Objective Manga Review (shitpost video) (Patreon)

Hello ladies and gentlemen welcome. Today I’m going to be mixing it up and reviewing something I don’t usually look at. Manga. The upside of looking at a medium I don’t usually explore is that as I don’t even like manga you can be sure I’ll be completely and totally objective.

My first note before we look at specific examples is that manga books, compared to western comics are much smaller, and you have to read them from right to left instead of left to right, which in both cases is objectively, worse.

Now, on to some particulars.
I recently read My Hero Academia. The story concerns a young boy living in world where the majority of people have super powers, but he is one of the unlucky few who do not. Such stories are usually about worlds where most people don’t have powers, and only a few people do, which makes this story objectively quite bad. The focus on the hero Izuku having to work twice as hard as his peers to achieve success was pretty cool and when he paused to reflect on his training and explicitly said that he was grateful for all the help he’d received and how it had changed his life I found myself crying for the first time in years. I was reading this book in a cafe, and I suddenly began to openly weep in front of many strangers, thinking about my own life, and for some reason, my father.
The art style in this book is different to in other books I’ve read, and so rationally I can say it’s pretty good. Overall I’d give this book a 4 out of 10.

Second I decided to look at an older series, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. At first I was put off this series because I’d heard it was gay and that either you’d only like it if you were gay or that liking it would turn you gay, however when I finally read it I found that there was nothing even remotely gay about it. Nothing gay happens, there are no gay characters, just men being men. Just guys being bros. Simply unfounded rumours spread by most likely Social Justice Warriors getting hysterical over nothing.

I liked the bit where Jojo shot the policeman with the coke bottle. 9/10.

Lastly I picked up the classic manga Attack on Titan, by Hajime Isayama. I had seen the anime adaptation of this story before and I had also spent many hours playing the free online game based on it when I first moved away from home as a way of coping with being in an unfamiliar environment so far away from what I was used to. So going into the manga my first thought was that Eren Jaeger was the only sensible character in the book. He seems quite reasonably upset at the giant bloody titans trying to eat everyone and everybody else who keeps trying to ignore the problem were no use at all. There’s no two ways about this one, Mikasa is a Mary Sue. It’s totally unrealistic that she is such a skilled member of their squad so quickly. Really felt like the writers just wanted to shoehorn a strong female character.
After reading several volumes in this series I found myself pausing whenever I was at my front door, all of a sudden unable to put the key in the lock, paralysed by the quandry of trying to bridge the gap between the inside world and the outside, two impossibly distant universes containing utterly different realities.

Overall I’d give this book a 7 out of 10.

Tune in next time when I’ll be doing an objective review of the movies Casablanca and Citizen Kane.