I’m dropping this for now, about halfway through. There are some clever ideas and nice moments, but they’re hampered by how excessively deranged almost all the characters are and how unrealistic things go down...
I would say I wanted to like this more than I did, but it feels like a decent plot with a truckload of edgey / messed up stuff dumped in...
^ This is basically how I feel.
Nozoki Ana starts with an intriguing premise, and mangaka Honna Wakou piles on the secrets and twists. This makes the series quite suspenseful and, as a result, kind of "compulsively readable". But only in the sense that mediocre television dramas seem "compulsively watchable" once you're hooked.
No one in
Nozoki Ana behaves in an even vaguely plausible manner: not generically irritating harem MC Kido Tatsuhiro, not mystery peeper girl Ikuno Emiru (more a plot device than a person), and not the supporting cast. Of course, comedy and art often depend on characters that act as real people would not. Here though, there's no justification. The writing is just lousy.
For me, the bottom fell out when Horii Makoto, the rapist thug who haunts the first major story arc, is magically redeemed in the space of maybe three minutes by an inane conversation. That's not how people work. That the whole scene is presented in utmost serious earnest makes its idiocy all the more galling.
Honna-san does this over and over again (I read on for another 25 chapters). Characters initially act in an absurd manner, then reveal anguished hidden motives in light of which their behavior still makes no sense, and are finally ushered out having somehow been transformed for the better. It's maddening, but also hard to put down.
Nonetheless, I eventually gave up. No one should have to suffer this much for somebody else's art.