第４３話
Look at this bozo caring about the consequences of selling his product instead of looking for venture capitalist money. Let the free market decide!
a retrospective
I actually found this specific chapter more interesting than the few before because it seems to cement that coko & co are working on a third way which is neither tongari nor tsubaari, and I like that the mangaka doesn’t seem to be forcing a black and white outcome.
I do agree that more generally the manga has been spinning its wheels since the end of the snake path arc. It feels a bit directionless. I kind of like that it makes it all feel a bit more grounded (in real life we don’t just jump from crisis to crisis for years on end) and we get some character development instead, but I think it’s about time that some stakes are reintroduced and we get a new concrete objective/threat. The beautiful art keeps me going either way.
I also think that Full Metal Alchemist does the whole “no real answers, only more questions” a lot worse than this, so maybe by contrast I don’t mind Atelier too much.
Honestly before I started learning Japanese a few years ago I never consumed a huge amount of manga or anime but I always felt that Japanese media in general is just bad at pacing. I genuinely can’t think of a single piece of serialized Japanese media where I didn’t feel like you could cut 50% of the content and lose nothing. It seems that Japanese culture just loves that stuff? It may also be because of the way the publishing schedules work. If I understand correctly mangakas and animes basically have to keep outputting new chapters/episodes weekly or it’s game over?