My Manga List

Viz released a version which has both volumes in one. I am writing this before reading any reviews or opinions as I randomly picked this up at a library. Dark drama where kids get bullied and murdered but nothing too dark. Shows how kids get into trouble because of the irresponsibility of parents, although I sometimes wonder if works like these can push people towards anti-natalism. After all, if you don't have children then there is no risk that your selfish actions will make them suffer... But anyway that's not the actual message of the anime. I think I would have done the ending slightly differently and included Naoki as well to complete the trio but for it's two volume length it's certainly worth watching. The influences on the creator, Taizan5, obviously seem to be Inio Asano (oyasumi pun pun) and Doraemon, quite an unexpected mix, but it works pretty well. As usual the time travel and time loop stories interest me so I appreciated this. As for the score, it's just my subjective feeling for my own record. I refuse to justify it, because if I did I would just be one-sidedly pushing my taste down the author's throat..

3 years after he shuts himself away from society and surrounds himself with 2D friends... Otaku Jin-kyung finds himself summoned to another world by a petite summoner who needs help...! The interesting about this one at least in the first few chapters is how the protagonist gets to travel back and forth to the real world and use real life objects for his chuunibyou powers. The art, background art and colossal enemies in particular is gorgeous. The fan service is tasteful, and the otaku pandering is appreciated, though maybe neither went far enough to attract those who would appreciate it, but it went far enough that it annoyed those with bad taste. The problems appear in the story to the point where I don't think I will be rereading this manwha/webtoon. It felt like the powers of the protagonist could do anything, which was fine when it was played off as a joke at the start but it grew stale over time. The revelation about the reason why the demons are appearing also felt like kind of a let down. It's just evil nobles being evil. I also felt like I read a short story despite it being over a hundred chapters long. There are things which are just dropped like that dark skinned boy wanting to free bird girl from the religious fanatics... or the figurine which becomes lifesize and walks away when the protagonist takes him with her to the fantasy world. The character development which the protagonist does also felt a bit too easy. Basically what it took for the protagonist to stop being a NEET was just immediately being OP in another world where even if he died he would just be sent back to the real world without any cost to him. At the end he is literally saved by a goddess... and while it is moving that he wanted to help the summoner because she was an ordinary person like him, and if she could save the world, then that would mean so could he save himself... when you think about it, it doesn't make any sense... because simply by being able to summon an extremely powerful spirit like him she was not an ordinary person. One good thing about the story's resolution however is the thread about the false accusations of being a "kidd lover" at the start of the story. Basically the protagonist let's go of the hatred for those who slandered him, and this thread was mirrored quite nicely with the protagonist's scepticism of the bards' slander against the king. This felt like an artists first work and indeed I can't find any other works by the author online. I think if I was new to manga/webtoons then I would have enjoyed it as a good entry title to the medium but at this stage it just didn't feel like enough. I just hope that the artist doesn't give in and stop making artworks. For one, it's nice to see an author who seems to be on the otaku's side, but this story is from ten years ago. I wonder if such a story could be made now. I feel like even the term "otaku" is receding back into the past so some of the gags about same-looking characters in anime probably will recede into the past too.

This manhwa's protagonist is kind of like Kazuma from Konosuba but more OP. At the start there is a lot of otaku humour but that slowly fades away as the stakes get higher. The reason I gave it an 8/10 is because this webtoon is greater than its parts because things which happened earlier in the story get brought up later to make connections between the various story arcs. The reason for taking two points is that a lot of time is spent on giving character backstories. I just don't like it when stories take breaks from the character's story even if the stories are all connected.

"High schooler Hana Kim channels her pain and angst by leading a secret life as Sparrow, the live streamer! In her vids, she shares her love of poetry yet never her own face, because—let's be honest—people are the worst, especially on the internet. Her cherished anonymity is broken when her classmate Aster discovers her private life and wants to get closer to her. Will she keep her distance from him? Or will she let down the walls she built to protect her heart from life's cruel realities?" I read this because it's about a youtuber. Hana is a pretty realistically written heroine but perhaps because of that I found her a bit dislikeable at times though cute at others. She is just too uptight and moralistic towards everyone else for my current tastes but when I was younger I enjoyed cold characters such as hers. I think that the idea which this comic pushes that you should be able to sue people for mean comments is excessively authoritarian but then again I have only had to deal with a few weird and obsessive people online because of my tiny YouTube channel, and I don't know if I would be strong enough to deal with hundreds if not thousands of hate comments like big creators do. I think the basic problem in the portrayal of the creator-viewer relationship is that it is totally skewed towards the creator's perspective even though the main relationship is a creator and fan duo. Imagine some nobody getting sued by a big creator making tens of thousands of dollars for a silly mean comment they left. It is true, as this comic points out that these people are motivated by envy and jealousy towards creators, especially towards female creators, but the bigger picture which leads to this envy is that most ordinary people do jobs which they hate and for which they get poorly paid for, so of course if they see some pretty girl half their age who gets money and attention just for reading poetry in livestreams this will make them hate her if they have any modicum of self-respect and hurt pride. Maybe this is is what made me dislike Aster's character arc. He did nothing wrong but he gets constantly berated for not taking Hana's feelings as a creator into consideration but she never takes his into consideration and treats him as a lowly viewer who couldn't possibly understand her true self. The resolution of him giving her a poem to get through to her was soured for me because it was couched partly as an apology even though he constantly got rejected by her in cruel ways, and even his persistence itself at trying to connect romantically with this girl is treated as some sort of sin, even though the relationship wouldn't have happened otherwise. One of the subplots is regarding women's experience of sexual harassment in the Korean literary scene. Basically the heroine was almost groped at an event by a drunk poet she admired so she could no longer look at his poems the same way. The whole impetus for her creating her youtube channel is to recommend poets who are squeaky clean. It's not that it doesn't make sense for her character to do this but I felt like there is something lacking in the bigger picture, apparent in the fact that nobody challenges her view. I am not referring to the shallow view that the creator and art can be separated, but rather that what was necessary to give birth to great poetry was the same vitality which has led poets to do immoral things. In the long term, you can't have one without the other because the magnitude of depth which that indivisible individual will can give birth to cannot exist in the sterile and dull environments of literary scenes where moral norms totally rule, and that it is apparent because mediums such as webtoons which have more vulgarity which are youthful and fecund, whereas poetry is dead, not through a natural death. Now as for the positives, the art for the two main characters is cute, so well done to the illustrator, and although I wasn't satisfied in the way some of the points about creators were discussed it did kind of made me want to restart making youtube videos (there is something aspirational about this novel which I am always for), and I also checked out some poetry livestreams on Youtube. Unfortunately, all of them were by ugly old men with their web cams turned on rather than cute girls so... just kidding... it's just that I find it hard to follow poetry when it's read aloud. As for the poetry in this novel, I didn't think it was very good, but that hardly means anything because it was translated from Korean to English. Thankfully is pretty short and embedded well into the narrative so it didn't feel like the story had to come to a stop.

Synopsis: "Hyun-Su Jung (29) was scammed by Jung-Mi Kim and is now in debt of $900,000. He is being chased by loan sharks and ended up kidnapping Jung-Mi Kim’s daughter, Ha-Yeon Lee (17). But when Hyun-Su Jung calls to demand ransom, Jung-Mi Kim tells him she doesn’t care about what happens to her daughter and hangs up. What will happen to the kidnapper and his victim?" This is a very low-key story. I gave it a 7/10 mostly because artist actually went with the bold choice of choosing the age-gap relationship rather than just teasing it for the sake of getting attention and then choosing cop-out pairing to shield themselves from the self-appointed "moral authorities" who wouldn't forgive it anyway. In the final chapter the author talks about he almost considered these characters to be real people who exist in South Korea, and to be honest after he said that it occurred to me that I felt the same because they didn't feel like cardboard cut-outs set up to teach a conventional moral lesson. Of course, it is unrealistic that most people would act in such a mature way but there are exceptional people. There is a 52nd chapter out there somewhere that I haven't been able to see anywhere else. I would really like to see more romances aimed at men like this one. They don't make them anymore. Maybe I should try to be the change I want to see..