Do you remember a cartoon named "Tom and Jerry", where in every episode the cat will try to catch the mouse, but in some way the mouse will always end up escaping the cat and then the episode will end? Well the formula behind this manga is exactly the same.
We can notice all this just by reading the summary of this work:
"Shinobu Sumida, a down-on-his-luck gravure otaku, unexpectedly starts living together with rookie gravure idol Sakura Katsuragi! But his heart-racing dream days are short-lived as lecherous photographers, crooked managers, and sexually harassing producers start closing in on his "beloved Sakura-chan" one after another!! Can Shinobu protect Sakura-chan's virtue!? What will happen on this netorare love comedy in the world of gravure idols!?"
Grapara is referred in the official site and was promoted as an "NTR love comedy", these three terms, when placed side by side, one after another, are obviously antinomicals, and thus they highlight, what was in fact, a disaster waiting to happen.
In this review i won't talk about the dogshit writing made by the author Katsura Airi, the majority of you guys already know her (and if you don't and are thinking about reading any of her manga just don't), in fact I saw that in the comments section of the latest chapters there are more than 3k comments, that i obviously didn't read and won't read (you guys are nuts).
One of the usual problems from authors that grew up in the porn industry, is that they always end up focusing on the majority of their works on the "porn aspect" of a story: (leaving aside that most of them, just like this author, don't know how to write a story, how to really develope it, and they end up using and relying on cheap drama and misery porn) most of the times these authors end up focusing entirely on their fetishes, rejecting the adherence of those fetishes in the actual story, and so they end up discarding in any way the possibility to develop a consistent and coherente story.
Grapara is exactly all that: the characters have to indulge in the "NTR aspect", the preponderant one in this story, so they can't really talk, they can't really develope, because in order to do that they will have to have real conversations or real confrontations (not the made up ones that the author comes up with to ""advance the plot""), because this fetish is all over this story and destroys any attempt to do something good.
The characters' speeches in this context are hollows, they don't resonate with their readers, and the majority (if not all) of their actions also don't, because they are nonsensical. These characters can't act in a natural and normal way (just think about the "climax" of this story) because the main "fetish" of this story subdue anything else.
If the fetish is all around the story, then what remains of this manga if we remove that from the equation? Well there's only one thing: "the Tom and Jerry formula".
We have our FMC, the oblivious "damsel in distrees" and our MC, the character that should help our mouse of the story to avoid being caught by the cat. In order to follow this formula, the mouse can't be caught by the cat, the main reason is cause if that happens, then there's really nothing else to do: (and also for another reason that I'll explain in a sec) the formula is broken, the characters get screwed and the manga can be thrown in the trash where it belongs to, cause everything is destroyed at this point.
Now if you are an author whose not a complete moron, you will have already realized that, in order to keep this story "an NTR love comedy one" alive and make those themes coexist, so basically, in order to continue to make moneys, you'll have to keep the main premise of this work alive, otherwise you will only end up disappointing your readers, who are the ones who buy your stuff. If you won't respect your own work, you will only end up destroying it, and bring ulterior shame and backlash on your own persona and on your "street credibility".
Katsura Airi though, goes far beyond the usual level of stupidity that an average idiot might possess: when people have a checkov gun in their hands, they expect that gun to shoot, but if they're not complete morons, they wouldn't aim for their own heads before pulling the trigger. Airi instead does exactly that with his last work Grapara: the premise is betrayed, the "love" and the "comedy" aspects ends up completely disappearing from the story, all that remains is the "fetish" that becomes the only thing that it is still alive in this environment.
The fetish alone though, can't survive all alone when the whole formula fells apart: the axe/end of the story is inevitable. Grapara as I said before was a dumpster fire of dogshit writing and a complete disaster from the very beginning: all that was already on the cards from the very start of the story, and I hope it ended up not surprising anyone, because this manga never had any good points, not even when the ""mangaka"" first started thinking about it.
Katsura Airi confirms once more to not being able to tell a story in any way or form, and that she should just crawl back up in the porn industry where she belongs, because the only thing she seems able to do is drawing porn.
(this is my review and the only comment I will ever do on this garbage manga)
