• 23 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Ah - I thought to explain the connection, but didn’t want to belabor the point if you already got it.

    First and most broadly, Fujimura is a tsukkomi completely surrounded by bokes, much like Alvin.

    More curiously though, there’s a side character who’s just called Helmet because he’s never seen without a full-face helmet, just like Alvin. And even to the point, again like Alvin, that in the rare event that he isn’t wearing his helmet, his face is pointedly hidden anyway.

    On the one hand, that’s a sort of meaningless detail, but on the other hand, it’s a meaningless detail that matches up between the two. It seems too insignificant to be deliberate but too obscure to not be.

    And yeah - it’s good. It’s mostly the same sort of boke and tsukkomi humor as this, and with really good characters (the fmc - Eri - is still one of my all-time favorite manga characters). And it’s also a surprisingly effective harem series, since the girls are all bokes of one sort or another, which is an alternative reason for them continually pestering Fujimura, and he can’t help but tsukkomi, which explains the otherwise awkward harem contrivance of the MC generally not figuring out what’s going on. It’s not so much that he can’t figure it out as that he can’t take it seriously - he thinks they’re just sort of deranged. And he’s not entirely wrong.













  • How so?

    One team translated the first 20 or so chapters, slowly and not very well. Then another one (or more precisely one person) took it over and started over with chapter 1, and has done everything since.

    If you start with fettyman’s version of chapter 1, you shouldn’t even see the other ones - when you finish one chapter, Mangadex will automatically jump to fettyman’s version of the next chapter. It’s literally as if the other versions don’t even exist.

    I don’t see the problem.





  • That’s a lot of the advantage of getting all of these chapters at once. As I noted, I was already following this, but wasn’t really sold on it. And part of the problem was that it was out to 30 or so chapters, and we still hadn’t really learned much about Ri-chan.

    But the thing is that this one’s moving slower and going into much more detail, so instead of suddenly slapping us with a condensed version of the history of her trauma, and with virtually no context, we’re getting things slowly fleshed out. And yeah - I think it’s better execution in the long run. It just needed enough chapters to really get moving.

    Another notable difference is that this one has introduced more characters, and I think that’s going to be better in the long run too. We’ve already gotten glimpses into Ri-chan’s relationships with both of her parents, and seen clues to how she came to be who she is. And we’ve already seen that her mom is apparently not as cold and distant as she initially appeared to be, and I fully expect more revelations about them.

    Glad you liked it.






  • I’ve been following this one for a while and was sort of undecided about it. It’s a page-a-day webcomic, self-published on Twitter. Or more precisely, it’s two pages a day, with the main story pages on Twitter and bonus pages on Fanbox. It was apparently partly inspired by Zyugoya’s When I Returned to My Hometown, My Childhood Friend Was Broken and is a similar set-up, though there’s no sexual content (even in the Fanbox pages) - this childhood friend was broken by a different chain of events. So it seemed sort of derivative, and the translations were apparently machine and sort of iffy. And slow. So I just wasn’t sold.

    Then, yesterday, a scanlator called fettyman posted 119 pages - 60 regular chapters and 59 corresponding bonus chapters, starting from the beginning. And with quality translations and enough pages to get a grasp on the somewhat disjointed and sprawling story, I can say I think it’s actually pretty good. It still sort of feels like a freshman effort and the gimmick of alternating every main story page with a non-story bonus page makes it sort of awkward to read straight through, but it has heart, and some great moments. And Ri-chan is an intriguing character with an interesting history.