The pacing seems very off to me, the fights are going too fast. At least an entire chapter for this fight and Hideman, this fight took like 8 pages and the previous one with Hideman half a chapter. Also, Asano should tone down his dark humor a little bit.
I agree, to some extent. The pacing and emotional beats feel very strange to me, like trying to dance in 9/17 time. The result isn't bad, necessarily, but it's hard to get a grip on. Like here, we're set up to expect a battle royale with the best Mujina in the biz. And we get a five-second skirmish with a ripped baby? Followed by the equally speedy assassination of two crazy old fossils? And that's it? The villain characters and their behavior are "wtf" strange, but not particularly funny. More just
really fucking odd. Like
Hiramoto Akira at half power.
And I'm not sure how we're supposed to take Mitsuharu's grief. Stockholm syndrome? Legitimate love & loss? Whatever the case, the post-assassination scene between him & Mimi felt
very forced and unreal, almost surreal in its uncanny valley sentimentality. Which, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing. To its credit, this series is starting to remind me of
HITS, which does a pretty great job of sustaining a similar kind of not-quite-comical comic eccentricity.
A lot of people bitch about this manga but, what were they expecting?
It's like asking Tarantino to make an action movie and then bitch about it for not being 'normal' enough.
Honestly, I think Tarantino's work is a hell of a lot more normal than Asano's. It's stylish and ambitious, plays clever games with genre, but aside from the use of violence, it never really goes too far "outside".