u/carbonera99

I roll my eyes whenever people try to push this narrative that One Piece has some enlightened anti-monarchy message and opposes inherently oppressive systems of power.

Luffy is a monarchist. He doesn’t topple monarchies and replaces them with democratic systems, he just knocks off the kings he doesn’t like and places his friends and allies onto the vacant throne. It’s less “liberate the masses” and more “American military intervention”

The story also goes out of its way to avoid direct criticisms of monarchy. Notice that whenever the people revolt against a king, it’s always shown that the people are dumb idiots who were tricked by the villain of the arc who’s woven a web of conspiracy to frame the king for things he didn’t do. “If your government does something bad, it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of a small, clandestine group of foreigners.” feels like something you’d hear from an anti-semitic conspiracy podcast instead of the superpower pirate manga. Whenever the country goes to shit, the manga bends over backwards to absolve the rightful king of any guilt or responsibility. That’s horseshit. With absolute power comes absolute accountability. If you got your country stolen by a gang of aquatic bandits and your subjects had to suffer untold misery for 10+ years because of your fuckup, you should absolutely be held at fault. You’ve still failed at your one job, regardless of how much the odds were stacked against you.

But what about the Five Elders and Imu? Yeah what about them? Sure, they’re kings and they’re pure, objective evil. But they’re also literal devils from hell. So the only objectively bad kings in this story are explicitly not regular people but inhuman monsters. When Luffy opposes them, it’s not liberator vs imperialist overlord, it’s divine god vs demon lord.

One Piece pretty staunchly communicates that monarchy is inherently good, it’s just bad actors who abuse their power that are bad. That’s not an anti-monarchy stance, that’s a turbo glazing of monarchy stance. The story might as well be doing tricks on it. You gotta remember One Piece is a softball story where the primary target demographic are Japanese kids who live in a country where the monarchy is still revered. Japan to this day holds an absurd amount of respect and awe for their ceremonial emperors. It’s pretty rare to find people who actively speak out against them or criticize them and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say it’s actively taboo. There’s no way Oda or his publisher Shueisha would risk controversy by directly spreading naked anti-monarchy rhetoric through his manga.

It sounds ludicrous but it's honestly a pretty good rule of thumb to see if a character has no substance. Characters and stories exist to provoke emotion and thoughts from the audience and if a character can't inspire anyone to talk/write/draw/fight about them, they're probably a boring-ass character. Notice how I said boring character, not badly written, because even the badly written characters will inspire conversation. Getting people to fight each other online over whether or not you were characterized well or if the author is a hack fraud, is a good sign because that means people are actually invested in you.

It's the characters that no one ever talks about that are the real issue, because that means there's so little meat on their bones (narratively speaking) that they're not even worth acknowledging. Shippers are like the vultures of media fandoms. They'll pick through the bones of a story to find even the tiniest scraps of characterization or implied subtext to talk about, so if even they can't find anything worthwhile about you, you must be an abysmally dogshit character.

One recent example is the character Yuno from Black Clover. The Black Clover manga ended recently, and it's been getting the customary beat-down that all shonen manga receive from their fanbase when they end. One of the funnier bits of slander that floated to the top during this period was someone pointing out that Yuno not having a popular gay ship with the main character was proof that he was the most boring rival character to disgrace the pages of shonen manga in the last decade.

They're honestly onto something though. The rabid shipping community for most shonen manga will jump on the thinnest justifications to ship the rival character with the main protagonist, even if they loathe each other. Most of the time, these MC x Rival ships are the number one most popular ship in the community, eclipsing whatever token love interest ship exists for the main character. Naruto-Sasuke, Deku-Bakugo, etc. Even if you don't read shonen manga, you've probably been made aware of this through cultural osmosis against your will. So the fact that no shipper bothered with Yuno means that it was an intentional choice, not because there wasn't enough material. Yuno is just that boring.

Another example is Solo Leveling. The only character you ever hear about from that manhwa is the main character, Sung Jin Woo. I don't think I've ever seen a single screenshot or a piece of fanart featuring a member of the side cast. Solo Leveling functionally doesn't have a cast of characters from what I gather, they're all just walking props that exist to highlight the main character. Even that main character doesn't seem to be all that considering the only time I've seen people enthusiastically talk about him is in power-scaling discussions. He clearly doesn't inspire much of anything out of the readers except hype and aura. He's basically a Michael Bay explosion in the shape of a man.

A major criticism people had with Infinity War and Endgame is that nobody actually properly calls out Thanos on how wrong he is or offers any counter argument against his 50/50 universal genocide program. In fact, Endgame has the audacity to actually hint that maybe Thanos was right about some things because look, whales are swimming in the Hudson River again.

I'm not here to relitigate that dumbass "we need to reduce the population because muh utilitarianism" argument because ultimately, whether or not Thanos is actually right in the end doesn't matter because this is a superhero story. A superhero story is by definition idealistic. Blind optimism and hope is literally the name of the game. They exist to champion the ideals of a better world. The Avengers definitely should have said something to deny Thanos's ideology instead of stoically contemplating the ramifications, regardless of whether that counterargument is logically sound.

That's where Dr. Stone comes in. Dr. Stone is set in a post-apocalypse where every human being on the planet suddenly turned to stone one day, with a handful of people becoming unpetrified thousands of years later. Dr. Stone also features a character that's come to the same exact conclusion that Thanos has, about how the Earth can't sustain a large population because of a lack of resources. This character believes that if they revive every single human being who turned to stone, the planet would be doomed. He thinks its the logical choice to abandon the vast majority of petrified humans and only revive a select chosen few and thrive in a bountiful utopia.

Unlike the Avengers, the main character of Dr. Stone actually speaks up against this inhumane idea by saying "yeah it's an undeniable problem that Earth can't sustain 8 billion humans, which is exactly why we need all 8 billion humans to help come up with a solution to fix that problem". It's hopelessly idealistic but that's the exact kind of message that's necessary to counter such a pessimistic ideology. In fact, it's doubly bizarre that the Avengers never said anything to this effect when "coming together and combining our powers to fight a threat" is literally their entire theme. They really dropped the ball, and that's why I believe there are so many people online and offline who unironically think Thanos was right. The movie never offers an alternative, idealistic or not.

Spiderverse actually did this the correct way. In the second Spiderverse movie, there's one character arguing about how some deaths are necessary and shouldn't be stopped and that it's pointless to even try, and the protagonist argues back that there's always a point to trying even if you might fail, and that's the whole reason they're Spider-Men in the first place. To try and make a better world even without knowing if they'll succeed or not.

The Avatar's role in the world of the show is seemingly set in stone, some universal constant that no one ever questions. Why does the Avatar get authority and respect? Why do they get a say in how people live and work? The Avatar is undeniably special, but why does that specialness mean they get the final say in all matters imaginable? They're not elected, they're not chosen (at least not by human beings), no one ever gave their consent to be governed by the Avatar. If you really think about it, the Avatar is no more qualified to guide the world than any other human being, just because they have the ghosts of 50,000+ other humans rattling around somewhere inside their head.

The Avatar is just as fallible as any other person. You really have to question how much wisdom they can actually get from their past lives when those lives were equally imperfect and biased and also lived hundreds of years ago. If I consulted with the spirit of someone who lived in the early 1900s about the geopolitics of the 21st century, they wouldn't be able to give me any meaningful advice because the world we live in now is so radically different to the one they knew. If their past lives are unreliable at best, what edge does the Avatar have over the rest of humanity when it comes to governance?

No one asks these questions because respect for the Avatar is baked into all of the four nations' cultures. But that respect is predicated on the implicit threat of violence. It's predicated on the fact that no one can stop the Avatar even if they wanted to. The Avatar might not be smarter than the average person, or more wise, but what they do have is unmatched capacity for destruction. The Avatar gets to operate with impunity because they are, bar none, the single strongest human being on the planet while they're alive. There are other benders, but even the greatest of them are mere ants next to the Avatar. Aang is a 10 year old kid and he routs entire armies and manhandles the most powerful firebender ever seen with contemptuous ease.

People respect the Avatar not because they're the most wise or most enlightened, but because they're a human nuclear bomb. It's big stick diplomacy, except the Avatar's stick is so astronomically bigger than anyone else's that there's no other option but to obey. If the Avatar says jump, all you can do is ask how high. If the Avatar says you can't build your house there, you can't argue for your rights in court, you just have to pick up and move. They can do this not because they're the bridge between the spirit and human realms, or because they possess immortal reincarnating soul, but because they have godlike powers that let them subdue anyone who stands in their way.

The Avatar without their bending and "Avatar State", is just some guy with ghosts in his head who would just get laughed out of the room if they tried to intervene in national politics.

If you need any further convincing, Just look at the real life avatar that the show was inspired by. It's no secret that the Avatar is heavily inspired by the real life Dalai Lama, the central religious figure in Tibetan Buddhism, who according to their beliefs also reincarnates. Unlike the Avatar in the show, who can walk into the throne room of the Fire Nation and threaten their leader with bodily harm until they stopped colonizing, the Dalai Lama was helpless to stop China's annexation of Tibet in 1950. The nations of our world don't care to listen to an avatar who doesn't wield phenomenal elemental powers and neither would the nations in the world of the show.

You’d think the ethnic group who had a monopoly on the power to control the ocean would take advantage of that in more meaningful ways than using it to build igloos and snowmen in the arctic. We only see one other population of water benders in the series and its people living in a swamp. Why are there no seafaring water tribesmen?

Pre-industrial revolution, the water tribe should have unbeatable on the open sea. The earth benders can’t earth bend on the water, the fire benders can’t fire bend without risking setting their own boats on fire and any fires that they set can be easily drenched. Sailing and navigating would be a joke for them when they can literally move the ocean, so their ships can still sail even when there’s no wind and they can use their water bending to capsize enemy vessels. One of the biggest weaknesses of water benders shown in the series is that they run out of water quickly since they’re fighting on land, well that’s not a problem on water.

It’s just weird how water benders feel like complete jobbers compared to the Earth and Fire kingdoms when they have as big an advantage as controlling the most abundant resource on the planet. Even outside of a warfare context, being able to control the ocean would mean they’d be one of the most reliable people to have on any merchant voyage. They should be way more involved and dominant in global shipping and trade, especially because their homeland is literally a barren wasteland of ice and snow. They’d be the ones who’d most benefit from trading and commerce with the other tribes.

To pre-empt the counter arguments: if that’s true, why are the Earth benders not invincible on land? That’s because the ground isn’t inherently dangerous like the open ocean is. Human beings in the avatar world are still terrestrial animals, so they’re not put at an inherent disadvantage by being on land. Even without a water bender trying to drown you, ending up in the middle of the ocean is a death sentence.

I got inspired to write this rant after watching a livestream where the game developers of Resident Evil 2 remake spectate a world record speedrun of their own game. Five minutes in, the speed runner shows off a movement tech that involves dropping yourself to low health and then spamming animation cancels to move at double the speed of a normal run cycle. The game devs are flabbergasted and start saying things like “this was possible?” “We didn’t know you could do this” and they’re the people who coded this thing.

A lot of magic systems in fiction are kind of like programs if you think about it. You get given a set of rules and are able to achieve a handful of predetermined outcomes as long as you operate within those rules.

But just like that speed runner, you can still push and surpass the limits of what’s possible to do with the program/magic system while still staying within the rules, if you exploit them in the right way.

I feel like too many magic systems, when they want to have an extraordinary or unique thing to happen, introduce an exception to the rules or outright breaks them. There aren’t too many examples of magic systems where someone does something unexpected by gaming the rules in a way no one else has thought to do before.

Avatar has both a good and bad example of this.

The good example is Toph’s discovery of metal-bending. Metal-bending is an exploit of the existing rules of earth bending that makes complete sense as to why no one else but Toph could have noticed and taken advantage of. Earth benders don’t actually bend the earth, they bend the minerals inside the earthy materials. Metal also has those same minerals inside it but because in smaller amounts and it’s harder to visualize them. But because Toph is blind and uses vibrations to “look” at her surroundings, she can visualize and bend those minerals inside metal.

The bad example is Aang’s spirit bending. Unlike Metal bending or even blood bending, which are all extrapolations of the pre-existing rules of bending, Spirit Bending is a complete asspull that comes out of left field. It’s a massive jump to go from bending elements to bending the unquantifiable substance of the soul. It’s not set up or hinted at anywhere, it can’t be logic’d out as something that could be possible within the rules, and has almost zero connection to anything the series had introduced about the supernatural up to that point. The Avatar had something to do with spirits but there’s nothing that indicates an Avatar could manipulate spirits. Also, only the Avatar can do it because they’re the Avatar. It’s not an ability anyone else can learn because they’re not a reincarnating demigod so it’s quite literally a deus ex machina ability.

Another really good example is the recent Witch Hat Atelier anime. While the story draws parallels between Magic and Art, I’ve always thought the way the magic system is portrayed feels more akin to computer programming than illustration. The glyphs are literally a pictographic programming language. Witches close circles to activate their spells just like “running” a program, and like programming, magic in WHA isn’t intuitive so it’ll only do exactly what you’ve drawn/programmed it to do, which ends up causing all sorts of inadvertent damage if you’re not specific enough. Because the author can’t just hand wave magic as “the character shot a fireball in the direction they were thinking of in their head” we get lots of great scenes where the characters have to creatively “stretch” the magic in order to solve problems in specific ways. There’s a scene early on in the series where the main character Coco basically vibe-codes her way into creating a magic glider by manipulating the glyphs on a basic wind spell to shoot all the wind in a single direction in a continuous stream.

Frieren has a ton of good examples as well. Frieren is one of the few magic systems I’ve seen in fiction that have a “meta”. Magic spells fall in and out of fashion as mages try to find the most broken spells and tactics to use against other mages in duels. The most common spell is Zoltraak. Originally, the spell was designed as an instant kill attack that targets and destroys souls but mages developed a shield spell that specifically counters Zoltraak, so the meta started to centralize around manipulating elements to bypass the shield spell by overwhelming it with raw mass (basically, throwing a big rock at the anti-magic shield is more cost effective than casting an even stronger magic beam attack). Finally, one of the main characters discovered that if they just shoot off Zoltraak spells fast enough, they could outspeed and overwhelm shield spells and started doing the fantasy equivalent of spamming jabs to get a frame advantage against blocks. All of this feels like an organic evolution of the magic system within the rules established and feels like how people would treat magic duels in real life.

Aira really has done nothing wrong so far. People dog on her for causing all of the misunderstandings during this amensia arc that's currently torpedoing Okarun and Momo's relationship but most of the blame should fall on Okarun.

People give Okarun a ton of undue credit for "stepping up" during this arc when his baseline personality and behavior haven't changed a bit. His confidence and assertiveness is still somehow in the gutter and he sandbags whenever a woman shows in the tiniest bit of attention even though he's more or less fully committed to pursuing Momo at this point. He should have established proper boundaries with Aira by this point. Momo had grievances with Okarun not shutting down other girls even during the earlier stages of their relationship but that was forgivable THEN because they hadn't gotten to a serious enough point where both were aware of each other's feelings towards each other. NOW Okarun doesn't have any excuses, it's pure negligence at this point.

Aira is not at fault for shooting her shot, it's Okarun who's in the wrong for not immediately shooting her down or expressing how uncomfortable he is with her romantic overtures at him. How is Aira supposed to know he's not interested when he hasn't expressed any opposition to her nonstop flirting. This guy's not a literal alien who's completely new to human emotions, he has to understand that Aira is hitting on him at this point. Okarun isn't a stupidly dense character, he's perceptive and good at picking up social cues. None of the characters are mindreaders, if Okarun wants Aira to stop hitting on him, he needs to tell her that or at least show that it's making him uncomfortable.

People also act like Aira knows Okarun is interested in Momo and vice versa. Aira doesn't actually have any confirmation of that, neither Momo or Okarun have opened up to her about that. Unlike Jiji, who's definitely pulling a borderline scumbag move by moving on Momo even though he has full knowledge of how Okarun feels about Momo, Aira isn't making a conscious decision to steal Okarun. She just saw an open goal and took her shot.

Aira slander needs to be redirected at Jiji.

Iroh is a beloved character with Avatar fans and a lot of people think of him as an unimpeachably well written character but I think there's lots of legitimate criticism that can be leveled at how the show chooses to write him.

Iroh is written as a victim of war. His beloved son died during his campaign, destroying him emotionally and politically after he abandons the war effort to mourn the son.

Iroh is also written as a perpetrator of war. He was the top general of the Fire Nation's forces during their campaign in the Earth Kingdom. He's by all accounts a vicious warmonger who leveled cities, slaughtered armies, and destroyed the lives of tens of thousands. The fact that his campaign against the Earth Kingdom was only five years ago prior to the start of the show means many of the Earth Kingdom orphans and war refugees we see throughout the show are likely direct victims of Iroh.

A character can be both, and there's a lot of nuance and interesting writing that can be had from seeing how those two sides of a character interact. But the show shows a categorical lack of interest in exploring Iroh's character as a perpetrator of war in favor of highlighting how Iroh is a victim of it. Not once do we meet a character who was personally affected by Iroh. Not once do we see a village torched by Iroh's army on their way to Ba Sing Se, or people who talk about how they lost their home to the Dragon of the West's army. People barely even talk about Iroh's past at all, even though he was supposedly a prolific general only 5 years ago. No one whispers the name "the Dragon of the West" in fear. The way the show writes it, Iroh's guilt over the war and his past actions feels like ambiguous lip service because we never actually see all the terrible things he's done, nor the lingering consequences of those actions. With Ozai, we at least get tangible proof of his cruelty and abuse towards his children. It's quite literally written all over Zuko's face.

Zuko is actually a pretty good example of how to write a character who is both a victim and an enforcer of an evil system. It's undeniable that Zuko suffered at the hands of the Fire Nation, but he is also their agent and commits a lot of heinous acts in their name. He hurts a lot of people in his Avatar hunt, chief among them the protagonists. The show then forces Zuko to confront the people he's hurt in order to redeem himself. Because we've actually seen Zuko's evil deeds firsthand, it hits that much harder when people are willing to forgive him for it and how he repents.

The show doesn't do the same for Iroh. It never directly confronts Iroh with the ghosts of his past. The show wants you to unambiguously pity and feel bad for Iroh and not question his bloodstained past. It's weird that the only victim of the war that actually gets a name and a face is Iroh's own son, who is himself not blameless as a soldier of the Fire Nation. It minimizes Iroh's role and maximizes Iroh's personal loss as the reason why the war is bad and needs to be opposed. This is ironically somewhat reflective of how real life discourse around wars often end up devolving into; it's never about the losses on both sides but more about the losses on your side as the primary consequence of war.

Imagine if there was a scene where Iroh visits an Earth Kingdom war memorial while he was in Ba Sing Se and ask for forgiveness from ALL the people he got killed, not just his son. Imagine how strong a scene like that would have been for his character.

I just feel like Iroh's past is one of the rare instances where the Avatar show drops the ball and leaves a lot of potential on the table.

A lot of people used to praise Dandadan as the only action shonen series under Weekly Shonen Jump's umbrella that had actual development and focus placed on the romance subplot between the two leads.

Even though the bar for that is so low it's in hell, it's not inaccurate to say Dandadan's romance did seem to be move at a refreshingly fast pace by the standards of an action shonen series. The characters actually showed physical affection to each other, they had big moments almost every arc, and a lot of their character development orbited around their burgeoning romance. We even got a proper confession (like an actual, genuine "I love you") out of the male lead towards the end of the Jumanji arc.

Immediately after this moment though, the author started the biggest stalling campaign in shonen manga history. First, he had the female lead refuse to reciprocate the confession until she had unshrunk herself (she got hit with a curse that shrunk her to the size of a thumb during that Jumanji arc), then at the end of the arc where she gets cured of her shrinkage, she gets magically hit with amnesia, forgetting all of her romantic development with the male lead. With her character growth and progress reset to zero, we proceed to have 21 chapters straight (and counting) of her retreading the same ground with the male lead, and actually regressing in development due to stupid-ass misunderstandings stemming from every single character stubbornly refusing to tell her that her and the male lead were basically an item. The stated reason for this is "oh no, we can't do that, that would just confuse her". WHAT DO YOU MEAN?!? SHE'S ALREADY CONFUSED, SHE'S MISSING HALF A YEAR'S WORTH OF MEMORIES!

So to put this all into a timeline, the male lead confessing to the female lead happens in chapter 159. The female lead gets amnesia in chapter 210. Currently, as of the latest chapter 231, her amnesia is still not cured. If you count that up, that's 72 consecutive chapters of stalling in-between now and when the male lead confessed. In real world time, it's been nearly ONE AND A HALF YEARS.

This is levels of blue balling never seen before. No matter how good the pay-off for all of this ends up being, it will never be worth all the time wasted on stalling. A generational fumble.

I feel like some authors get so much leeway from fans for their new works because their previous ones were so great. The past doesn’t always predict the future. Authors are human beings and their skills can change over time, sometimes for the worse. Very few authors are actually consistent in their output. Sometimes, the reason their previous work was so good was because that was before they were popular or they had an external factor that was supporting their writing, like a good editor. There might be personal stuff going on in the background too that could influence their work.

I’m sure everyone is expecting the Fujimoto Chainsaw Man discourse so I’ll start with Oshi no Ko first. Aka Akasaka, before Oshi no Ko, was the author of the hit romcom manga Kaguya-sama Love is War. Back during its hayday, Kaguya-sama was a runaway hit and a sensation in the romcom space. It’s genuinely good and deserving of the hype; for the first half at least.

There’s kind of a sharp divide in the quality of the manga after a certain point, and that point coincides with when the manga became incredibly popular and the author skyrocketed in prestige. You can tell his publishers started giving him more and more creative freedom with his newfound success and the story started to bloat out of control and lose focus. Every interesting idea and subplot the author thought of was recklessly thrown into the mix and most of them ultimately ended up abandoned and without a satisfying conclusion or follow up. This might start to sound familiar to Oshi no Ko readers and that’s because it was during this era of Kaguya where Akasaka started writing his second manga, Oshi no Ko, concurrently with his first.

Oshi no Ko is basically a multi year documentary of Akasaka Aka’s fall-off as a writer. It’s Akasaka Aka at his most self-indulgent and hyperactive. All of his juvenile impulses from his early career that he actively lampshaded in Kaguya come back with a vengeance.

For context Aka’s very first piece of writing, even earlier than Kaguya, was a manga called Instant Bullet. It was unsuccessful and got canned in a handful of volumes. It had a lot of potential, but the writing was obviously amateurish, unbearably edgy and pseudo-intellectual. It’s peak “I’m 14 and this is deep”writing. which makes a lot of sense because Instant Bullet was apparently something Aka had been working on since he was in middle school. I’m sure anyone who dabbled in creative writing when they were a moody teenager can relate to writing similarly edgy slop. Instant Bullet is relevant in this conversation because you can accurately describe Oshi no Ko as having the charming characters of Kaguya with the edginess and pseudo-intellectualism of Instant Bullet.

Oshi no Ko, like Instant Bullet, had a lot of potential when it began. It was an out-there concept compared to Kaguya but still well within Akasaka’s wheelhouse. During the early days of Oshi no Ko’s serialization, Aka still had a lot of good will left over from Kaguya. This was still the era where fans unironically called him a genius mangaka. Even though there were early warning signs like Aqua’s entire character, most people’s sentiments were still “let him cook”. Aside from Aqua, Oshi no Ko still had a lot of interesting and dynamic characters packed full of the signature Kaguya charm that people know and love.

Aka has never been shy about inserting his own hobbies and interests as plot points in Kaguya, and it was well known that Aka had become pretty big into idol culture, so his next work Oshi no Ko being focused on the idol culture and entertainment industry on Japan was just the logical next step. The story of Oshi no Ko is nominally about a son trying to solve the murder conspiracy of his mother but in the early days of Oshi no Ko, the murder subplot took a backseat as Aka focused on what he actually created the manga for, to discuss his fascination with the entertainment industry. The murder mystery is largely a plot hook to get people into the story, not the main dish.

As Oshi no Ko entered its later years of serialization, you can tell Aka’s interest in idol and entertainment industry precipitously drop off. Oshi no Ko, more than Kaguya has ever been, is mostly a vehicle for Aka to write about the things he likes. That’s why there’s so many tangentially related arcs about vtubers or manga artists and getting their work adapted into film and stage plays. Those arcs are largely autobiographical in a sense. When Aka started to care less about those things and/or wrote what he wanted with them, and started to scale back their presence in the plot, what he was left with was an undercooked murder mystery plot with the least interesting male protagonist he’s ever written helming it.

Right around the stage play arc is when Oshi no Ko’s really starts to buckle under its own weight. Akasaka Aka, now more drunk on his own success than ever before, starts to get real sloppy. He flippantly abandons subplots he set up earlier in the story (which to be fair is a trend he carried over from Kaguya) because by the time it came to finally deliver the follow up, he had lost interest in it. A lot of characters that were previously important and had interesting roles to play in the plot get their screen time shafted. (Memcho? Memwho?)

Worst of all, since Aka’s focus was off the actually interesting parts of the manga, it became mainly focused on the murder mystery. Before, the story was held up by the more interesting characters and plots. Now that the focus is primarily on the murder conspiracy, the reader is subjected to more of Aqua than ever before. A common complaint even early on was how the universe revolved around Aqua, but that problem got exponentially worse as his dedicated subplot started getting all the focus.

Aqua is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with Oshi no Ko and modern Aka’s writing. It’s actually incredible how Aka went directly from writing such a compelling male lead in Kaguya to writing Aqua. It needs to be studied. It’s like Aka’s 14 year old self who wrote Instant Bullet possessed adult Aka’s brain while writing Aqua. Aqua is everything that Aka lampshaded and made fun of in Kaguya. Kaguya was also full of genius teenagers who dabbled in moody edge, but what made them lovable was that they and the story were self aware of how silly their behavior was. Kaguya, the protagonist of Kaguya-sama, has a scene where she seemingly hallucinates a council of alter egos and have a debate with them about their feelings for the male lead. The story makes it clear though that this is just a comedic visualization of her internal conflict and not an actual schizo moment where she’s talking to different personalities. Oshi no Ko has a moment like this with Aqua but it’s played completely straight. This man really starts having a serious conversation with some Persona-ass manifestation of his guilt and hate.

Aqua, aside from being schizophrenic, is also the king of plot conveniences. He’s effortlessly good at everything, a genius who can solve any problem solo. He’s what people think Batman with prep time is. Aqua with prep time can bend the universe to his will. He can save anyone and solve any issue because his giga brain will cook up a wild scheme that will play out to the exact detail. This is incredibly unearned compared to how this exact trope plays out in Kaguya. Shirogane, the male lead of Kaguya-sama, is also a genius with a propensity for grandiose schemes. Unlike Aqua though, the story makes him work for everything he achieved. He’s smart, but because he puts in more effort than anyone else. When things work out for him, Aka made sure to write it in away where we could see he achieved it through sheer grit and effort and not because the universe twisted itself into a pretzel to make it work. When he cooks up a plan for a crazy elaborate romantic gesture to confess his love to Kaguya, we actually see him running around ragged making sure everything is in order. He doesn’t just use his 500 IQ and chad aura to Le Manipulate people into doing his bidding, he has a good rapport with people and asks for their help and calls on favors. He’s explicitly not good at a lot of things and he makes up the gap by working to improve on those things. The existence of Shirogane makes Aqua that much more frustrating to read because it’s clear Aka knows how to write this exact type of character well, he just lobotomized himself with too many hours on Apex Legends and forgot that he could write good male leads.

Aqua also tangentially makes every character around him worse. Case in point Ruby, who’s basically sidelined for the first 70% of the story in favor of Kana who’s almost as annoying as Aqua, despite nominally sharing the protagonist role with Aqua. Ruby goes from being barely involved in the story to being a main character but only by becoming female Aqua. I actually thought Aka cooked with her character initially. The concept of a terminally ill cancer patient who got a second lease on life by reincarnating as her idol’s child and getting to live out her dream of following in her role model’s footsteps is compelling. Instead of utilizing her character as is, Aka has the bright idea to just infect her with Aqua’s personality traits. She starts to do the same giga brain schemes, the same charisma manipulation/mind control to get her way, etc. The same obsession with getting revenge and overflowing with “darkness” or whatever. This is eventually “solved” by Aqua revealing his true identity as the doctor who took care of her when she was sick in her previous life. I’ll actually give Aka some credit here. This scene, especially in the anime, is actually pretty well executed. Aqua is finally allowed to show a shred of human emotion and vulnerability for once and the two of them have a genuine heart to heart that snaps Ruby out of her edgelord warpath. You could almost feel a glimmer of hope that Aka isn’t completely washed. Then you snap back to reality when this moment is followed up with Ruby developing an incestuous infatuation with Aqua, her twin brother. Again, what makes this infuriating is that Aka liberally lampshades the brother-sister incest trope in Kaguya-sama. How do you go from making fun of it and pointing out how unreasonable it is to playing it out completely straight in your next work?

Which is the final thing: Aka became famous for writing one of the best received romcoms of the last decade. How the hell is the same guy so bad at writing romance in Oshi no Ko? Aqua and Kana have the most bland romance in any Aka work to date. Even the worst written relationship in Kaguya-sama (Ishigami and Miko) completely mogs Aqua and Kana. It really says a lot that the twincestous teacher-student age gap reincarnation romance that Ruby has going on with Aqua is more compelling and interesting than the Aqua Kana ship. Just goes to show even if the author was famously good at one aspect of writing a story, doesn’t mean even that will carry over to his next work.

I’m too tired to talk about Chainsaw Man and Fujimoto after all that. You’ve all heard the relevant takes on that ending already anyway. Themes and such.

A common design language for villains stretching back at least a century at this point is showing them as grotesquely obese or at least noticeably fat. There's been a lot of understandable pushback against this trope in recent years as a form of body shaming and promoting whack beauty standards. However, I think there's two schools of thought at work when creating these character designs, and only one of them is inherently fat phobic.

People have a natural inclination to associate unattractive features with negative personality traits so a lot of villains are intentionally designed to be ugly. One of the ways that can be achieved is by making the villain fat, which is almost a universally unattractive trait by modern beauty standards. This school of thought for designing fat villains is inherently fatphobic, because the villains' fatness is entirely cosmetic. They're fat for the sake of being ugly, not because their fatness is connected to their character or story in any meaningful way. They're evil, so they're fat. Uncle Vernon from Harry Potter definitely feels like a character who's fat primarily because it's a negative trait and he has to be as hateable as possible to the audience. There's some thematic resonance with his son who grows a pig tail, but it's a pretty weak connection and the whole pig thing is a one-off that's more relevant to the son's character and not him directly. Disney movies are chock full of villains who are unappealingly fat for little reason except as visual shorthand for evil.

The other school of thought is the fatness as an actual character trait and not as an aesthetic choice. The villains in this school of thought actually have a more meaningful reason to be designed in such a way than "fat = ugly = bad". A character might be fat because it ties into their personality trait of being gluttonous or greedy. A character might be morbidly obese as a form of body horror. Their fatness is used to enhance and highlight these villainous character traits. This school of thought for designing fat villains isn't inherently fatphobic because they're not fat for the sake of being ugly, they're fat to highlight their evil traits which are relevant to the character design. Gluttony from Fullmetal Alchemist isn't fat for the sake of making him ugly and more hateable as a villain, (he's actually one of the more "cute" designs out of his villain faction) he's fat because he metaphorically represents the sin of gluttony and also is a cannibal monster who eats anything and everything in his path. Or take a character like The Duke from Resident Evil 8. He's grotesquely obese, but it ties into his character by hinting that he's also a mutated monster like the rest of the NPCs you meet in the game, even if he's a lot friendlier than most. He's also a literal merchant of death who focuses single-mindedly on profit even at the most inappropriate times. He literally buys the bones of the bosses you kill off of you while exclaiming gleefully, even though most of them were his former clients that he knew for a long time personally. He's greedy and hedonistic and his fatness is used to highlight these traits at a glance.