Now That We Draw - Ch. 29 - What Gets You Going

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It always bugs me when manga about artists ends up with with them simply reproducing their own lived experiences in their art.

Oftentimes, it feels lazy, because the author then doesn't have to come up with a story within a story to present to the audience, they can just say 'the MC drew what happened in the actual chapter that you, dear reader, just read'

It also doesn't feel realistic, because even though drawing from your own lived experience is a perfectly normal thing for an artist to do, it makes no sense to be a complete copy, because then you're just a one-hit wonder. You're not really an artist at that point, you're just an autobiographer.

It makes me sad because it really could be done so much better. I always remember in the movie 'Liz and the Blue Bird' how there was this entire secondary plot being presented every few scenes which depicted the entire Blue Bird story and the audience could read between the lines that the story matched with what was happening in the 'actual' story of the film about the two girls in the band who were practicing to play the particular orchestral piece depicting this story. So even if the stories were clearly correlated, they were still unique in their own way and it was interesting seeing how the girls were 'approaching' the play.

I think stories about manga artists and writers could be so much stronger if they had similar secondary stories happening within the manga which were the product of the main character, but the way in which the story relates to the 'main' plot of the story would be kept subtle so that there was still value in presenting this 'story within a story'.

Alas, this manga is like a B-movie so this sort of criticism is a bit overkill, but still, just my two cents.
I think it's just an easy fictional shorthand, because showing something more realistic as a creation is a lot harder.

In real life, you create by recombining all the tiny little moments of inspiration, emotion, allure, displeasure with how a plot went in something else you watched, and so on and so forth. And the things that catch the mind, the things you want to reproduce, can be so tiny or specific to your experience or nuanced or vague as to be unrecognizable from the outside.

Having an in-universe work of fiction that does that AND that the real world audience can reliably understand as being inspired by [whatever] is a lot harder than just taking a half-step away from what literally happened in-universe and putting it in the in-universe work of fiction.
 
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That's a pose. But it's common in high jump, and only momentary, so she probably wouldn't see him. And that's on her.

Guest mangaka. Nice opportunity.

Character introductions for 8/8 pages. Sounds like a pokemon harem story.

Good place to go with that skirt.

Actively flirting. Needs more clarity; he's a manga protagonist. He's not going to get it.

And she gave him the inspiration he needed.

It always bugs me when manga about artists ends up with with them simply reproducing their own lived experiences in their art.
It's a common advice for drawing. Write what you know. But usually it involved some abstraction and remodelling. And in a story, a story within the story is almost always less complex, since it has far less page-time to appear in.
 
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Editor-san is a real one for pushing our boy to really bring out his best stuff as a mangaka, while also sticking with him this whole time despite his more underwhelming draft submissions.

BSxjrop.png

Kudos to this dude
 
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Wake up babe , another banger chapter dropped , alongside the promise of a banger christmas chapter
Thanks for the translate as always
 
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The other day I was looking into buying some headphones, and I decided to get a set of those Marshall Major cans that Koi-chan wears. They’re nice headphones, but is that weird? I feel like that’s weird.
Nothing weird about it, they are well regarded cans that a bunch of regular people use. I say do it
 
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It always bugs me when manga about artists ends up with with them simply reproducing their own lived experiences in their art.

Oftentimes, it feels lazy, because the author then doesn't have to come up with a story within a story to present to the audience, they can just say 'the MC drew what happened in the actual chapter that you, dear reader, just read'

It also doesn't feel realistic, because even though drawing from your own lived experience is a perfectly normal thing for an artist to do, it makes no sense to be a complete copy, because then you're just a one-hit wonder. You're not really an artist at that point, you're just an autobiographer.

It makes me sad because it really could be done so much better. I always remember in the movie 'Liz and the Blue Bird' how there was this entire secondary plot being presented every few scenes which depicted the entire Blue Bird story and the audience could read between the lines that the story matched with what was happening in the 'actual' story of the film about the two girls in the band who were practicing to play the particular orchestral piece depicting this story. So even if the stories were clearly correlated, they were still unique in their own way and it was interesting seeing how the girls were 'approaching' the play.

I think stories about manga artists and writers could be so much stronger if they had similar secondary stories happening within the manga which were the product of the main character, but the way in which the story relates to the 'main' plot of the story would be kept subtle so that there was still value in presenting this 'story within a story'.

Alas, this manga is like a B-movie so this sort of criticism is a bit overkill, but still, just my two cents.
I think I understand what you mean, but I believe in the case of our two protagonists this wouldn't fit because they're in the situation of being in a time crunch needing improve their skills quickly while also coming up many new drafts, and since the focus of this story is more the romance between the two, it's more about the feeling of trying to become an author and trying to learn while also enjoying the proccess more then developing the story of the work itself. I think there would be the space for that after one of them gets serialized (did Uehara get a spot after winning the award? I can't remember), but even then it'd probably just be snippets, as there's already a lot going on in the story and it'd be something almost completely new.

Though, I'd really enjoy if the topic of research would be introduced with a bit more depth as the story moves forward, I think that'd be really nice to see.

______

Also, thank you very much to the group for the scanlation.
 
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Things appear in print magazines, not on them.
(For reference, things also appear in web magazines, but web magazines appear on websites, so it's a bit more complicated then.)
 

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