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.
Yeah it kinda did reflect the reality of the entertainment industry with that ending...
Enjoy a pallette cleanser, go look up what's currently happening with My Dress up Darling.
Sure, the manga did quite a bit of that. But the thing with Aqua was just annoying. I feel there was a better way to end this. Never mind the fucking U-turn they did with the dad.
My Dress Up Darling is one of my current favourites. If not the favourite. I almost always catch the chapter the day it is posted. It's just so soul cleansingly wholesome. :)
I've got SO many I read weekly that as soon as Oshi started to drag I just drop, don't stick around. Hell SSS class suicide hunter came back for season 2 so ain't got time for something with annoying characters but no sign of progression.
The opposite scale on that for me was Unordinary as that had annoying MC and characters but there was good building on redemption arcs, why they became like that and the world that made them that way so there are examples of how to do it right.
Yeah, sorta same here. I constantly check out new stuff (usually ends up being slop that stops being entertaining after 30 chapters), so whenever something starts getting draggy, I wait for a couple months, so that I can binge multiple chapters. There's only a handful exceptions that I check up on regularly.