And so we have come to the end of Unlucky Young Men and gosh, let me tell you... this became such a chore for us towards the end😅 I really hope there's someone out there that will one day read this manga and think "That was such a great series" because for us... it... well... yeah. I will maintain that the first volume was actually quite strong but it just crashed in the second volume, and it crashed hard. Overall sentiment in the group was "ewwie" for most of (or in suchtla's case, all of) the second volume. Although it was co-plotted, I put most of the blame on Eiji Otsuka because he also wrote that turd MPD Psycho, I read that one probably more than a decade ago and I didn't even read everything that was scanlated at the time, I dropped it at around 40 chapters in or so, it had a very poor and surface level handle on the multiple personality disorder presented in the series.
Kamui Fujiwara is absolutely fantastic throughout the entire series though and I feel bad about not talking about his work more but his layouts are pretty fucking incredible. It's a shame the manga wasn't better, especially since some of the character were based on some really cool fucking people. The worst sin in terms of the writing has got to be the female characters that are just simply badly written. And I think most of the attempts at being clever fell flat, Eiji Otsuka is no Tolstoy and while Yoko's words in chapter 18 (on the 4th page/058) are great, that chapter takes a turn for the worst and is overall pretty shitty and her character is just... so bad from that moment forward (ironically, the two Yoko's conversation at the end of that chapter is actually pretty okay)
But I don't wanna rag on it too much, I didn't hate it even though I didn't find the last chapter satisfying (last several pages were very good though) but even so I thought there were sill some good moments like the N scenes from chapter 20 or those last several pages of chapter 26 with T and Yoko (mostly because of Fujiwara but the pages were well written too).
There's a spin off one volume manga that you should know what it's about by now. Absolutely zero interest in doing that from us and if someone were to join with the intention of doing it we'd just throw a few hundred other suggestion their way instead. Go read Mishima's novels and then watch Mishima A Life In Four Chapters, I'll stake my life on the fact that that movie is far better than this 1 volume spin off manga that I have not read. He was such a fascinating person that it's hard to believe his life was real... maybe it wasn't and we're just living in his dream, but his story is grander than fiction and his books all build up and help contextualize his life and its trajectory, he is poetry in human form. And his writing is simply beautiful. There's a lot content about him and based on him out there, just this year there was some lost footage recovered of a famous debate between him and students at Tokyo University.
Oh well, this series is (in my opinion) the weakest we've worked on but I'm glad we were able to finish it despite the fact that, like I said, we weren't really feeling it anymore. And I really hope someone out there, even if it's just one person, end up really liking this.
And here's the entire thing
Tokyo Girls Bravo on the other hand continues to be lovely. Funny and sad, tragic and at times very uplifting. Kyoko Okazaki does a lot in a limited number of pages, chapters never feel empty.
