Anime/Manga ★ Cherrim's Manga Log ★

[Cherrim]

Cherrim's Manga Log

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Hello and welcome to my weeb journal!

It's a blessing and a curse that I'm doing this because I read a lot of manga last year and will probably repeat that this year. I mainly read manga from the library at this point, so last year I tracked all my manga on Goodreads. But when I add a volume to my read list, I basically never take the time to leave any sort of review. It's made me a bit sad because I like being able to go back and see my thoughts on a given piece of media after I'm done, but also... I read almost 500 volumes of manga last year. I don't have time to leave that many reviews. So I'm definitely going to have to find a balance when I talk about what I'm up to here.

I don't tend to watch a lot of anime these days, but if/when I do, I'll make a little section for that, maybe.

Symbol Key

Much like my gaming journal, I'll be using several symbols to show the status of what I'm reading in my updates. Here's what they mean in a little more detail:

New this update
This is a series I just started or recently started. Or a one-shot I read.

Caught Up
This is a series that I have caught up with - usually to the English tankobon publications. I'll generally just wait for the next volume rather than seek out simulpublish chapters or the Japanese version if I've already been reading in English.

Completed
This is a series that has finished publication and I've read each volume available.

Dropped
For series that for some reason or other, I have no intention of continuing with.
[Chapters]
I usually read by volume, but in some cases I am tracking by chapter, such as anything I'm reading as it releases or where new omnibus publications blur the lines for how many volumes I've read. For example, the Sailor Moon Eternal editions have more chapters in them than the original tankobon releases, so it's easier to track my progress accurately by chapter.
[JP]
This is just for anything I'm reading in Japanese.

2023 A&M Challenge

This year I have challenged myself to read 200 volumes of manga. Here is my progress so far:

314/200​

Series Completed This Year

1. Takane & Hana
2. That Blue Sky Feeling
3. Inuyashiki
4. Sensei's Pious Lie
5. Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
6. A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow
7. Goodnight Punpun
8. Love Me, Love Me Not
9. Time Stranger Kyoko
10. 1122: For a Happy Marriage
11. Magical Girl Raising Project
12. Your Lie in April

Oneshots Read This Year

1. Black Paradox [Junji Ito]
2. Ristorante Paradiso [Natsume Ono]
3. No Longer Human [Junji Ito]
4. Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection [Junji Ito]
5. The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend [Mieri Hiranishi]
6. Kaiu Shirai x Posuka Demizu: Beyond the Promised Neverland [Kaiu Shirai & Posuka Demizu]
7. The Comiq [Kazuki Takahashi]
8. Tombs [Junji Ito]
9. Tatsuki Fujimoto: Before Chainsaw Man 17-21 [Tatsuki Fujimoto]
10. Tatsuki Fujimoto: Before Chainsaw Man 22-26 [Tatsuki Fujimoto]
11. Talk to My Back [Murasaki Yamada]
12. Dekoboko Bittersweet Days [Atsuko Yusen]
13. BL Fans LOVE My Brother?! [Mimu Oyamada]
14. The Cat Proposed [Dento Hayane]
15. Cut-Over Criteria [Koala Omugi]
16. I'm Looking for Serious Love! [Shoko Rakuta]
17. Remina [Junji Ito]
18. Goodbye, Eri [Tatsuki Fujimoto]

Currently Reading

• After the Rain - 3/10
• Ajin: Demi-Human - 4/17
• Alice in Borderland - 12/18
• Angelic Layer - 13/28 [Chapters]
• Anti-Romance - 1/2
• The Apothecary Diaries - 7/?
• Arisa - 3/12
• Ashonde yo!: Uchi no Inu Log - 5/10 [JP]
• Beastars - 4/22
• Beauty and the Feast - 6/11
• Black Clover - 2/?
• Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey - 3/5
• Bloom Into You - 3/8
• Blue Box - 3/?
• By the Grace of the Gods - 6/?
• Call of the Night - 5/?
• Catch These Hands - 1/4
• Chainsaw Man - 6/?
• Chi's Sweet Home - 4/12
• Choujin X - 1/?
• Cocoon Entwined - 4/?
• Crazy Food Truck - 1/3
• Crossplay Love: Otaku x Punk - 1/?
• Daily lives of high school boys - 3/7
• Delicious in Dungeon - 2/?
• The Demon Prince of Momochi House - 11/16
• Dr. Stone - 23/26
• Dreamin' Sun - 6/10
• The Fable - 1/22
• Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma - 3/36
• Forget Me Not - 5/7
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End - 1/?
• A Galaxy Next Door - 1/6
• The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún - 1/11
• The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses - 3/?
• Golden Kamuy - 3/31
• Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku - 11/13
• How Do We Relationship? - 5/?
• Hunter x Hunter - 18/?
• I Belong To The Baddest Girl At School - 6/7
• I Cannot Reach You - 1/?
• I Think Our Son Is Gay - 4/?
• If I Could Reach You - 3/7
• If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die - 2/
• Ima Koi: Now I'm in Love - 5/?
• Insomniacs After School - 1/?
• Kaguya-sama: Love is War - 2/28
• Kaiju No. 8 - 6/?
• Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits - 3/?
• Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You - 3/30
• Kingdom Hearts III - 30/? [Chapters][JP]
• Komi Can't Communicate - 16/?
• Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible - 2/?
• Library Wars: Love & War - 2/15
• Love's in Sight - 1/8
• Maid-sama! - 2/18
• Mame Coordinate - 1/4
• Mao - 9/?
• Mashle: Magic and Muscles - 7/?
• Mob Psycho 100 - 4/16
• Monster and the Beast - 3/?
• Moriarty the Patriot - 4/?
• My Dearest Self With Malice Aforethought - 2/11
• My Dress-Up Darling - 7/?
• My Happy Marriage - 3/?
• My Hero Academia - 19/?
• My Isekai Life: I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage in the World! - 7/?
• My Love Mix-Up! - 8/9
• My Secret Affection - 1/2
• My Special One - 1/?
• Natsume's Book of Friends - 3/?
• New Game! - 4/13
• Noragami: Stray God - 4/?
• Oh My Goddess - 2/48
• Oshi no Ko - 1/?
• Otherside Picnic - 1/?
• Ouran High School Host Club - 3/18
• Perfect World - 5/12
• Ragna Crimson - 1/?
• Romantic Killer - 1/4
• Sakamoto Days - 8/?
• Shortcake Cake - 5/12
• Show-ha Shoten!! - 1/?
• A Sign of Affection - 3/?
• Skip Beat! - 7/?
• Snow White with the Red Hair - 5/?
• Spy x Family - 9/?
• Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town - 2/?
• The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest - 11/?
• To Your Eternity - 4/?
• Tokyo Aliens - 3/?
• Tokyo Revengers - 3/31
• Usotsuki Rhetoric - 2/10
• Vinland Saga - 2/?
• Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina - 4/?
• The Water Dragon's Bride - 8/11
• The Way of the Househusband - 9/?
• We Never Learn - 14/21
• Whisper Me a Love Song - 6/?
• Witch Hat Atelier - 3/?
• Yona of the Dawn - 10/?
• Yu-Gi-Oh! - 6/38
• Yuri Espoir - 1/?

Dropped

• Blue Lock - 2/-
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 1: Phantom Blood - 1.5?/-
• Rent-a-Girlfriend - 8/-
• Rent-a-(Really Shy!)-Girlfriend - 2/-
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime - 3/-
• My Clueless First Friend - 1/-

 

[Cherrim]

Log Update #1

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New this update

Caught Up

Completed

Dropped

New or Completed Series

• Takane & Hana #12-18
• That Blue Sky Feeling #2-3
• I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School #1
• Ima Koi: Now I'm in Love #1
• Black Paradox
• Rent-A-(Really-Shy!)-Girlfriend #1
• Blue Lock #1
• Inuyashiki #3-10
• Ajin: Demi-Human #1
• Chi's Sweet Home #1

Ongoing Series

• Snow White with the Red Hair #5
• Whisper Me a Love Song #4
• Dr. Stone #4-6
• Monster and the Beast #3
• Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku #2
• Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits #2
• Skip Beat! #7
• My Dress-up Darling #4
• My Hero Academia #16
• Love Me, Love Me Not #7-9
• My Isekai Life #4
• Goodnight Punpun #9-10
• Rent-a-Girlfriend #6
• A Sign of Affection #2
• By the Grace of the Gods #5
• We Never Learn #11
• Mao #5

This is my first update and I have to figure out what to talk about, how much to say, and so on. As you can see... I've already been pretty busy! I'm at 46/200 for my goal and I am obviously going to have to bump it. I think for now I'm going to focus on talking about series/one-shots I complete and anything new I pick up.

Completed Series

Takane & Hana

10/10
This is the story of Hana, a high school student who ends up impersonating her sister for an arranged marriage meeting and hitting it off in a bizarre "we find each other sooo annoying" with the super rich and high-class Takane ten years her senior. The first half of the manga is largely just them trying to one-up each other during outings together, but there was a point in the manga where it had to transition from "silly age gap fake dating" to "oh no we caught feelings but the age gap is still there" where it was a bit awkward because they really had to sell us on the drama of it, but honestly? On the whole it handled it pretty well. I was always going to be suspending disbelief as a reader over the age gap with a high schooler because like... yuck in real life, for sure, but this manga managed to make it work in an appealing way to read. The inherent imbalance between the characters was constantly turned on its head and the transparency of the characters and their families sold it a lot better than I expected once the tone turned a little more serious. (But only a little more serious.) In the end it was a really sweet manga with very appealing art and one of the few series that has ever made me laugh out loud extremely regularly.

I really loved this manga a lot. If I ever get rich, this is absolutely one I want on my shelf instead of reading from the library, but at 18 volumes for the set... I think I'll be waiting a while, lol.

That Blue-Sky Feeling

6/10
This was a pretty cute high school gay romance that, hypocritically enough given the previous review, lost some points for me because of the damn reliance on a 20-something adult who keeps interacting with high schoolers. Noshiro is a new transfer student who notices loner Sanada and tries to befriend him. Even when he finds out about the rumour that Sanada is gay, it doesn't deter him and it's basically the story of Sanada learning to trust and open up while Noshiro learns about other sexualities, including his own. However, I just could not get past the fact that one of Noshiro's exes was like a 26 year old guy and never does the series question this or be like "maybe this is kind of yikes". The focus is always on the characters being like "whoa, you're gay??" instead of "whoa, why did this adult in the work force invite 3 teenage high school boys to his house for dinner and a sleepover?" I think it would have been fine if he'd just been like a gay mentor or crush to some of the characters, helping them learn about themselves and stuff, but the fact that he was the one guy's ex and it was repeatedly brought up just bugged me so much. Even in Takane & Hana, once things got more serious, the age gap was appropriately called out and touched upon by the surrounding characters and her family was very involved and stood up for her when she was out of her league. But in this, it was just never ever discussed. It's not the first coming of age gay manga I've read with something like this in it, and it's not like that sort of story is unheard of even in real life, but I just did not enjoy the way it was presented here at all and it's what I ended up taking away from the series moreso than the rest of the messages within. Aside from that, though, I did like how the manga handled the idea of trying to keep a secret for yourself, for a friend, dealing with queer sexuality in a largely straight world, and so on. I just wish the one guy had a different role, lol.

Inuyashiki

6/10
I'm gonna be honest, the only reason I stuck with this manga was because it was just so bizarre. The art really isn't my thing, the violence in it was far too gratuitous and it felt like porn more than trying to make a statement. I ended up just knocking out the whole series in a day after a certain point because it was pretty quick to read when I was just kind of skimming over all the fight sequences. I didn't mind it in the end, or at least I liked the way it resolved, but especially some of the earlier bits, like the whole chapters with the yakuza, were just... too much. I don't think they added anything to the story at all and it was just so depressing.

New Series

I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School

Volume #1
I read one volume of this recently. It's about a rebellious girl who falls in love with a guy who's been bullied a lot. She doesn't know how to be chill about things so she always looks really fierce and overbearing and he interprets it as she's claimed him as a lackey and keeps doing nice things for her because he thinks she'll beat him up otherwise. The misunderstanding is funny enough that I'll keep going for now, but I suspect the concept will get old pretty quick.

Ima Koi: Now I'm in Love

Volume #1
Another romance. This one... I think will also get pretty boring since the hook isn't anything special, but it was cute enough I'll give volume 2 a go. Basically it's about this girl who's rescued from harassment on the subway by another boy at her school and falls in love. He agrees to date her to see what happens and seems to be falling for her too, but that's like... the whole thing.

Rent-A-(Really-Shy!)-Girlfriend

Volume #1
I really think I will drop this after the next volume. I can't remember what made me reserve the next volume instead of just giving up this time, but I really just don't find the premise compelling and the manga it's spun off from is already questionable for my tastes. But at least the original has a lot of drama to make up for very obviously not being made with my demographic in mind, lol.

Blue Lock

Volume #1
I am mad that I'm not dropping this one, hahaha. I don't like sports manga and this is a soccer manga, but it's so off the rails weird that I'm going to give it a bit longer. I love the bizarre nature of "oh no, Japan will never be great at soccer because they're too collectivist in culture" leading to "well, we barely even want to monetarily support the team but sure, let's build a big secret facility where we basically kidnap 300 high school students to find the best striker in the world". Like what in the hell? Let's see where this goes.

Ajin: Demi-Human

Volume #1
If it's not obvious by now, I basically just take out any manga my library has digitally and give it a shot for a volume or two. I think this one isn't for me, but it was at least interesting enough that I'll keep going with it for now. I think it'll end up too violent for my tastes though and I learnt my lesson with Tokyo Ghoul to just drop stuff when I'm not enjoying it enough. This has similar vibes for me, but I do want the main character to meet his fellow... demi-humans, I guess? And then I'll see if it's caught my interest for good.

Chi's Sweet Home

Volume #1
I've been putting off reading this largely just because I'm lazy and I couldn't imagine I'd get much out of it. It's unfortunately flipped because it's for very young kids who I guess they just don't want to bother teaching right-to-left reading to (probably the correct choice), but it's very cute. It's basically exactly the original Chi's Sweet Home anime but in manga form but I can't be mad about it because it's so dang cute and especially now that I actually have a cat, so much of it is relatable. I never want a kitten again but I'll happily read about them.

Continuing Series

Monster and the Beast

Volume #3
I could have sworn when I was looking this volume up that it was the final volume in the series, so I was very confused as I was reading it and it didn't seem to be wrapping things up. I guess there's more of it and the next volume isn't due out till February, so I'm caught up! Also my library covered up the "explicit content" symbol with one of their sorting stickers so I was also like "oH" as I was reading through it and it suddenly turned... explicit. I just casually had the volume sitting out on the table for a week, sorry mom for bringing smut into ur house.

A Sign of Affection - Volume #2
I mostly just want to say I REALLY love the title "A Sign of Affection". The Japanese is ゆびさきと恋々, which is roughly "affectionately attached by the fingertips". It's about a deaf girl who falls in love with a hearing man and begins teaching him Japanese Sign Language, so the title is a pun on that and the localized title is sooo good. The original is of course a reference to sign language by using fingers/fingertips along with affectionate attachment/longing and I love that there was such a clear way to translate that into English with "sign" doing double duty for sign language but also the phrase "a sign of affection" being such a cute way to refer to the romance. Aaaaa I love when the stars align for localization like this! The manga itself is beautiful, too, with very pretty art and you can tell a lot of care went into how to portray the deaf girl. The typesetting changes depending on how she's interacting with the world - words are a light grey if she's lip reading and sometimes she doesn't quite catch the meaning if someone is mumbling or saying a word she doesn't recognize. When she or others are signing, the author has said in an interview that she consults with deaf friends and chooses specific words from the sequence of signs to convey in the panels. It's also clear when the protagonist is just using her phone to respond to people. It's just a very well done manga and I'm excited to keep reading it.

Dr. Stone - Volumes #4-6
I really don't often binge manga at all. Because of the way I'm reading it (primarily borrowing digitally on my iPad from my local library), I usually just take out one volume at a time and kinda sit on it until I feel like reading manga and then I'll just read a few volumes of different things based on what's due soonest. But volume #4 of this ended on a cliffhanger and I just had to see more and so I borrowed a few more volumes and kept going until the plot thread was resolved. I'm kind of glad I did because I realized it's sooo much quicker to read manga when you're reading several volumes of the same thing in a row instead of switching series/styles/genres with each book you read. I'm still quite restricted by how many copies the library has of something and whether others are waiting with holds, but I might try to do this more in the future. I do hope a new hook shows up for this, though, because before the aforementioned plot point I wasn't terribly invested in this and I already feel myself slipping back to that point ahaha.

 

[Cherrim]

Log Update #2

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New this update

Caught Up

Completed

Dropped

New or Completed Series

• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End #1
• Call of the Night #1
• The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses #1

Ongoing Series

• Perfect World #2
• The Demon Prince of Momochi House #8
• Chainsaw Man #2
• Komi Can't Communicate #8
• Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon #50-55 (ch)
• Whisper Me a Love Song #5
• Yu-Gi-Oh! #2

New Series

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Volume #1
I really enjoyed this! It follows an elf who was part of a party that took down a demon lord in the past coming to terms with her long lifespan compared to that of her mostly human companions. The art is really pretty and the concept is really poignant and I'm excited to read the next volume.

Call of the Night

Volume #1
This is just kind of weird. I like the characters well enough that I'll keep going but the premise doesn't do much for me as I'm not really interested in vampires.

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses

Volume #1
There really isn't much to this and I was admittedly a bit baffled to look this series up after this volume to find out it has 10 volumes and an anime on the way, but I can only hope the series broadens into something more? It's cute enough, though, and the art is pretty, so I'll keep up with it as it publishes, assuming my library sticks with it.

Continuing Series

Whisper Me a Love Song - Volume #5
This continues to be just a fantastic series. I'm so glad it's getting an anime version. In this volume, Himari learns about the drama between Yori's band and its previous member, having befriended all involved. I really liked that this volume took some time to build out the side characters instead of focussing so heavily on Himari and Yori's relationship. Shiho's backstory and the reason she's so driven is very interesting and the tension in her flashback chapter was so well done, my heart was racing as I realized how it was going to turn out. I was spoilt yesterday on how the next volume (which is the last one currently in English) turns out which sucks but I'm still interested to see it play out when my library gets a copy.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon - Chapters #50-55
I'm in the final stretch with this! It's been a very slow read because the art is so dense with detail. That's not a bad thing, but rather than zooming right through it like I find I can with a lot of simpler art styles, I have to stop and take everything in for much longer per page with Sailor Moon. Plus, I'm reading the eternal editions which, instead of the typical 3-4 chapters that the original tankobon volumes had, have 5+ chapters per volume. It's just a lot to get through! But I think I have one more volume to go after this. It's very good of course, but it does make me appreciate the pacing of the original anime run. Turns out the filler was really great for developing the characters and its the characters that I love because I can't really follow the plot to save my life, if I'm being honest.

Yu-Gi-Oh! - Volume #2
I forgot how quickly the manga gets into the Ancient Egyptian stuff since it's... actually been about 20 years since I first read it (wtf I'm old). I mean, I guess the original anime might have too, but I can't recall finding many episodes of it back in the day and the longer running anime didn't do much at all until later because it was so focussed on the card game. We finally saw the card game in this volume but I'm enjoying that it's still not a huge thing yet, since I think I might lose interest at that point. I really like the way Takahashi draws this. It's always really easy to follow the action and there's something about his older, rougher art that's just so charming that sort of gets lost as the series went on and the characters got much more angular and "on model" all the time.

 

[gimmepie]

Beyond Journey's End sounds really interesting. I might have to look into that one.

 

[Cherrim]

Log Update #3

​

New this update

Caught Up

Completed

Dropped

New or Completed Series

• No Longer Human
• Ristorante Paradiso
• My Love Story #1
• High School Debut #1
• Sensei's Pious Lie #7-8
• Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon ch#56-61

Ongoing Series

• I Belong to the Baddest Girl in School #2
• Dr. Stone #7
• Kakuriyo #3
• Ima Koi #2
• Komi Can't Communicate #9
• Good Night Punpun #11-12
• A Sign of Affection #3
• By the Grace of the Gods #6
• Alice in Borderland #5-6
• Whisper Me a Love Song #6

Writing this update from the airport! I just spent a week in Arizona avoiding the snow from home. I read a bit of manga while I was here and also bought some! We went to some used book stores while we were here and man I wish we had Half-Price Books in Canada. I found almost the entirety of Angelic Layer as well as a volume of Satoko and Nada for like... $25? Considering the former is out of print, I'm ecstatic about it. I can finish reading it! (And Satoko and Nada is one of the greatest, funniest series out there and I'd love to collect the whole thing to reread.)

New Series

No Longer Human

I didn't know this was based on something so I was somewhat surprised by the end when a real author I recognized cameoed in it, realizing later that it was based on that author's loose autobiography, iirc? It was not really… what I tend to expect from Junji Ito. I'm not sure if he does better with original ideas or if this adaptation just wasn't really suited to his talents but I didn't super enjoy it. The content matter wasn't really my thing in the sense that it was quite depressing—moreso upon realizing it was biographical to an extent—but even beyond that, it kind of felt like Ito really needed to add more horror elements to make it his own and I never really felt like they fit. The shock value wasn't needed for this sort of story so it kind of felt out of place, especially by the end when I didn't feel like it added anything to the natural horror of the situation. I'm also being vague because I read this all in one night when I could not sleep before a flight and have since had a whole sunny vacation to forget about it LOL but my impression more or less remains. Wouldn't really recommend but a tiny of part of me wants to go read the original novel.

Ristorante Paradiso

I read a different manga by this author and did not care for it at all (one of the very few manga I have dropped after only one volume), but I gave this one a try since it's only a oneshot. It's about a girl who travels to her estranged mother in Italy who abandoned her with her grandparents to marry another man. Her mother vehemently does not want her new husband or anyone in their life to know the protagonist is her daughter and her daughter has every intention of ruining her mother's life by revealing that, but ends up falling in love with a much older divorced man who is a waiter at the restaurant her mother and her husband run. It's kind of a weird story (why do I end up reading so much age gap stuff??) but also pretty sweet. I liked the way it resolved with everyone having known from the start that she was her mother's daughter and supporting the both of them anyway as well as the way the tenuous relationship with her mother panned out. Nothing resolved in a happy ending wrapped in a neat bow, but everyone's lives were messy and the characters all grew together in a way that was believable and leaves you thinking they're all gonna be all right, and I liked that.

My Love Story

Volume #1
I don't know what to say about this beyond the fact that it was pretty sickeningly cute. A kind of unattractive guy who's used to his attractive best friend always ending up as the object of his crushes' affections saves a girl on the train from a groper and she falls in love with him for once, which he takes most of the volume to realize. It's extremely sweet, including learning the reason why his friend always turns down the girls who confess to him. There's a bit of drama in that the friend's older sister was sort of saving the protagonist as a romantic option for once he was an adult that I don't really care much for (seriously? age gaps in everything I read? I don't mind it but I'm not even looking for it!) but it's also largely resolving so!!! I'm not really sure where this is going. It's cute though, so I'll keep at it!

My High School Debut

Volume #1
This one is the story of a sporty tomboyish girl who decides that she wants to attract a boyfriend once she gets to high school, but realizes rather quickly that she is not at all successful at it, no matter how many how-to articles she reads in magazines. An aloof, attractive boy reluctantly takes her under his wing to help her figure out fashion and so on on the condition that she doesn't fall in love with him. It's pretty funny how much of a disaster she is even if it hits pretty close to home because I'm willing to bet if I'd ever had a "I really want a boyfriend" phase at any point of my life I'd be equally useless at putting myself out there in flattering cutesy things. It's a pretty endearing manga so I'm gonna keep going.

Sensei's Pious Lie

Volumes #7-8
This was… an extremely uncomfortable series. It's got age gaps, it's got cheating, it's got physical and sexual abuse. Yikes! I didn't actually enjoy it much at all, if I'm being honest, but something kept me reading. It's essentially the story of a high school teacher whose pregnant best friend's partner has been sexually abusing her for years and eventually as a coping mechanism (?) she kind of enters into a strange romantic relationship with one of her reclusive male students. Among other things. In this final omnibus that collects the last two volumes (I didn't even realize I was reading omnibus volumes—no wonder I'd come away so depressed every time if I was having two intense volumes for the price of one), everything sort of comes to a head and it's very depressing, quite in appropriate, and… well, a little bit satisfying in the way most of the characters get what they deserve, for better or worse. I would not recommend this at all nor would I ever read it again, but in a strange way I'm glad I read it. Sometimes I guess it's good to challenge yourself with harder subject matter. I guess that's what all the cutesy romcoms I listed above are for! To wind down after something like this.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon

Chapters #56-61
It's been a very long time coming, but I've finally finished reading the Sailor Moon manga! I've been reading the Eternal Editions which collect the chapters into slightly different volume counts than the original tankobons, so I think I'm going to count these as two or three volumes for my challenge, depending on how close to the original run they were. (I'm counting things as best I can by original Japanese tankobon runs for the sake of my challenge because it's more satisfying for the count lol.) I really enjoy Sailor Moon, but I think the original 90s anime adaptation is my favourite version of it. The manga is absolutely gorgeous, but the filler in the anime goes a long way for helping the pacing, strangely enough. The manga is just kind of all the time all the time and I never really felt like anyone but Usagi or Chibiusa ever really got a chance to shine, unlike the anime which gives plot points more breathing room and gives characters their own episodes to highlight their characters.

One thing I noticed in the manga was that I kind of like… never really knew what was going on. I couldn't follow the action very well, which might be a symptom of reading action scenes moreso in shounen manga where it's more of a highlight than the characters, maybe? But the timeline and plot of Sailor Moon felt pretty wishy-washy at the best of times. It was an enjoyable read but I probably couldn't explain back what happened. Like when you're learning math or something and you understand the content well enough to do the problems but definitely not well enough to teach the concept to someone else, lol.

But anyway, it was nice to finally read it! I didn't vibe with the art style when I was younger so I never bothered to read it and it felt nice to mark it complete this morning when I finished the final volume.

I just realized I basically wrote all of this in my last update but OH WELL. I'm leaving it here because I'm sitting in an airport writing this on my iPad and cannot be bothered to edit it to not be repetitive.

Continuing Series

Whisper Me a Love Song

Volume #6
Turns out I didn't get a spoiler, I just kind of misinterpreted the line about Himari becoming the other band's manager as "she'll become our manager if we win" instead of "she'll become our manager right now until the competition" lol. So that's good! I really liked the drama in this volume, which was Yori not actually being okay with Himari being the other band's manager and pulling away any time the topic came up, despite assuring Himari otherwise. I really liked the honesty between the girls by the end before they shared their first kiss. This is just so sweet. Anyway, I'm all caught up with this series now and it's very sad because the next volume doesn't come out in English until June, I think? I miiiiight look into picking up the volumes in Japanese from here on out but I think my musical vocab is pretty bad so I'm not sure how well it'd go. (But… I guess that's one way to learn, huh?)

By the Grace of the Gods

Volume #6
I think the next volume of this comes out in just over a week but! I have technically caught up and I wanted to try to write updates on anything I caught up to publication with so here we go.

Although, well, there's not a lot to say. This is a pretty standard "isekai where the protagonist controls slimes and is super overpowered in the new fantasy world" manga and it's extremely boring at times, but this is the only one where I actually think the protagonist and his setting/situation is cute, so even though I've been keeping up with most of them for some reason, this is the only one I kinda look forward to the new volumes for. Hopefully my library gets the next one pretty quickly, but it'll be weird waiting too long after that one so maybe I won't mind a delay this time.

Oh my flight is boarding, I should stop here…!!!

 

[Cherrim]

Log Update #4

​

New this update

Caught Up

Completed

Dropped

New / Completed / Dropped Series

• Blue Box #1
• Kimi ni Todoke #1-2
• Maid-sama! #1-2
• Show-ha Shoten!! #1
• Suppose a Kid [...] Moved to a Starter Town #1
• Tokyo Revengers #1
• Tokyo Aliens #1
• Usotsuki Rhetoric #1-2
• A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow #9
• Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection
• The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend
• Goodnight Punpun #13
• Kaiu Shirai x Posuka Demizu: [...]
• Love Me, Love Me Not #10-12
• Blue Lock #2
• My Clueless First Friend #1
• Rent-a-Girlfriend #7-8
• Rent-a-(Really Shy!) Girlfriend #2
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime #3

Ongoing Series

• 1122: For a Happy Marriage #3-4
• Ajin: Demi-Human #2-3
• Alice in Borderland #7-10
• The Apothecary Diaries #7
• Arisa #3
• BEASTARS #3
• Beauty and the Feast #3
• Chainsaw Man #3-5
• Chi's Sweet Home #2
• Dr. Stone #8-18
• Dreamin' Sun #4-6
• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma #2-3
• The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses #2
• Golden Kamuy #2
• Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku #3-6
• High School Debut #3-4
• I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School #3-4
• Ima Koi: Now I'm in Love #3-4
• Kaiju No. 8 #4-5
• Kingdom Hearts III ch28-29
• Komi Can't Communicate #10-11
• Mao #6-7
• Mob Psycho 100 #4
• Moriarty the Patriot #2
• My Hero Academia #17
• My Love Mix-Up! #6
• My Love Story!! #2-5
• My Dress-Up Darling #5
• My Happy Marriage #2
• New Game! #4
• Noragami #3-4
• Perfect World #3
• Sakamoto Days #4-5
• Spy x Family #9
• The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest #7-8
• Time Stranger Kyoko #1
• Way of the House Husband #9
• We Never Learn #12-14
• Yona of the Dawn #5-6
• Your Lie in April #3-4
• Yu-Gi-Oh! #3

Augghhgh why did I leave this alone for so long. I've literally read over a hundred volumes since I last updated and now I have to write about them all!!!!

New Series

Blue Box

Finally a sports manga I think I can get into. It's about students attending a prestigious sports academy and I think the reason I might be able to care about it is they largely all play different sports so far. The protagonist plays badminton and finds out the girl on the basketball team that he has a crush on is going to be living with him and his family at the start of the new school year. So far it's been light on the sports and focused more on the characters and how they approach their sport. Hopefully it continues like this because I'm a big fan of the characters so far.

Kimi ni Todoke

I think maybe I'd like this more if I'd read it before "My Clueless First Friend" (see way below) because it kind of repeated the same jokes as that one, but with more endearing characters. I'm gonna keep going a bit because I've always heard good things about this series and------okay I had written this much in my notes app and am only just now coming back to it as I post this and I read the second volume and it's definitely getting better. The characters are getting more depth and I'm enjoying it. There's like 20-something volumes to go so I hope that continues lol.

Maid Sama!

This was...... very 2000s. It's the story of a serious student council president who takes a part time job at a maid cafe and gets found out by one of her rivals and the hijinks that ensue. I can't remember if I 'dropped' this or not. I think maybe my library just had the first omnibus volume digitally and while I guess I'd be okay with continuing it, I'm not going to go looking for it. If they add further volumes, I'll read them but if not… I'm not missing much.

Show-ha Shoten!!

I read this the other day and it was really good. It's the story of a shy boy who's secretly one of the funniest joke writers in Japan, as shown by his numerous awards from write-in comedy shows. He gets roped into doing a live comedy routine with another student at his high school and loves it, so now he wants to go to the top to become famous through comedy to have another shot at meeting a girl he knew as a child who moved away and changed her name after her mother's remarriage. But first he has to prove to his parents that he's good enough to concentrate on this instead of his studies. I'm really excited for more volumes.

Tokyo Revengers

I was surprised that I enjoyed this, but I'm always a sucker for time travel fix-its. It's the story of a deadbeat who manages to go back in time and decides to use this ability to rescue his middle school girlfriend who's destined to die to gang violence. The characters are surprisingly likeable for being rough and tumble middle/high schoolers (not usually my fave character archetype in manga) and as I said, I've got a soft spot for this sort of thing.

Tokyo Aliens

This is one of the many manga I picked up to read the first volume of, fully expecting to drop it there but… I liked this one, lol. It kinda reminds me of Men in Black, in that there's a bustling alien tourism industry on earth and it follows a boy who gets recruited into a special sector of the Japanese police who deal with aliens. He finds out that his late father, who was a police officer killed in the line of duty, was actually also a special agent with this part of the police and there's more to his death than originally thought. It has really clean art that's easy to read through, so I'm happy to keep going.

Usotsuki Rhetoric

This is a really sweet manga! It's about this girl who can hear lies when people say them, which caused her no end of trouble growing up because her honest nature made her enemies when she'd call people out for their lies. The story starts with her arriving in a new town after striking out on her own only to find the job she was relying on was already filled. She ends up as the assistant to a broke detective in town using her ability to help him solve cases and it's cute to see her find some self-worth as she learns how to handle her ability and tell white lies from bad ones. None of the cases are particularly astounding mysteries or anything, but the characters are nice and I like the premise.

Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town

This is really funny. It's a much more interesting take on the "overpowered person in an isekai fantasy setting" because it's actually... well, exactly as the stupidly long title says. (Seriously, I had to truncate it for my little list up there AND change my CSS to fit some of these titles in smh.) It's the story of this boy who moves to the big city and he's a wimp at home who can barely do anything, but his dream is to become a solider for the crown or whatever. But... when he gets there, he's super overpowered because it turns out his native village is actually the "endgame" village where they're all stupid strong because the local flora and fauna is like max level, so to speak. So even him, the weakest of them all, is insanely powerful compared to anyone in the city. But he has no clue and the situations this creates are pretty funny.

Kaiu Shirai x Posuka Demizu: Beyond the Promised Neverland

The other long title one I had to cut up for my list... This is a little anthology of stories that the creators (writer + artist) of The Promised Neverland worked on together. I think there was even a little write-up for each short manga sort of explaining it and what inspired it. Some of them I believe were sort of... tests to see if they could execute TPN. I liked some of them more than others, but overall I like this duo so I like what they'd created together. I think it ended with a short sequel chapter to TPN which was cute. Can you tell I read this months ago and barely remember it now?

Completed Series

A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow

I really liked the middle of this series where everyone was kind of problematic. By the end it just got kind of boring. I suppose maybe if I'd read it all at once I might have enjoyed it more but I went quite a few months between some volumes and the pacing felt wonkier than it actually was as a result. But on the whole I guess I just kind of... expected more. It's classified as yuri/girls love but the closest it got was when everyone was really possessive of each other and even then it just kind of felt like normal adolescent friendship drama. And I guess sometimes that's just how yuri goes and you really need to look between the lines but this one really leaned into "they're really good friends" territory.

The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

idk if this is """technically""" manga because it's only in English right now but the creator is part-Japanese who's lived in Japan and draws manga style and I think is trying to get this published in Japan too so? Whatever, counting it. It's an autobiographical manga of a girl's first love (with another girl) and how it goes awry. It was funny and sad and the perfect humour level for me. And I liked turning one page and seeing a figure of my favourite Final Fantasy character at one point. (Emet-Selch? In my yuri manga? It's more likely than you think.)

Goodnight Punpun

What a bizarre series. I don't think I've talked about it here before, which I suppose is the problem with my reading so much... I end up only having time to detail things I've started or finished which means all the middle of reading it goes unremarked upon and suddenly I've read 13 volumes and I'm sitting here going . . . . . . about how to talk about it. This was one of the most depressing and also weird things I've ever read! It's... at its core...? I guess? About a boy from an extremely dysfunctional family who falls obsessively in love with a girl from his class whose family is part of a cult. They're separated in elementary school and then the manga follows his life through onto adulthood where he is a useless member of society. You see his escapism evolve throughout his life but the bad luck just never really relents, not that he works hard at all to overcome anything. It's depressing!!!! Eventually he finds the girl he was obsessed with and, uh, well she's not any better off than him and while I won't spoil anything, it is not a happy ending and it is pretty, as the kids say, ****ed up.

Oh and also he's always drawn as this super cartoony little bird in an otherwise very realistic setting. It's weird, but I think the subject matter would be even more serious if there wasn't this ridiculous thread going through the whole story.

Love Me, Love Me Not

Wahh, I'd been putting off finishing this because I've come to LOVE Io Sakisaka's work. Her characters are so fresh and cute and I like their relationships. And her art is soooo pretty. This was the last of her available manga and I didn't want to be out of material so I didn't prioritize finishing this, but man, it was cute. I really liked that this one focussed on two different protagonists and how they work through things at different paces with different opinions and outlooks, but come together to help each other because of it. I liked that it wasn't heavy on the relationship drama but just gave the characters room to be who they were. I liked it better than Strobe Edge but probably not as much as Ao Haru Ride.

Although!!! Apparently this one is not the last since she's started serializing a new series as of 2021. It's not in English yet so I might actually pick it up in Japanese as it releases.

Continuing Series

Alice in Borderland

This is a bit more violent than I usually go for and I think lately it's gotten even moreso, but I'm still curious enough about how the world came to be how it is that I'm still sticking with it... Just half of the series to go! But I don't like it enough to read ahead in Japanese so I will simply await more volumes in English.

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses

This isn't a very remarkable manga or anything, but I did want to bring it up in light of "My Clueless First Friend" (again, see below). I couldn't really figure out while I was reading this volume why I don't mind this manga filled with extremely repetitive gags whereas the other one was just excruciating to read but I think it probably comes down to this one not being about someone being bullied and another character's complete inability to see that. Anyway, apparently this one has 10 volumes? Not gonna lie, I think it might wear out its welcome if it goes that long reusing the same gag.

Dreamin' Sun
Not a lot to report here, but I did want to record some thoughts about this one. I admit I spent most of volume 4 extremely confused as to what was going on since it had been nearly a year since I picked up volume 3, but this manga is very strange. It once again made me realize that age gap stuff with high schoolers and older characters makes me uncomfortable when it's never confronted at all. I didn't mind it in Takane and Hana because even if it gave some pretty basic excuses for it sometimes, it at least acknowledged it. But this one is squicking me because the protagonist is crushing on her much older live-in landlord, who is a lawyer. And once when she confesses in front of her whole school, he agrees to go out with her because (as far as we know in the volume), his old high school teacher is there and he was going out with her when he was in high school and he feels pressured to agree or something? And all the adults around him kept telling him he should accept her feelings. Or like, they were giving advice like you'd give one of her peers--to "come up with his answer" and to not agree to go out with her if he didn't have feelings because he'd hurt her... what!!! No! They should be telling him to kick her out so that her puppy love crush couldn't go any further!! I had this surge of hope in one volume because one of his adult peers is a police officer who saw them together and looked REALLY suspicious and I was sitting there like yes finally an adult who is going to tell him to stop dating a high schooler and... no, turns out he just doesn't like their relationship because she's not good enough for his college buddy, so hijinks will ensue as he tries to keep them apart. IT'S SO WEIRD. Like, if him being an adult isn't a big deal, then why make him an adult at all? I have a feeling he needs to be a lawyer for plot reasons, but surely in a manga you could just like... either have him be an assistant at his father's firm or find some way for him to be working as one while still attending high school. It's not really that much more unbelievable than some guy hosting a bunch of wayward teenagers who just don't feel like being at home. He could even still be the landlord if they were both in high school. Or hell, even just make him a university student? That's not so insane an age gap and you could even sort of get away with "he may be an adult but he's not an adult adult since he's not in the workforce yet. Just... idk. It's so uncomfortable to have him so much older, making moves on her (because I got far enough that

I'm just so baffled that this is so weird and the characters seem so childish when I picked this up because I loved the author's other work, Orange. It was a really poignant series about characters processing grief and using clues from their future selves to prevent their friend from committing suicide in the present. Everyone felt so real and to go from that to this manga is whiplash. (Apparently Dreamin' Sun was serialized a bit before Orange? So it's not even a case of one being from way earlier in their career... it's weird!

Not sure why I'm not dropping this. I think I'm a masochist.

Dropped Series

This is already so long... gonna see if I can quickly get through the reasons I dropped the following manga:
Blue Lock

I tried to like this because it was an insane take on sports but everyone in it was just so unlikeable. I didn't want any of them to come out on top and I didn't want to read about them anymore. u_u

My Clueless First Friend

This has to be one of the most boring things I've ever read. Every single chapter is the exact same gag over and over again. The clueless overexcited transfer student misinterprets everyone's bullying of the gloomy girl as her having special powers and shuts them all down by saying it's really cool that she's a reaper or will curse you. It's the same thing over and over and over again. If this hadn't been an omnibus I would never have read two volumes of it. It's a shame it got a little better by the end when they changed up the setting from school to elsewhere for summer vacation, but it was too little too late.

I assume it's for little kids but that kind of baffles me because I didn't think licences for those were particularly sought after in the west. Apparently this has an anime adaptation starting this season and I think it's pretty telling that by episode 3 they're already near the end of what was in volume 2 because there just isn't anything to adapt.

Rent-a-Girlfriend / Rent-a-(Really Shy!) Girlfriend

Dropped both of these. The latter was an easy decision because I shouldn't even have read the first volume since I didn't find the girl in it compelling enough to get a spin-off, but as you can gather from the previous entry here, I just kind of give everything I see in my library's digital offers a shot lol. As for the main series, I still kinda like the hook and the characters and the drama, but for some reason I stumbled upon spoilers for the series which is still going and by volume 19 it sounds like it hasn't gone anywhere and I just don't care enough to continue if it's gonna drag out like that.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

Was this one of the earlier works in the isekai boom? Is it based on a novel that's a lot better than the manga version? I don't get it. I just wasn't into it at all.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

Oh right, this is probably blasphemy for a weeb but I dropped Jojo because I find the art ugly and the characters and story boring. I really tried to give it at least two volumes but I put off volume two for like half a year and when I finally picked it up I couldn't bring myself to even finish it. Dunno what chapter I left off on so I'm not even gonna add it to my list at the top lol.

 

[Cherrim]

Log Update #5

​

New this update

Caught Up

Completed

Dropped

New / Completed / Dropped Series

• 1122: For a Happy Marriage #5-7
• A Galaxy Next Door #1
• Anti-Romance #1
• BL Fans LOVE My Brother?!
• Black Clover #1-2
• The Cat Proposed
• Catch These Hands #1
• Choujin X #1
• The Comiq
• Confessions of a Shy Baker #1
• Cut-Over Criteria
• Dekoboko Bittersweet Days
• The Fable #1
• The Girl from the Other Side #1
• Goodbye, Eri
• Kaguya-sama: Love is War #1-2
• I'm Looking for Serious Love!
• If My Favourite Pop Idol Made It [...] #1-2
• Insomniacs After School #1
• Library Wars: Love & War #1-2
• Love's in Sight #1
• Magical Girl Raising Project #1-2
• Mame Coordinate #1
• My Dearest Self With Malice Aforethought #1-2
• My Secret Affection #1
• My Special One #1
• Oshi no Ko #1
• Otherside Picnic #1
• Ragna Crimson #1
• Remina
• Tatsuki Fujimoto: Before Chainsaw Man 17-21
• Tatsuki Fujimoto: Before Chainsaw Man 22-26
• Talk to My Back
• Time Stranger Kyoko #2-3
• Tombs
• Your Lie in April #5-11
• Vinland Saga #1-2
• Yuri Espoir #1

Ongoing Series

• After the Rain #3
• Ajin: Demi-Human #4
• Alice in Borderland #11-12
• BEASTARS #4
• Beauty and the Feast #4-6
• Blue Box #2-3
• Call of the Night #3-5
• Chainsaw Man #6
• Chi's Sweet Home #3-4
• The Demon Prince of Momochi House #9-11
• Dr. Stone #19-23
• The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses #3
• Golden Kamuy #3
• Hell's Paradise #7-11
• High School Debut #5-6
• Hunter x Hunter #15-18
• I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School #5-6
• Ima Koi #5
• Kaiju No. 8 #6
• Kimi ni Todoke #3
• Kingdom Hearts III ch30
• Komi Can't Communicate #12-16
• Mao #8-9
• Mashle #5-7
• Moriarty the Patriot #3-4
• My Dress-Up Darling #6-7
• My Happy Marriage #3
• My Hero Academia #18-19
• My Isekai Life #5-7
• My Love Mix-Up #7-8
• Oh My Goddess #2
• Ouran High School Host Club #3
• Perfect World #4-5
• Sakamoto Days #6-8
• Skip Beat #7
• The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest #9-11
• Suppose a Kid [...] Moved to a Starter Town #2
• Tokyo Aliens #2-3
• Tokyo Revengers #2-3
• Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina #4
• Yona of the Dawn #7-10
• Yu-Gi-Oh! #4-6

Hi I left it even longer this time and in the two and a half months since I last updated I have read 142 manga volumes and watched one season of anime. teehee oopsie daisie. *spends 3 hours trying to journal about it* :')

Needless to say I will try to be brief.

New Series

Oshi no Ko

lmao this is so weird. I knew the basic premise but I didn't actually know the twist at the end of volume one, so that was a nice (??) surprise! I've heard it gets... worse in some ways soon enough but I'll stick with it for now, in part because it's so popular and I also just love stuff with really weird ideas behind them and what's weirder than this one?

Otherside Picnic

I heard interesting things about the light novel version of this and was very pleased to see a manga version at my library. I'm pretty interested in the supernatural story and knowing it'll veer into yuri territory is just icing on the cake.

If My Favourite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die

I watched the anime version of this a couple years ago and thought it was weird but cute. It's a bit painful to watch the reality (?) of idol fans in Japan navigating the terribly capitalistic and predatory ways that idol fandom works, but the story is pretty endearing anyway with how much Maina appreciates Eripiyo, her only (way-too-dedicated) fan.

My Secret Affection

LMAOO this is that manga where a meteor turned everyone gay but the protagonist is tragically straight. A lot of people panned it for trying to make queer issues into a straight tragedy when the person could just write a queer story but then it turned out the creator is some flavour of queer themselves and honestly, I did kind of feel like that came across in the story. It's fairly sincere and the premise itself is so silly that I didn't get the impression they were trying to make light of the idea, if that makes sense. I wanna read more of it haha.

Completed Series

1122: For a Happy Marriage

I quite liked this! It was largely depressing but it felt like such a weirdly realistic manga about a couple who fell out of love and then had to try to maneuvre their married life together through the hardships of adulthood. No one was particularly likeable in the slightest but I liked how it turned out. It was one of those trainwrecks you can't look away from but instead of a trainwreck it's more like two people colliding slowly on the sidewalk because both kept trying to veer to the same side over and over until they crashed.

The Comiq

This was a oneshot by Kazuki Takahashi. I loved the Professor Layton-y character designs but I didn't enjoy the twist and the art felt a bit choppy. (iirc it was Takahashi's first attempt at working digitally instead of traditionally?) It was nice to see something unique after Yu-Gi-Oh but I ultimately came away kind of sad that we'll never get anything else ever again. :(

Magical Girl Raising Project

I did not like this, lol. It felt almost comically over-the-top in terms of gratuitous violence and depressing storylines. It's like Madoka but if everyone was forced to kill each other like in Battle Royale rather than letting them naturally come to blows. I like Madoka Magica but I hate what it did to the magical girl genre with all the imitations like this.

Time Stranger Kyoko

It was nice that this manga didn't really overstay its welcome but it ended so quickly and abruptly I was kind of shocked! I think with the scale Tanemura seemed to be going for, where the protagonist had to collect the 12 guardians (one for each number on the clock), the series probably should have lasted at least 5-6 volumes if not more, but I think she obviously got bored with the concept or something and wanted to move on because the pacing feels like a medium length manga series for the first two volumes and then suddenly there's a big twist and everything wraps up in a big ol' rush in volume 3. (I think. It's been a few months since I finished it--the pacing issues might've started midway through volume 2.) It was really weird and a bit disappointing because I did like the setting and characters and think they deserved more than they got. :(

Your Lie in April

I almost forgot to write about this and had to edit! This was a beautiful manga. I was always so impressed with the music scenes... how do you portray a moving piano recital when the reader can't hear anything? I dunno but they managed! I never did put on the music they were playing to listen along to. It always felt like I'd be invading their moment to listen to someone else play a song, even if I usually had no idea what the song was even supposed to sound like. The ending made me bawl. u_u

BL Oneshots

I won't list them all but a bunch of the ones in my new list were BL oneshots published by Tokyopop that my library had on Hoopla. They were largely just cute but the BL Fans Love My Brother one made me laugh out loud.

Junji Ito Stuff

I think I read a few Junji Ito works but I particularly enjoyed Remina. It was very weird, as all his stuff is, but it resonated with me a little more than a lot of his other stuff does.

Goodbye, Eri & other Tatsuki Fujimoto oneshots

I think I'm going to drop Chainsaw Man because it just does not appeal to me much at all, but where I think Fujimoto really shines is his oneshots. I adored Goodbye, Eri. It was weird but sweet and I just loved the ending. He's very good at bringing out his strengths when it comes to more contained ideas, I think.

Continuing Series

Beauty and the Feast

This inches closer and closer to the widower and the high school student falling for each other and I know I should bail now because I have absolutely no desire for it in this context where she's basically mothering him but I like the food segments and otherwise it's really cute so... ;_; I persist to my own doom.

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses

This continues to do basically nothing special but I wanted to mention it here because it got an anime adaptation this season and WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL IS GOING ON WITH IT?? There's like these insanely baffling camera angles because it's one of the 3D anime and I guess they're showing off that they can do it? But it's so bizarre because this is essentially a repetitive gag manga. Every single chapter is the protagonist being like "oh gosh i hope my crush is okay and doesn't forget her glasses today /////" and then she bumps into him on the way to school because she forgot her glasses and she leans in really close to squint at him and make sure it's actually him and he blushes more and that's like. The entire manga. Literally everything is like that! So why does it need vertigo-inducing camera angles? The hell?? Like the manga is nothing special at all to write home about but it did get an anime adaptation so it actually makes me kind of sad that what it's getting is so distractingly discordant with the subject matter that it's going to detract from it and nothing deserves that. (That said, it probably didn't need a proper anime adapation. I think a little web anime would have been plenty.)

Hunter x Hunter
I am finally out of the video game arc and I am thrilled because I wasn't really vibing with it at all and found it very anti-climactic. But the setup for whatever is next hasn't been very interesting either.

Kingdom Hearts III

I just want to take a moment to praise Shiro Amano for being the only person attached to KH3 in some way who was brave enough to not make me sit through the entirety of Let it Go when the Frozen adaptation hit. Seriously, the game made me watch/listen to a full rendition of it. Even the novel made me read through it with all the lyrics. And the manga totally could have taken a whole chapter to do it and it would have been easy street because you'd just have to pull iconic frames from the movie and redraw them and call it a day. But they didn't! And I am so damn thankful for it.

Mashle
I'm gonna put this here even tho I'm not caught up with the manga or anything because I watched an anime! And it was this one! I visited my brother for a week last month and I sold him on watching the adaptation on this because it's "Harry Potter but if the protagonist was basically just One Punch Man" and we love kind of absurdist stuff, so we watched it. It was... very low budget... but honestly I think it kinda worked for it, lol. The translation was also very good! My brother doesn't like dubs so we watched it subbed and I got to sit and think about the choices they made and I was a big fan. :D They really nailed the deadpan humour with their word choices.

My Isekai Life: I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage in the World
I'm not dropping this because it's such a quick and easy read whenever my library gets a new volume but I do want to note that it's so hilariously bland and one-note like every "i got isekai'd and i'm a super overpowered mage and also i tame slimes when no one else does" story that I actually read a volume out of order and didn't even notice. I think that's hilarious.

Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town

I think I might drop this but I'll give it one more volume to be sure. I have no idea what the pacing is like in the light novels this is based off, but for some reason what was entirely a slice of life in the first volume (as well as a good chunk of the second volume!) very suddenly gained a big plot and urgency and then wrapped itself up within like 3-4 chapters. It was really weird and not at all good, lol. The ecchi humour is creeping in more and more and although the premise is so strong, I feel like they're just kind of wasting it.

Dropped Series

N...one? I think there was maybe something I started to read and then just stopped and returned to the library but it doesn't come to mind and this already took so long. I'm very close to dropping a few, as I mentioned above, and I've definitely picked up some more violent manga that I don't know if I want to finish but I also didn't care enough to talk about them here so... idk. I guess we shall see if next update has anything here!

 

[Cherrim]

Okay I'm dropping all the formatting for this and not logging everything because now that I've passed (I think?) 500 volumes for the year, I'm realizing how silly this is to keep up with when I'm already tracking it on My Anime List and Goodreads. So instead of a whole big list, I'm just gonna talk about some of the highlights! I'd actually written up my usual list and there were... *counts* over 150 of them, so I will be brief lol.

New Series

Banana Fish
I've always heard of this series but I'd never touched it and so when I finally picked it up I was really surprised to find out it's about a boy in a NYC gang?? And it's like an action manga?? I'm really intrigued by the whole thing even if I'm not huge on the art style.

Blood on the Tracks
Reading this makes me feel like I'm insane and I simply cannot look away. The art is so intense and so far it makes my skin crawl. Highly recommend!

Boys Run the Riot
I've only read one volume of this so far but I'm so hooked. The characters and story are so good.

Real
As usual, so many manga I pick up and go "ok well this doesn't look interesting at all but at least I can just drop it after this volume if I don't like it" and then get pleasantly surprised when it's actually really good. This was another one I judged by its cover (why would I care about basketball???) but it's actually about wheelchair basketball and I'm always so interested in depictions of how Japan approaches disability. This is a good one.

Sand Chronicles
Apparently this is a shoujo classic and I definitely see why. It's the story of a girl whose mother moves her out to her rural hometown from Tokyo and how she has to adjust to her new life... after her mother succumbs to her depression and commits suicide. The characters are really endearing and their relationships are challenged in good and interesting ways. I'm enjoying it a lot!

Completed Series

After the Rain
This was another age gap story about a girl who has a crush on her manager at the family restaurant where she works. I was actually very surprised and pleased at the ending. I was worried that, because midway through the series he agrees to go on a date with her to stop her asking (or something like that - I finished this up a while ago and read it over the course of a year lol), that they would end up together but he ended up being a pretty good adult. He let her into his life a bit but in the end urged her to go back to running track instead of spending all her time working. I think the series might have been able to earn a romantic outcome but it was nice that it didn't actually try even with a lot of the groundwork laid. It made it feel like a more realistic relationship between people, including all the awkwardness. I liked it quite a bit in the end and the art was really nice.

The Demon Prince of Momochi House
This was suuuch a gorgeous manga. It's the story of an orphan who finds out she has inherited an ancient Japanese manor in the woods only to find out when she moves there that it is actually a magic place protected by a boy who is trapped as its protector. The artwork seemed so ephemeral and beautiful and it complemented the story so well. I think maybe it was a few volumes too long and it got kind of confusing in the middle, but on the whole I really enjoyed it.

Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku
I was a little surprised that I finishes this because I don't usually enjoy battle manga, but the premise of this one was pretty interesting and I loved all the religious references. The art was really good, too, which I don't usually find from shounen stuff for me. I found this also dragged a bit in the middle (I am discovering that <10 volumes is perfect for me, just like I prefer shorter anime lmfao) but they nailed the ending and I was surprised at how much I liked all the characters.

Mame Coordinate
This was a cute little manga about a girl from the boonies moving to Tokyo and becoming a model for really cutesy clothes. It's light on the plot, for the most part, but the characters are really endearing. This one could have actually used another volume to flesh out the plot a little better because it just felt like it rushed everything at the end and became a little too wishy-washy before finishing up. But it's still a cute read.

My Dad's the Queen of All VTubers?!
I knocked out this whole series in a day and it's one of the funnier things I've read in a while. A boy discovers that his favourite VTuber is actually his dad using voice changing software and gets roped into helping him... and then also finds out his Mom is similarly a struggling VTuber who can't stand the big popular ones, including his Dad's, and gets roped into helping her too. It's such a stupid premise and it's very funny. It's only 3 volumes and I actually wish it was longer because I could have gone for more of it.

My Love Mix-Up!
The final volume of this one finally came out and it was a really sweet ending. I really loved this manga and it's one of my favourites, I think. The characters are cute and it was nice seeing them grow closer and learn more about each other over the course of the series. The art is so expressive and fits the story perfectly.

Tomie
I wish this had been two or three separate volumes and not one huge omnibus collection and I think I would have liked it more. I felt obliged to read it all in one sitting because it was a library book but the stories were all just so... samey. The Tomie plot overstayed its welcome really quickly and I don't really think you're supposed to just read them all one after another like I did for 600+ pages. @_@ Good premise but he mined it too much for me to have enjoyed it in the end.

Ongoing Series

Chainsaw Man
I love this series when there aren't any fights happening - the characters are great and the intrigue is there and hooking me... and then the action starts and I get so close to completely dropping it every time. Why is action so boring!! Shonen manga needs to stop having good plots/characters so that I don't have to read action scenes. <--unpopular opinion

Confessions of a Shy Baker
Okay, admittedly I skim over all the pages where the baking part comes up because I'm not really interested in the food part of food manga (oops!) but the story surrounding all that is really good. It follows a gay couple and the people around them. The protagonist is an uptight realtor who is very in the closet and and bakes healthy/low-calorie snacks once a week for his overweight, out-of-the-closet partner. The protagnist has been slowly opening up more and more as the series goes on and I just think it's such an interesting portrayal of homosexuality in Japan than most BL usually gives you. I like it for a lot of the same reasons I really like I Think Our Son is Gay.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
I'm a few volumes in now and I'm really loving this. I love how Frieren is still slowly opening up and the characters she picks up on this second journey are great. I like how much time passes to show how long these journeys are with medieval-level transport and what it means for their relationships. I bet the anime is really good - it looks so pretty.

Show-ha Shoten
I remember really loving the first volume and I found the second volume... kinda boring in comparison. Maybe the stakes didn't seem as high but even though I like all the characters, it just wasn't as interesting. I hope the next volume is good or I may just end up dropping it. :s

Spy x Family
I'm caught up again and wow, I didn't expect heavier backstory from this! I kind of wish it had come earlier than volume 10 because getting Loid's backstory really helped me visualize the countries and their political feud a lot better, which I always felt was a bit hard to follow. I also read the companion book to the series and while I wish it had more new information, I loved hearing about the process of making the manga and seeing all the art other mangaka drew for the series.

Dropped

Classroom of the Elite
This was just boring lol. The premise was kind of interesting but none of the characters were likeable and while I usually give things more than one volume, I'm already reading so much and I just didn't care to learn more about anything this had to offer.

My Androgynous Boyfriend
I've always really loved the cover of this manga - it's so pretty! I was excited to find it at the library but when I finally got around to reading it... I was so, so bored. Nothing happens! It's the story of a woman whose boyfriend is quite androgynous/feminine and really into fashion but there's not really any conflict and no one ever does anything interesting. The art was pretty but it wasn't nearly enough to carry it. I almost didn't even finish one volume. :(

Ran and the Gray World
This was really pretty but I didn't really enjoy the story. iirc it's about a girl in a family of witches who, when her magic is stronger, ages up. I think she's like 7 or 8 and ages into a 16-18 year old woman and then it seemed like it was going to push a romance between her and this middle aged dude so I just kinda noped out. I can handle plenty of age gap stuff but this one gave me the squick too fast.

Anime

I actually watched some anime since the last time I updated because I had a trial from Crunchyroll. I mostly just watched the anime adaptations for some manga I've read.

My Dress-Up Darling
Not much to say besides I thought this was a good adaptation. I reeeally liked the dub for this - the writing was so good and snappy!

Orange
I cried such ugly tears at this one. ^_^ This was a pretty faithful adaptation, which made it a liiiittle boring in parts, but seeing it animated brought so much life to the characters. It wasn't as pretty as the manga version, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Spy x Family
Good adaptation! This is one of my favourite manga I keep up with so I've always been excited for the anime version and seeing them all in action is so good. Anya is so funny and seeing her in motion is just *chef's kiss*.

The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest
This nearly made me drop the manga and I still might, lmao. It wasn't even a faithful adaptation--they basically left out the the prologue part which made the whole thing confusing and rushed. It focuses way more on the romance elements (which suck!) and then I realized after I finished the final episode that... it actually spoilt the next volume of the manga for me. Most anime I watch, a season of like ~13 episodes covers about 4-5 volumes. I think this one covered like 10+ so I thought it would be plenty safe for me to watch but because they cut so much out, not only did it not make a lot of sense, but it spoilt the end of a big battle and I didn't realize that's what they were doing until it was too late. >:/ I thought they'd just changed so much at first that I wasn't recognizing what was going on because it diverged lol. It's made me realize I don't like the manga as much as I thought, too. oops!

Your Lie in April
Oughh the anime version of this was really good. I was always too lazy to even pull up a youtube video of the songs that were mentioned in the manga, even when a whole chapter or two would be dedicated to characters playing specific songs, so it was nice that the anime put it in for me. :D This also made me cry ugly tears!

 

[gimmepie]

So many things I have never heard of and a few I really need to get to. I am pleased to see Your Lie in April and, especially, Orange get some love though. I feel like Orange kind of just fell out of the collective weeb consciousness somehow despite being really good. I need to watch the movie some time.

 

[Cherrim]

I went a lot of years not really watching anime anime or reading any manga, but most of the big series still trickled through to my awareness, like Your Lie in April and so on, but I'd never heard of Orange before picking it up at the library because the cover looked neat and I'm blaming everyone I know for sleeping on it. It's got such a good premise and the characters are all so good and believable. I know it's got like dramas and stuff so obviously it was popular, but I can't believe it wasn't one of the things that ended up on my radar.