Ciguatera
Started reading the manga Ciguatera (same author as Himeanooru). Seems good, I’ve been looking for this kind of manga ever since I read Sekitou Elegy.
The bullies in this manga are fascinating. That guy is weird, almost friend-like. For example this scene where he wants to compare the MC’s and his own penises because of a rumor that MC has a huge one. And the bully’s girlfriend is there too so he makes her show hers as well, lol.
When the bully finds out MC has a girlfriend, he doesn’t set out to destroy their relationship, but instead asks when he will show nude pics of her, since after all he already showed pics of his girlfriend. To me this strikes as quite realistic behavior of guys who usually are bullies at schools. They just want to be cool, popular, alpha and strong. They pick on weak guys because they are annoyed by their attitude. If the bullied kid somehow grows to be like them, then they may actually become “friends” like this, but in reality that kind of thing only happens when changing schools or some other big “shuffle” in the relationships so that a kid can “start anew”.
Anyway, the bullies are with their friends in a kind of relationship that spirals and is very hard to rectify. They have to do dumb things to stay friends, and they have to be mean. A good foundation cannot be built upon such behavior, and the relationships stay shallow. But the point is, guys like this are not “evil”, nor is their bullying inescapable.
These volumes have really nice cover art. Not especially well drawn, but art-like interesting.
Finished reading Ciguatera. It was okay. This author’s works give me the feeling like there’s some theme right there but I can’t quite grap it. It’s not really a bad thing in my opinion, to make stuff happen in the reader’s subconsciousness without forcefully blurting out some “message”. However, I think these works would have been better with more focus, with an end in mind when you start. I think it’s a serious weakness of the manga industry that the series are serialized so that the writers can’t really plan the stories from start to finish. Firstly because they might get axed earlier than they intend to end, and secondly getting a new series running is such a risky prospect that continuing the existing serialization probably makes a lot of sense.
In particular, I think this series had a good thing going with the MC and the bully. It was an interesting relationship, and the subcharacters connected to it in an interesting way. For example the relation between MC and the bully’s girlfriend was quite unique. Not that I expected anything to happen between them or thought it would have made sense, but I do think the series could have been built so that something came out with that unlikiliest pairing, and I would probably have enjoyed reading that more than what I now actually got.
Also I fully expected that epilogue where MC and the heroine have separated. I think that kind of standard seinen ending made sense here, but again I wonder if this was a good story to tell among all the stories that could have been told. Throughout the series the girl is the focus of everything for the MC. It’s his triumph that they stay together for the whole time. And then that is just unceremoniously taken away from the reader in the epilogue. I’m not sure if this is some kind of intentional literary technique, since I’ve seen the same thing so many times, but it doesn’t do much for me. I much more prefer stories that are like (derailing) trains. You can feel that they are going somewhere, but the artist is crafty enough to hide it just enough so that you are constantly on the edge of your seat. Until the very climax that gives you the biggest surprise, along with the biggest sense of understanding. In one actually good how-to-write book there was a nice graph that had “plot” presented as a pyramid, vanishing into a point in the climax where everything gets resolved. In the same space is another, inverted, pyramid of “theme” indicating that “as the plot closes towards the climax, the theme expands in the reader’s mind”.
