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Lone MacReady II said:
Kindov amazing how good the first half of Freiren was, and how much I couldn't really stay interested for the 2nd half. I liked a few of the half-episode plots and a few of the new characters, but (despite episode pacing remaining good) the story seemed to get sidelined. I also realized Frieren isn't actually a completed manga, so we aren't getting an ending this season... I feel deflated, and my tissue is spongey. I dug everything with Frieren and Himmel and the old crew, and Fern and Stark, and every demon, but that's it.
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I'm enjoying the character-centric nature of the second half so far. Normally I wouldn't like this kind of shift but the characters are strong enough to make it work, and work well, at least for me.
 
HexFag said:
After about 2 years (has it really been that long? :stress:) I still haven't finished the series. 2023 was a relatively busy year for me and I don't particularly want to rush a series like this. I had just decided to go through both the anime and the manga as there are differences in both and I would probably recommend you do the same. I know the first season of Aria skips around parts of Aqua, the first volume of the Aria manga and the episodes are all over the place in the manga. (if you want a full chart of how the anime is ordered from the manga look here) The choice for manga or anime first is totally up to you, I'll probably do the anime because the OST is amazing sells Neo-Venezia better than anything else could. The first season of the anime was great and I would highly recommend it. The opening made me close to tearing up every episode, it really does stuff to you.

I was also a good chunk through the manga and I would recommend just finding the TOKYOPOP Masterpiece edition of Aqua and then going on to Aria. Listening to the series OST helped with reading a lot.
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Thank you! This was exactly what I needed to know, now I can enjoy this series fully. :heart-full:
 
Xenomorphs Are Cute said:
It's the 2nd least intresting read of the week for me after MHA. The other series in WSJ mog it unrealistically hard, the only good thing that recently happened in JJK was the meme fight.

Speaking of memes, this is another example of my point:
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Agreed, JJK dropped off a cliff as well as MHA. Sakamoto Days, Dandadan and UndeadXUnluck are still my top 3 of the Sueisha site as of now (and one piece of course) and even stuff that isn't as enthralling like Magilumiere, Kindergarten Wars and Get the Priest to fall in love with you get me a lot more hype than JJK and MHA.

On a completely separate tangent. I've recently discovered Frieren. Plowed through the anime, and already plowing through the manga while waiting for the final episode of the season to land. I'm in the early 100s chapters and really enjoying it, though I'm gathering it has a pretty slow release schedule.
 
I feel like my biggest problem is trudging through power fantasy scifi-fantasy (isekai or not), slice of life that is very by the numbers, or kinda just high concept shit that’s inherently boring with great art work but takes forever until it hits it’s stride.
 
I know it was was discussed in this thread a year or so back but is there Still intrest for a Mangadex thread and its related groups? I had a partial OP written with alot of the stuff htey have done various scanlation group drama.
 
Betonhaus said:
Go Go! Loser Rangers! Looks interesting. Tl;dr, the monsters won and are forced to reenact their defeat for entertainment. I suspect it has The Boys vibes
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IIRC, It's getting an anime soon. I never really read this myself, but from what I've read from others at least, is that the pacing gets shitty later on, mediocre at times with it's premise, but the twists are surprisingly well executed in many people's opinions, while others think there's almost near-90 chapters of filler. It really is The Boys honestly in how it's trying to shit on the Toku genre.

I do, however, know some of some non-story related drama, which happened IRL in relation to manga's sales.
As someone who has not read it himself, I do know some stories about this manga, that aren't story spoilers.

So, from whatever little I remember about this, it actually has really shit sales, like 80% decline in sales after Volume 1, it struggles to hit 15k at times even nowadays. Just to explain how bad those sales are, when Kodansha dedicated a whole color page in the magazine just for a message "Please help us push Ranger Reject on Twitter!". The result was that 99% of (the few) tweets were of people complaining how bad it is & the editor was blocking those people. They had to hijack 5toubun twitter account with 400k followers to promote it which only resulted in many followers leaving. Later, Kodansha had the idea of attaching the Quints' bonuses to every Volumes 1-5 & it still was selling extremely poorly.

In any other case, like this being in Shueisha's hands in something like Young Jump or Grand Jump, these sales are so bad that, it would've been axed long ago if it weren't for nepotism on Kodansha's part, cause it's made by Negi Haruba, same guy behind The Quintessential Quintuplets. Whose ex-editor Kawakubo, is now WSM's (Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Jump) EiC. This is excluding the fact that Negi himself is essentially milking GoTouBun through merch to this day.

It can take it's own spoiler to explain why TQQ became bad.
 
Xenomorphs Are Cute said:
IIRC, It's getting an anime soon. I never really read this myself, but from what I've read from others at least, is that the pacing gets shitty later on, mediocre at times with it's premise, but the twists are surprisingly well executed in many people's opinions, while others think there's almost near-90 chapters of filler. It really is The Boys honestly in how it's trying to shit on the Toku genre
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Would the anime potentially have better pacing?
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
Was there any drama of its ending? Harems without an obvious winner usually do.

They never do sadly
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Thing is, there was KINDA an obvious winner. It just had many issues. I barely remember most of this, so take my words with a bit of salt.

Negi got a bit burned due to his wife giving birth, he couldn't handle an upcoming children with projects like some mangaka could (best recent example being Witch Watch), combined with having a retard for an editor (now his best strength for his shitty Ranger Reject manga), so the ending got rushed to all hell, it really reads like he took 3-4 arcs & mashed them together to make the final arc. Other than that, the biggest issue is how the end reverses the development of most of the cast so it feels like nothing in the story really mattered, the end plays out as if the author wrote it before the manga & then just paste it at the end without taking into account how the story actually developed.

Waifu-fagging
This is something I'm also guilty of (Nino my beloved) tho I only say this as someone who only saw the 1st season when it was airing, before being spoiled on the series before S2, but people disliked the girl that won. Yotsuba (we'll call her 4) won, but the other sisters 1, 2, & 4 had more screen-time & development by then, meaning that the already extremely rushed feeling 2nd half of the series (which was S2, movie was finale) are now ruined. 80% of the manga could be considered spent doing nothing, the "development" was fucking flashbacks all the time.

Also, 4 is as pity-victory as it gets, she has the least interactions with the MC. She got forced into relevancy last minute (could've been worse, like a D.Gray-man situation).

Turns out, the reason was Negi himself was waifu-fagging, except he was doing it IRL cause Yotsuba was based of his own wife. Also, this shit got leaked by the editor 6 months ago, but most didn't believe it then or huffed copium. This means that the ending was decided at the beginning. Negi created the story around the ending, not the kind of work that writes until the end to come up with an ending. Issue is, Negi was so obsessed with making it a mystery that he pretty much had to leave things regarding how the MC felt as ambiguous as possible. The proof of that is how it ended. The mystery gets solved & 2 chapters later the manga ends, ending with a half-hearted reassurance that yes, he knew the girls.

To make it even worse, he nearly got death threats for the ending. Nips on 5chan were shitting on Negi & 4, the Sakura Ayane shitpost (I'm not explaining this, it's too retarded to explain) originated from there. Negative Japanese Amazon reviews were posted on /a/ to show how bad the writing was for the characters, Negi's handling of the mystery of the bride, & portrayal of Futarou's feelings. In fact, Aka Akasaka admitted to not liking the ending either in an interview in a magazine prior to the release of Kaguya-sama S2, apparently he could tell Yotsuba was gonna win the second he saw her in the manga.

Incendiary Actions
Before going into this, I'd like to clarify that Negi isn't some pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, lolcow mangaka like Aka Akasaka (Kaguya-sama, Oshi no Ko), Makoto Yukimura (Vinland Saga). He's not a scorned mangaka like Shuwata Ramunewura (Gal ☆ Cleaning!). He's not a troll mangaka like Akira Hiramoto (Prison School, & literally every other work of his)... He's just a guy who tried to "deconstruct" to the point of disliking his own work & simped for his wife a lot.

Now to those incendiary actions, one of those was the thank you note, mainly the lack of it. Negi didn't even write a note at the end of the last volume to thank the readers for support, something which is customary among mangaka, even doujins artists do that.

Another one was that he didn't publicly acknowledge the ending of his manga, to make it worse, no one from Kodansha publicly acknowledged the ending of his manga either. He also forgot to make art for Quints' brirthday & had to shit out some scribbles at the last second.

He also admitted drawing headphones for Miku was annoying, which Miku fans didn't like. She was also expected to win due to first girl rule, but the deconstruction killed that notion.

As for the "They never do sadly" part, I agree. Hell, it'll be funny if it went through the issue that A Couple of Cuckoos did, where the sales of the manga lowered after the anime.
 
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Xenomorphs Are Cute said:
Thing is, there was KINDA an obvious winner. It just had many issues. I barely remember most of this, so take my words with a bit of salt.
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Mangakas using their wives as templates for the main love interest is fucking cursed. Interestingly it feels a lot like How I Met Your Mother ending, one of the biggest rules of writing is to adapt the plot even if the ending was already conceived, else you get cases like this where the romance feels forced.
 
I don't know what's weirder. Loveless is still ongoing over 20 years or cartoon reviewer on YouTube admit reading loveless turned him gay at the start of his loveless review. Not to defend lolicons. But there is a double standards with shorta shit.
 
Xenomorphs Are Cute said:
IIRC, It's getting an anime soon. I never really read this myself, but from what I've read from others at least, is that the pacing gets shitty later on, mediocre at times with it's premise, but the twists are surprisingly well executed in many people's opinions, while others think there's almost near-90 chapters of filler. It really is The Boys honestly in how it's trying to shit on the Toku genre.

I do, however, know some of some non-story related drama, which happened IRL in relation to manga's sales.
As someone who has not read it himself, I do know some stories about this manga, that aren't story spoilers.

So, from whatever little I remember about this, it actually has really shit sales, like 80% decline in sales after Volume 1, it struggles to hit 15k at times even nowadays. Just to explain how bad those sales are, when Kodansha dedicated a whole color page in the magazine just for a message "Please help us push Ranger Reject on Twitter!". The result was that 99% of (the few) tweets were of people complaining how bad it is & the editor was blocking those people. They had to hijack 5toubun twitter account with 400k followers to promote it which only resulted in many followers leaving. Later, Kodansha had the idea of attaching the Quints' bonuses to every Volumes 1-5 & it still was selling extremely poorly.

In any other case, like this being in Shueisha's hands in something like Young Jump or Grand Jump, these sales are so bad that, it would've been axed long ago if it weren't for nepotism on Kodansha's part, cause it's made by Negi Haruba, same guy behind The Quintessential Quintuplets. Whose ex-editor Kawakubo, is now WSM's (Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Jump) EiC. This is excluding the fact that Negi himself is essentially milking GoTouBun through merch to this day.

It can take it's own spoiler to explain why TQQ became bad.
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I've read a bit of ranger reject and from what I can tell/remember from when the first few volumes where released, I remember a lot of people felt whiplash because they where expecting it to be another romcom and where still coping for a few dozen chapters before they realized it wasn't gonna be 5toubun 2.0.

Its nothing new for a mangaka's next work to fall short of their precious manga, there's one in Jump right now with the Elusive Samurai made by the same guy as AssClass, fraction of the sales and lost something like 60% of it's volume 1 sales as well as Witch Watch that while slightly growing is still no where to what Sket Dance was. But Kodansha definitely didn't help things with how much they tried to promote it by tying it into 5toubun which like I said completely different series and the fact that like you said people really didn't like the ending, which can kill a authors future series for awhile.

Case and point, is there anyone here who remembers The World God Only Knows? Well quick TLDR everyone hated that ending to the point where Wakaki's series afterwards kept getting axed with the only 2 exceptions being a non-h doujinshi series he and some other creators made that caught some buzz and got picked up, and a romance series about two people faking being engaged to avoid being transferred to a branch office in Siberia where he had to jump ship to a completely different magazine to publish.
 
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