punchline: existential dread's Manga

this author is good. VERY good. whatever direction she takes the reader, however unexpected, she does it with flair. i love reading about expat communities. it always brings back memories of my childhood as an expat, a third-culture kid. i love the way the romance takes a backseat to the slow creeping subplot of intrigue. the variegated and colorful supporting characters are great too. i love the way the author introduces them without cue cards, so that i have to rely entirely on contextual clues to figure out their relationships to ryuunosuke.

mixed bag

this... this isn't a slow burn romance, or a "will-they-won't-they"—it's a "won't-they-won't-they." how many more chapters of denial am i going to have to slog through??? Sekaiichi Hatsukoi is at its strongest when it dwells on the past and the bittersweet longing of lost love. if we're talking about manga that touches on a persuasion-esque (yep, don't think i haven't spotted the austenian influence) rekindled romance, though, i think "replay" by junko managed to capture with one chapter the essence of volumes of this.

EDIT: I've neglected to mention the good: Sekaiichi Hatsukoi remains the only manga to feel like a proper love letter to the manga industry, rather than just a surface-level cribbing of a convenient setting--the inner workings of the shoujo industry are intricately interwoven into the tapestry of the narrative, and its operations lovingly parodied. Ritsu and Takano's jobs are central to their lives. I still love the fact that Ritsu's background was actually in literature, that his foray into shoujo initially felt like a demotion he had to suffer to procure his independence, but that over the course of the narrative he slowly falls in love with the lowbrow industry.

current progress: vol 6 chpt 3

hey man this is fucking good shit