Great hook to the story. Manga writers are sometimes really good at making you feel the pressures on the protagonist and this chapter is a great example of that. The main character, Nomamato, is a 17-year old girl who can't make enough money to eat while recently landed aliens are enjoying prosperity and what seems to be an enforced privilege in society.
Nomamoto meets a guy named Kitami who dislikes aliens even more than her. Long story short, he ends up killing an alien and she gets the bright idea to eat it, since apparently they taste like squid. The speed of the conflict might be a problem. It definitely gets your attention, but the manga could be in danger of running out of road in the future because it used up its ideas too quickly.
I love the 90% realism art style on the cover. It works really well for Chainsaw Man. Just a fantastic style. The art in the manga itself is more stylized, but still good. Nomamoto is pretty cute and very crazy.
Obviously this isn't a traditional heroic story, but that doesn't hurt its potential at all. Chainsaw Man and JJK are the biggest hits in the last 5 years and one of them is a massive antihero story while the other isn't far behind. JJK is a really interesting failure at the end of the day, but Chainsaw Man is still going strong. I don't believe at all that this is going to "flip on the chuds" as I saw some people posting - I'm sure the aliens aren't completely villainous but if there is indeed more than meets the eye to the story about the aliens saving the Earth from an asteroid, then they are definitely not going to be revealed as "the good guys all along." Also alien life is framed too cavalier for this to be the case.
Nomamoto and Kitami aren't heroes, and might not even be antiheroes, but the one thing that's established is they have legitimate grievances (unless he was lying or deluded about an alien killing his family, which I doubt). Maybe the story will be a Heart of Darkness-style descent into madness, but their grievances will always be there.
A bit off topic but a thing A LOT of Mangas seem to have an issue with is sticking the landing.
People were railing against AoT's ending but that seems to have dissipated over time, we know of the recent Oshi no Ko backlash and there was some on My Hero academia but that was more over 'come on give him a wife!' which the author did annoying the shippers (which fuck them).
Endings are a huge deal so advise to some, have a start and an end set out and go free with the journey as if the destination is disappointing you're fucked no matter how good you make the ride to it.
Their system is kind of close to the pulp story system we had in the West 80 years ago. You gotta deliver an amazing hook to ensnare readers at the newstand to pick up your folio. Cover art, sensational or fantasical headlines and/or loglines. In Japan, you gotta hook a reader to take your story onto the subway, when I would imagine the newstand competition is fierce.
The artists, who are most often the writer, design their characters first, think of a premise and just dive in. Not a lot of long term planning like an experienced or thoughtful writer would do for a serialized story.
I'm not a shipper, but the end of MHA was disappointing to me hehe. The whole 'this is how I became the greatest superhero' with the twist being 'for 10 minutes'. If you're going to do a Flowers for Algernon kinda take back, reduce how long it took Deku to 'get gud' so we get more time with the pinnacle action. Instead we got the worst of both worlds. Long investment in training for a tiny payout, then watch the hero immediately take on the mantle of has-been, here's a pity artifact. It is truly rare where a manga sticks the landing.
It was predictable how things were going to end up for both Deku and Bakago. Not once did Deku ever refer to himself as "The Number One" while Bakago repeatedly aimed for that. In a good way a lot of things were predictable so the reveals were less asspulls and more founded, like with the Decay power having been given by AFO all along, something I certainly started considering when the first flashbacks of Shigaraki's post family massacre released.
Somethings were overdone, though. The "teacher with eye powers finding out one of the big bads is actually his previously thought dead best friend who can teleport" literally mirrored Naruto with Kakashi and Obito. Both Erasurehead and Kakashi fail their class/teams as a team/character building exercise they are that similar in the role.
His sudden use of the last few quirks were also written in too fast. He leaves the school and the next time he's seen not only can he use both the Smokescreen quick and Fa-Jin, but he already knows how to use them well so the timeskip threw a lot away just to get to some future point of the story faster but that just meant more treading water and issues dragging out the same fight over and over and over. AFO died how many times in the last fight? Three or something? First time before Rewind, second time vs Bakago, third time vs Deku and the previous OFA wielders who ended up sacrificing themselves instead of all being taken as the Spidey-Sense one was.
The Anti-Quirk bullets also ended up being far less significant as many thought the number of them remaining would line up with how many extra Quirks Deku had. Nope, they reappear once, involve a quick hack-job [heh], and that's it. Never seen again.
And that's before getting on to how drawn out the fights with Dabi ended up being, how stupid the fight with Uraraka vs Himiko ended up, and one of the biggest traditional endings for Shounen how Deku and Uraraka just never seemed to happen. Whether that last one was because of retarded Fujoshi whining about Deku and Bakago or not it was still a big step away from how Shounen, [aka the comics for boys/men and not the retarded Fujoshi...], usually ended.
Look at Naruto. For years he was pining after Sakura while Hinata was pining for Naruto and Sakura was pining after Sasuke. Sasuke ends up with Sakura, box of insane violence and parent issues that she is, while Naruto ends up with Hinata, a literal princess of sorts of her clan and S T A C K E D by the end of Shippuden. Sakura might have been what/who Naruto was chasing since the start of the manga but not only did he still end up with someone that had actually been around since the start, more or less, but someone who was IMO a far, far better choice, and not just because she could out eat Choji at the ramen restaurant, crush melons with her thighs, offer melons of her own, and knit a great scarf.
Dabi was also a bit redone ala Avatar with Zuko and Azula, the former being the good pyrokinetic with the burn/scar caused by a parent [Todoroki] against the unhinged pyrokinetic sibling who uses blue flames. While MHA had a lot of references throughout several of them were far too recent like the Naruto and Avatar ones to feel like anything other than direct copies.
Yeah I didn't mind the Dabi vs family plot, it was just toooooooo dragged out. He was trying to juggle multiple threads, so they would line up in a climactic way, but it put too many critical moments on pause and too much repetition.
Putting it lightly. Some of the "big reveals came and went so fast they could probably get missed with a physical copy if two pages get stuck together.
"Hey kids look, Stain is back!
Aaand he's dead." 🙄
Did you read chapter 431?
It felt the the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC trying to fix various issues with the original ending that was released.
Regarding MHA, the original magazine-run ending was lackluster, sure, but Horikoshi added an additional chapter in the tankobon release to hopefully end on a better note.
Lol that's what happened? MHA fans take a final L. Sucks to suck I guess.
I'm glad it's finally over. Not like it was offensive or anything but the sheer banality of the story was enraging.
Someone made a joke that Japanese authors should write a story and then when they get to the end they should give the story to western authors to write the ending lol .
Whoever said that must've been smoking some strong shit, we have as bad if not WORSE history on endings.
GoT is an obvious one but the West's biggest sin is taking something that ended great like Avatar TLA or Star Wars Return of the Jedi and ruining it with expansions.
They may need help on endings, just not from the West lol.
Battlestar Galacitca was a massive disappointment.
Because the ending was retarded as often happens when writers decide to bring in pre-destination paradoxes that are somehow still going to be broken despite the sudden introduction of the actual Big Bad as an omniscient being which should never have any chance of losing except for dumb plot armour, aka the Ackermans which even then was retconned multiple times because the author seemed to run out of actual ideas so just started making everything and everyone nebulous and a bad narrator.
I think that's more of a problem with the business incentives of serialized media than the authors themselves. They're not failing to stick the landing so much as encouraged to ignore their intended landing and turn the event into an impromptu triathlon where they have a massive headstart. The only stories that don't deliberately overstay their welcome at least a little are the ones written by artistically obsessed auteurs or the supremely confident writers who intend to strike gold more than once in their lifetime and won't risk tarnishing their reputation early.
Otherwise the producers or their own little greedy devils are always asking why end the story in the 3rd act where it should have ended when you can have a shitty 3rd act of ass pulls and power scaling before bringing back an only slightly butchered original ending for the 4th act. Then the cycle repeats until the total story ends up being 50% bullshit filler and b-grade side plots.
Oh yeah I can definitely see that, I only know of I can confidently say 2 manga/manwha where they ended perfectly:
Weak Hero and Kill the Villainess
in the case of AOT im pretty sure the original ending would have been the Akatsuki no requiem ending https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrQ0zZArUV8 . Which would have involved Eren winning but maybe the author didn't have the guts to do that so he messed it up in the end. The story that he based AOT on is The eternal champion which had both time travel and a complete genocide ending route .
A small detail, but currently I'm curious to learn whether it's just Nomamoto's strange tastes that make her enjoy eating aliens, or if it'll become more widespread. After all, Kitami clearly stated that he hated the smell and was disgusted at the thought of ingesting them. So is it just women that find the smell and taste appealing, is it randomly just every other person, or is it just her? And the corollary question, is it only men who are disgusted by the taste and smell, is it every other random person, or is it just him?
The answer to those questions seem like they will affect how commonplace their actions might spread in their society.
It could just be a personal preference. I'm nauseated by the smell of cooked shellfish, and I'm not even allergic or anything. If it's as you say and the female protagonist had an unusual affinity for it, it's going to cause problems as her neighbors are sure to be complaining about the odors coming from her tiny apartment. Though if working class humans are paid so poorly they can't afford to eat meat in general it's going to be suspicious either way that she's cooking so much meat going forward. Maybe they'll get around that, and her recent unemployment, by opening a sashimi cart using aliens as the meat, lol.