Now That We Draw - Vol. 4 Ch. 22 - So...

[nicolas22g]

Now, kiss

 

[biologist]

I wonder if Uehara still has the same view of Miyamoto from chapter 16 which is "unattainable". If he still has that and Miyamoto not show him that she is indeed, attainable for him then thing is going to be ... fine If not for the fact that Koi-chan exists.
Not to mention Koi-chan existence is a complete enigma to Miyamoto at the moment. And unlike Yume-sensei case where Uehara know that he is Miyamoto's type. Miyamoto doesn't know jack shit about Koi-chan.

yes, this is How Koi-chan can still win copepost

 

[Randomlosername]

These two are so mf cute. I cannot wait for the next chapter!

 

[yazh]

So close yet so far away

 

[schwnt]

Well, they've got something else in common. Other than their passion. Other than being cute.

"I could tell you about it, but you wouldn't get it," is such a crap thing to say. What it really means is that he lacks the understanding and verbal capacity to explain it to her. There are very few things you can't explain at all, and that's not one of them.

You don't get it. There are many things that you either get or don't get it. At worst, the verbal explainations could lead people astray

 

[AnotherDuck]

You don't get it. There are many things that you either get or don't get it. At worst, the verbal explainations could lead people astray

You don't get it. This isn't an "at worst" situation. What she was figuring out was something you can easily tell someone. I mean, if it wasn't, it wouldn't be something you could even depict in a manga.

 

[SomeBoredGuy]

Let's goooooooo

 

[setohuto]

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD FUCKING KISS ALREADY

 

[Kaizerdist]

Thank goodness most of that stuff is behind us. Hopefully we'll finally get to them being honest about their affection, at LEAST to themselves.

Thanks for the chapter.

 

[SatchelBagman]

You don't get it. This isn't an "at worst" situation. What she was figuring out was something you can easily tell someone. I mean, if it wasn't, it wouldn't be something you could even depict in a manga.

Setting aside whether the story succeeds in accomplishing it, the intent seems to very much be "This is an important thing to understand, so it is important for you to come to the realization through your personal experience rather than just have someone tell you verbally and risk having you brush it off, misunderstand, argue the point, or otherwise fail to internalize the lesson being conveyed."

Giving her Steps 1 and 2 of the line of thought sets her up to put together "You like this character in the story you're writing, but the people who're reading the story are not you" with "Other people (who aren't me) don't (already) know why I like this person" to arrive at "I need to be able to convey why I like this character in my writing so the reader will understand" and connect this understanding with a personal breakthrough relating to something important enough to be frustrated about.

This is very much not the more infuriating case of characters being told to figure something out with no clues — Yume-sensei put forth a line of address with a clear trajectory, then pivoted to "I could tell you all about it, but it wouldn't make much sense" after she was visibly not connecting the dots. From both a storytelling and conversational perspective, what does just telling her outright accomplish? She's not exactly in a note-taking frame of mind and this is already implicitly pointing to a failure of hers with regards to a part of her work that she likes a lot, so unless the goal is for her to go all starry-eyed about how cleanly her manga-mentor explained it the best we could probably hope for would be a sort of dejected "I see, thank you for telling me this."

Ultimately the framing is such that this also doubled as "I'm not-really giving you the homework of thinking about this yourself because I'm the artist you're assisting and theoretically picking up tips from, not your editor or your teacher," but I don't think it's Bad to give someone eighty percent of the routing to come to the emotional understanding that being enthusiastic about something is not the only thing you need to be able to make other people enthusiastic about it instead of saying "You're going to have to show the readers why they should like this character" when they've already submitted the work and were fretting about asking for an outside opinion.

 

[AnotherDuck]

Setting aside whether the story succeeds in accomplishing it, the intent seems to very much be "This is an important thing to understand, so it is important for you to come to the realization through your personal experience rather than just have someone tell you verbally and risk having you brush it off, misunderstand, argue the point, or otherwise fail to internalize the lesson being conveyed."

But for such an intent, you have to actually have a lesson that's even close to it. This is essentially just Theory of Mind, which children start learning at around 4 years old. This is just such base level information, several steps before learning the difference between showing and telling (often misleadingly stated as "show don't tell"), for instance.

To take another example, telling someone that, "no one can be told what the Matrix is," makes more sense. That's at least something that could potentially be difficult to wrap your head around without experiencing it. But a lot of people still had a problem with that, since it was so easily explained.

As I said, there are lessons you need personal experience for, but those are related to practice (which this is not about) or other topics. In the writing industry, regardless of medium, so much has been analysed and written about that you can verbally explain most of it, and the rest require an amount of experience you cannot gain by a single epiphany like this.

From both a storytelling and conversational perspective, what does just telling her outright accomplish?

It would give her the exact same answer as whatever was going on here, but with a much lower risk of her misunderstanding or not ever getting it, and it doesn't look down on readers by providing an extremely simple lesson and pretending it's a hard one.

You can't pretend you're dealing with a difficult concept and then present an easy one, and just expect readers to fill in the blank. It's like pretending you're dealing with a morally complex issue, and then go, "Orcs are Evil, mmkay?"

the best we could probably hope for would be a sort of dejected "I see, thank you for telling me this."

Absolutely disagree, and you're being dishonest. There's a lot more to hope for. Don't pretend to present a "best case scenario" and then present a mediocre one. It's a false argument.

Ultimately the framing is such that this also doubled as "I'm not-really giving you the homework of thinking about this yourself because I'm the artist you're assisting and theoretically picking up tips from, not your editor or your teacher,"

I considered that, but if he's that reluctant to give proper advice, he shouldn't accept looking over it in the first place. She gave it to him expecting feedback, so he should honour that wish if he accepts it. I'm reading it as him being too incompetent to instruct someone, and so far no arguments have shown otherwise.

I don't think it's Bad to give someone eighty percent of the routing

It's not eighty percent of the routing, though. There are other conclusions to draw from it, such as the audience just not caring about that type of character, so she should draw something more marketable instead. It's at most fifty percent of the routing, and since she already managed to convey her feelings through drawing alone, he didn't add much at all. His advice instead had a serious risk of throwing her off course, should she have reached the wrong conclusion.

 

[SatchelBagman]

As I said, there are lessons you need personal experience for, but those are related to practice (which this is not about) or other topics. In the writing industry, regardless of medium, so much has been analysed and written about that you can verbally explain most of it, and the rest require an amount of experience you cannot gain by a single epiphany like this.

And the lesson here is one that involves the root of presentation of a story's events to build the reader's engagement with a character, specifically that there are things that are missing from the presentation she currently has. There's concrete advice to provide toward that end, but it isn't exactly good radio without the kind of examples that would have to thread the needle between telling her how to write her story (with information she has and the reader doesn't) or introduce another story that takes up page space and either won't come up again or has to come up again to justify its inclusion in the middle of the finishing business of this amusement park date arc.

It would give her the exact same answer as whatever was going on here, but with a much lower risk of her misunderstanding or not ever getting it, and it doesn't look down on readers by providing an extremely simple lesson and pretending it's a hard one.

I feel it is somewhat disingenuous to call an exchange presented as a flashback in the middle of a character coming to an understanding "looking down on readers."

Absolutely disagree, and you're being dishonest. There's a lot more to hope for. Don't pretend to present a "best case scenario" and then present a mediocre one. It's a false argument.

From a storytelling perspective, addressing the fact that this is a visual medium conveying events to the readers and the dramatic principle of Chekhov's gun, in what way would you expect this consultation to directly provide Miyamoto with the answer verbally that is satisfying to read instead of a setup for her to better understand it later?

She's sitting down and talking to a person who is reading pages and trying to tell her about things that aren't there that should be. That's a very abstract thing to try to convey about a manga-within-a-manga that we haven't really seen much of, and we've already seen that negative editorial commentary from earlier in the story tends to be either presented as advice the characters talk about having received as something they're trying to work on or part of their frustration at not getting their work picked up.

Short of going further back in the narrative to reframe this date entirely, pushing this flashback a couple pages later than it is to cut out Miyamoto's frustration with those strangers on the bus, or cutting out the interaction altogether, there has to be a justification for including this scene instead of having "I need to get the readers to understand what I like about this character" be advice Miyamoto recalls being given off-screen.

I considered that, but if he's that reluctant to give proper advice, he shouldn't accept looking over it in the first place. She gave it to him expecting feedback, so he should honour that wish if he accepts it. I'm reading it as him being too incompetent to instruct someone, and so far no arguments have shown otherwise.

Yume-sensei's a very out-of-focus character (this is roughly his fourth appearance in the manga overall, one of which was a single panel of a montage page, his introduction was him oversleeping, and his fifth appearance at the end of this chapter is him not even realizing what he had said was taken as advice), and unfortunately he's also the closest established character we have in Miyamoto's circle that's able to fill the same role for her manga as Oyamada fills for Uehara's. He's a professional mangaka whose work is getting a drama adaptation; his work is good and/or popular enough to be known to Miyamoto and getting a drama adaptation, but that doesn't make verbalizing lessons about big-picture story design part of his job description.

Miyamoto asked him to look over her submission because he's successful and she respects his work and was able to ask him as one of his assistants, but his role in the narrative here is to be a vehicle for her to come to a secondary realization on the tail end of a date she went on to figure out if she likes Uehara. We don't see any other advice he may or may not have given her during that consultation because the important part of this flashback is providing immediate context to her realization that she knows why she likes the things she likes and wants other people to understand it, which is itself in the context of her finishing up a date where determining whether she likes someone and why was the main goal.

We have more than one instance earlier in the comic of her struggling to learn things that are being directly instructed to her and this flashback already takes up a fifth of the chapter without incorporating more of a back-and-forth than the "I don't get it" transition back to the present. Yume-sensei's teaching chops are not the purpose of the scene, Yume-sensei's teaching chops are not what he does for a living, and there is not enough information to definitively analyze Yume-sensei's teaching chops because Yume-sensei as a character has been on-panel for less than the length of a full chapter.

It's not eighty percent of the routing, though. There are other conclusions to draw from it, such as the audience just not caring about that type of character, so she should draw something more marketable instead. It's at most fifty percent of the routing, and since she already managed to convey her feelings through drawing alone, he didn't add much at all. His advice instead had a serious risk of throwing her off course, should she have reached the wrong conclusion.

See "He's not her editor." From both inside and outside the story there is little reason to assume that he's telling her to draw an unspecified "something more marketable" as something she can "find out for herself" as a currently unpublished artist who is trying to get picked up by a publication. The material she showed him shows that she's enthusiastic about the character in the art (which is often discernible in the amount of detail and care given to a subject) but not why, and this is a four-page flashback with a page's worth of transition between the internal monologue and the visual presentation of what she is connecting to her current situation.

It's an offhand tip given to an employee and fellow artist off the clock about a work she is likely to get professional editorial feedback for later. We have plenty of sequences in the manga of characters being told by an editor about the shortcomings of their work, but relatively few opportunities to e.g. characterize the second of the artists our two main characters are assisting in the middle of an arc that otherwise has nothing to do with the main characters' manga.

 

[AnotherDuck]

I feel it is somewhat disingenuous to call an exchange presented as a flashback in the middle of a character coming to an understanding "looking down on readers."

That's got nothing to do with what I actually said.

in what way would you expect this consultation to directly provide Miyamoto with the answer verbally that is satisfying to read instead of a setup for her to better understand it later?

To be satisfying to read it has to be something that's on the skill level she should be at. If it's really about conveying information about the character to the reader, then a simple reminder to include that would suffice, and she should already have some basis for how to do that. Forgetting to do something is vastly different from not even knowing the concept of it.

It would be more appropriate to have a problem about how to tell or show that information to the reader. In that case it would be better for him to ask her how she would accomplish that (and she could figure out an answer later on), rather than just saying he can't tell her.

The rest of what you wrote is a lot of words that say very little of meaning, and it's largely not relevant to my argument.

 

[Peterociclos]

I never thought people would be this passionate about this manga it really makes me happy (imagine my pfp but with a smile instead)

 

[TheRebel]

Great chapter, I’m sure there will be some bumps and drama ahead but I’m loving it so far.

 

[NishaAzalea]

Yuume senseinbeing legit like "I gave her advice???"
Bro could not even be bothered to remember 😂