Unpopular opinions

[PantsMan]

Vent here about your peculiar manga-related issues very few people seem to feel the same way about. Feel like the only sane man in a mad, mad world with awful taste (at least as far as manga are concerned)!

I'll start:
I really despise what I refer to as "drama-porn" manga. You know the kind: young guy/girl (usually a guy, weirdly enough) is depressed/a NEET/gets dumped/betrayed/has a terminal illness. Usually he'll try to commit suicide, but something, like a girl, keeps him from doing it. Shenanigans happen, a major character dies, not a single arc goes by without someone crying; you've probably come across this before. I hate this crap, and it really irks me when everyone gobbles this kind of series up. It just feels so cheap and cookie-cutter: of course people are going to feel sad about someone dying/wanting to die young!

Not to mention how seemingly easy it is to get people out of these so-called "depressions", since usually all it takes is a cute girl and some token "Just be yourself, bro! Enjoy life more!" message. I don't know about you guys, but that just comes off as extremely shallow. I can't feel bad for these characters when all they needed all along to get right back up was a pep-talk and someone willing to date them.

On the flip-side, when these stories involve some sad, middle-aged guy who's way past his prime as the protagonist, I can't help but eat this shit up. Maybe I just find that kind of sadness more compelling and "real" when it's coming out of the mouth of some old fart who's wasted his life than a 20-something who's barely out of highschool (assuming he's even left it).

 

[Valkit]

Almost every isekai manga is bad. There are a few exceptions but most are practically the same garbage repeated slightly differently. Bonus points if it's ecchi and/or harem.

 

[RedInACup]

@Valkit
Bonus points in a good or bad way?

 

[totallynotmike]

.

 

[Valkit]

@RedInACup
Bad

 

[demias]

@Valkit
Agreed. Unfortunate that Isekai fill 80% of the top chapters here.

 

[Legion_01]

Both isekai and comics from wuxias are terrible. In isekai the MC is almost always either a brainless dude with a plot armor so thick that the great wall of china bows to it, or a pervert that yet never gets laid. Characters are mostly monodimensional, best case scenario bidimensional. Wuxias, are the same sh*t but with different tropes. The most ridiculous thing about them is how the MC after becoming super strong still gets called trash, then starts the get humiliated->get stronger->get revenge rinse and repeat cycle. And to add insult to the injury, the ones that try to kill him for petty or no reason at all, call the MC "despicable" cuz he refuses to die.
Also in both isekais and wuxias, a MC only needs to sneeze to get all kind of girls fall in real love with him.
This kind of comics are insta drop for me, make me puke buckets.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

Solo Leveling is one of the top followed mangas on MD. The thing is, once you look at the bigger picture, it's just a one-dimensional protagonist who gets to fight in ridiculously awesome action scenes.

Yeah I can see why it's one of the top most followed _{coughshounenporncough} but the protagonist is still one-dimensional. He only gets a single character development throughout 60 chapters and that's at the first arc of the story (granted, this is a longstrip so progression per chap is little). His personality can be summed up as "I want to get stronger" (granted, that's all the story needs).

 

[Heidi]

I personally don't like the way Japanese authors talk about food so damn much, especially in an isekai series, where the MC just can't shut his/her mouth about how good the food taste in the new world or how they miss the old world's food. It's so damn annoying when sometimes the author spend an entire chapter or two talking about it.

If I want to read about food, I will just read a cooking manga. Seriously, what's with the Japanese authors' obsession with food?

 

[PantsMan]

@Legion_01

a pervert that yet never gets laid

This one brings up a weird reasoning I don't get. Everyone (understandably) dislikes blueballing and relationships going nowhere because the characters act like Puritans who are an indirect kiss away from strapping buckles to their hats. On the other hand, there's a bunch of trashy, poorly-written manga that get paraded around and recommended simply because "the protagonist fucks! How cool is that?" What a dumb thing to praise a series for.

@Heidi
If those series were to be believed, Japanese soy sauce must be some kind of divine end-all of cuisine (instead of, you know, a slightly salty garnish).

 

[MonteKlive]

I particularly don't like series where MC overworked and died then reincarnated to start a slow life stuff. Many isekai Mangas are like counting the reincarnated part like a main story line and I feel like missing something reading most ieskais.
And things like magic is imagination or chanting in kanji for stronger magic stuff.

 

[DjAlexDubCheck]

@PantsMan I agree so much with your first post.
It's the perfect description of "I want to eat your pancreas", which is in my worst manga top ten of all time.
Drama porn should disappear in the sewers it belongs

 

[Tcof]

@DjAlexDubCheck i don't think his point and your post really match.
also in "I want to eat your pancreas" it maybe even opposite. you kinda miss the story point. He (or both) scary of make them become important. It not the type comfort the reader's shell. It suppose to be a regret

 

[Tikibo]

Most unpopular opinions are really popular and the author just wants to validate his worldview.

 

[dankdevice]

@MonteKlive omg yes, every time i see the "i just want to live a slow relaxing life" plot device i roll my eyes so fuckin hard.

is working life in japan really so awful that a common escapist power fantasy is "i can do anything i want, so i choose to do nothing"

 

[Rhaptopia]

Well atleast in my opinion I think that working in Japan is pretty fucked compared to like idk Germany like they sometimes work the whole day and then go to bed to go to work the next morning. The example is pretty extreme but not uncommon.

 

[Superioreos]

I do find the plot boring, but it makes sense from the Japanese perspective. Yes, work CAN be that bad, this is a country which has a word explicitly for "death from overwork". What is perceived as entertainment is based on the culture in which it was created. Think of Animal Crossing, aside from being really cute and fun, the basis of that game was to allow Japanese people to do what they would probably never be able to do, live in a house that they owned (and pay off their debt). For many Japanese, living in a tiny apartment is the best they will ever get. Or you can look at how the young people who have cars are so cool when portrayed in Japanese media (the same thing happened in US media during the 60s when young people having a car was a status symbol), that is because so few people in Japan own cars. In Japan you are not assumed to have a driver's license. Unlike in the US or Europe, where people who do not have one are the odd ones out.

 

[Kaarme]

@Rhaptopia Yeah, although the last four hours of that "work" day is sitting in a bar with your boss and coworkers, getting wasted. Neither going to the bar nor getting wasted is optional if you want to keep your job and even get promoted eventually.

 

[ninjadork]

This is primarily a wuxia/light novel problem, but some isekai do it too. Characters that are not just flawed, not just mixed bags, but actively fucking evil (often for no reason) and yet the author builds the entire story and setting to not just focus on them, but idolize them and paint them as good people. I don't want to spend an entire series wading through rivers of you shitposting about why I should applaud this jackass's relentless jackassery.

ToDaG and Against the Gods are the two that come immediately to mind.

 

[EaterOfBooks]

I'm not sure if it's an unpopular opinion, but I hate retardedly evil 'nobility'. The form it takes depends on the setting: sometimes it's western-style nobility, sometimes it's corporate types, sometimes it's sect heads, and sometimes it's Chinese imperial court style douchebags, but it always feels lazy to have the antagonists' main motivation be "because we're evil, duh" and be protected by power, wealth, and status so they can't be dealt with until the protagonist gets stronger or decides to break the rules.

Yeah, it's easy to hate people like that, and authors can generate a lot of 'cheap heat' for one-dimensional antagonists that way, but it gets incredibly repetitive when you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in positions of power who don't have "be a jerk to the MC, or maybe beat/rape/kill/torture some slaves or commoners instead" on their daily agenda, with no real further motivation. Sometimes it's partially justified by factional strife, or there's more to the character, but most of the time there's none of that.

You see it in a ton of isekai, a lot of wuxia/xianxia stuff, and occasionally in straight-up fantasy. Often, it's so ridiculous that you have to ask "how has a country (or company, or sect) entirely ruled by openly sadistic plotting backstabbing evil douchebags survived this long?"

Off the top of my head, here are some otherwise fairly decent series that have this as a glaring flaw: Shield Hero, Shen Yi Di Nu (at some point, you'd think the villains would just cut their losses, give up, and try to ride the MC's coattails to power), and Iron Ladies (where it seems there's a contest to see who can be the most punch-worthy noble in the galaxy).

The crazy part is that I've started to see isekai series deliberately mocking the cliche - there was one with a name I can't recall where the protagonist's reaction to hearing she's to be taken before a noble is a thought bubble of a Fat Faceless Man^TM and the assumption she's going to be violated. (Of course, it was a shoujo, so the noble turned out to be a hot guy with no evil intentions.) You could also consider the 'otome game villain' isekai subgenre as a reaction as well, since those focus on people who should, by all rights, be this sort of one-dimensional douchebag, but struggle to overcome that fate in one way or another.

Speaking of 'otome game villain' isekai, and isekai in general, I hate "what is this black magic known as 'double-entry accounting'?". And for some reason, it's always double-entry accounting, despite the fact that, in our own world, it was fairly widespread in the late 1400s, and most isekai worlds that hail it as some sort of crazy invention from the future are already at a level of culture or technology where they should have come up with it themselves (a lot of the isekai that use it seem set in a fantasy version of ~1700s France, because the clothes are pretty). I'm fine with isekai where people are amazed by 'inventions' that jumpstart the industrial revolution by hundreds of years, but the double-entry accounting thing always bugs me, because it's really not that new of an idea.