptive farce and its stories were never any good? Was Ichinose Family a horrible, shitty work that past the damn time to be canceled? Perhaps editorial and public pressure has hampered the progress which has been treated unfairly? I don't know, maybe we'll find out. And before you, the spoiled and immature reader who treats your favorite story as a personality trait feel offended, I'm going to give you a trigger warning:
I DON'T LIKE Ichinose-ke no Taizai.
I have several problems with its narrative and I intend to elaborate on them in the following paragraphs. So if you're someone who gets frustrated at discovering that other people don't share your tastes and can only absorb positive things in your life as a poor, helpless little baby, avoid reading what I have to say. Now, if you don't like Ichinose Family, here you'll find refuge, come with me on this fun and enjoyable adventure that is talking shit about things.
• The First Sin - Overdrama
You see, my life is already a drama. It's extremely dramatic, I don't have any money, I don't have a car, no bitches, I haven't finished college yet, I'm not 1.90, I'm not famous and I was born Brazilian, it's not easy. I don't need more drama than necessary. Everyone loves a good dramatic and engaging story that you feel compelled to continue, chapter after chapter, and Ichinose's debut delivered just that, a promising world, art with personality and an interesting mystery to be solved. We see from the very first chapter that this close-knit family isn't all that close-knit, and that even before the accident and the loss of their collective memory, they already had a ton of problems and were far from being a happy family. And knowing Taizan-san's former work, it was nothing new to expect heavy themes and a family drama in the middle of this whole mess. And that's fine, despite the drama of my life, I still have more room to appreciate the drama of other lives, I love stories with heavy drama, everyone does. Now, there's a limit to everything, just as my personal drama is supported by my routine, I couldn't bear to see my problems tripled and repeated, again and again, without interruption. What I don't want for my life I don't want for my stories, and it's a narrative waste to destroy an entire dramatic construction by delivering one problem after another, without pause, and with more and more layers of problems interspersed.
I UNDERSTOOD, I must be sad Ichinose-ke no Taizai!!! I'm supposed to cry at this point, I'm supposed to be shocked, YES, SHIT, I didn't expect a story that delivers a different Plot Twist in EVERY chapter and escalates the protagonist's problems non-stop, to deliver another Plot Twist and another problem in the next chapter, you've really got me with my pants down this time. The biggest crime that an unpredictable story can commit is to become predictable, to naturalize the unexpected in such a way that everything becomes absurdly obvious. You know that nothing matters because every discovery is going to be emptied soon after by a different problem, you don't have time to breathe and internalize the problems that the story solves, because as soon as it's over you're faced with a new problem, even worse, more abrupt and even more confusing, and that's not the problem in itself, the problem is knowing that this new problem, which was the amplification of the past problem, will become outdated in 7 days with the release of a new chapter, which will make the urgency of this new situation pointless, because now I have another concern in front of me, which will also soon lose its validity, in another 7 days.
See that character? His life is sad, you have to care!!! See this situation? Look how bad it gets, look how bad it gets in the next chapter! Look at the incessant, artificial and infinite suffering imposed on our suffering and poor protagonist, our 2d poor soul, suffer with him I beg you pleaseee. That's what Ichinose-ke no Taizai tries to do every single chapter. It's not going to happen bud. I'm like a spoiled child who only does the opposite of what's asked, if you try to convey a message through insistence, it gets lost due to annoyance. I learned this when I was blocked by my ex-girlfriend who couldn't stand receiving anymore of my messages saying that I miss her.
• The Second Sin - Overplot-twist
We understand Ichinose's first major problem, the destruction of all immersion and empathy for the characters through overdrama, which stupidly naturalizes problems in such an idiotic way that any conflict delivered becomes extremely predictable and with no impact. Now let's discuss an aggravating factor, the overplot-twist. As if it wasn't enough to annoy me by pushing dramas with no weight on a weekly basis, Ichinose likes to spice things up with another annoyance, his twists.
Okay, now I don't have my memory, okay my brother is behind all this, no no, it's actually my grandmother, no, she's doing it only for my grandfather, it's my mother who's behind it, no no, it's actually none of those, it's someone else, okay now I'm actually dreaming and I'm in a coma, ok now I'm out of the coma but actually my coma was shared with the dreams of my life and everything was real, ok now I know that someone is manipulating my coma and my family's memories, ok my brother actually has another family, oops, this family is fake and they split up, let's go back to our real Souta family. STOP, LET ME BREATHE. My man writes as if his life were on the line, racing against time, afraid of being axed, and that fear will catch up to him. I can't keep up with you Ichinose (the story and the character), my CPU can't process information at this speed, it's old, I no longer know what to be surprised by because there are too many surprises, my birthday has passed and I keep getting presents nonstop, it used to be fun to be surprised, but it's become inconvenient, I don't want to anymore. What I DO know is what NOT to be surprised by, and that's this story. Once the whole mystery thing is trivialized, once the unexpected becomes routine, why in the hell should I care? It doesn't matter anymore.
• The Final Sin - Fucking Weekly Shōnen Jump
If the two initial problems were the only ones, I wouldn't be writing this review. I've had this same problem several times with other stories that have similarly irritated me with their overdrama; Hanebado, Violet Evergarden, Kiznaveir, Hyouka, I could name movies, series, books, games, there's no end to it, the point is that my patience for whiny people is short, I'll only care about your problem if it's a real problem, not one specifically fabricated to make me empathize. My suspension of disbelief is here, but it's fragile. For me, this kind of story is like watching bad acting, you see the actor crying, but it's so fake and poorly executed that you become disconnected from the story. This has already been covered in the other two problems, my final problem is structural, it's the foundation that sustains the ills of this story and thousands of others, that is the Weekly Shōnen Jump and its outdated and archaic weekly model.
Naoki Urusawa (you have to know him, that's the minimum) has already said in an interview, and I quote:
''Every chapter needs to compose its own story, with a beginning, middle and end, being able to be enjoyed to its fullest, by itself as an individual story, without depending on its connection with the other chapters''.
He obviously didn't say it in those words and I don't have the source to assure you that he said this, but that's the idea, trust me, he did say it. The weekly structure allows a comic to be organized in a totally different format from the conventional one. The Japanese comic's production doesn't allow the same flexibility that a novelist or a book writer, where their story is thought out with a beginning, middle and end, with time for several revisions until the conclusion of their complete material. A Japanese weekly manga doesn't have this freedom, it lives by a goal where you establish a beginning, a direction of what you're aiming for, and a vague and distant ending that you may reach in God knows how many years, all of this only, of course, if your story isn't axed. What the conclusion will be like and the path to that distant end is often not even known by the author himself, weekly manga are nothing more than a thematic controlled-freestyle. It has its benefits, its variations and its problems, which are quite a few. Obviously, it's a system that considers countless variables, they take into account possible abrupt endings. They think, and they think A LOT about everything. But the thinking and organization are outdated, obsolete. The only reason Oda hasn't finished One Piece yet is because he can't, he's been trying for 10 years to produce an ending that hasn't yet been theorized by the fans, if it weren't for that we wouldn't have this thousand-year-old story still being published, I'm sure of it. Not to mention that I'm deflating the issue of weekly serialization to a narrative problem, as if the problem were solely the quality of the story, when actually there is a bigger problem, which is the maintenance of the authors' health. We have the recent example (2023) of Black Clover, which was removed from Jump due to the health of its author, as well as other mangaka who put down their pens and never returned simply because of the trauma of living through years of inhuman suffering on a weekly basis. This format is not exclusive to Shōnen Jump, but without a doubt, the country's largest magazine has enough responsibility to dictate trends in the industry, thus influencing the best way to produce manga, or in this case, the worst way.
The same man who produced Takopi's Original Sin produced Ichinose-kun. Everything he managed to do well and with quality in his previous story, which, by the way, was published in Jump+, was only possible because of the more flexible structure in terms of publication and pages that the author was given, a much healthier format for both authors and readers. It's not surprising to realize that only 26% of the top 50 mangas in anilist are weekly stories, and only 6% of the top 100 are Shounen Jump stories, many of your favorite stories are stories that have not always been published weekly, and when they have, they have been kept away from Jump eyes. Of course, the biggest hits came out of there, Death Note, Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, it's not for nothing that it's the biggest magazine in Japan, but for every one of those hits, another 50 authors died on the beach, it's a totally cruel and unfair filtering, imposed by an broken formula that makes no sense to still be maintained. Is it the one that makes the most money and is the most successful? That's exactly right. And it's also the least likely to ensure the quality of the story. If you don't want to be radical and break up the weekly rhythm, simply introduce a rotation system, establish obligatory breaks throughout the month (Like Shonen Sunday). I don't know, it's not my job to fix it, my job is to complain. DO SOMETHING
This review has been written taking into account the first 40 chapters and ending with those 40 chapters, the show is still at enormous risk of being canceled and has a good chance of ending before it even reaches the one-year mark. If that doesn't turn out to be the case and the story improves from here on it, I don't care, im not reading and i doubt it. A team that loses the first 30 games of the season only to win the last 8 games continues to be relegated.
Taizan-五 has already demonstrated his competence, he has a fantastic artistic style capable of carrying a story on its own, but it's a pity that this time it wasn't enough. May the author return soon enough with a new story, this time treating me less like a complacent, ultra-empathetic idiot, and for his own sake, i hope that he can free himself from the shackles of the damned butcher named Weekly Shōnen Jump.
