I fucking hate how 90% of manga start with a really interesting premise and then, within 5 chapters, divert from that into shockingly bland cookie-cutter shit. A series will start with some crazy subversion of tropes or expectations and then immediately work very hard to monkeybranch over to the same beach episode, mountains episode, kotatsu episode structure as every other manga.
>Nani? Kozuki-san, why do you open your potato chips like that?
>Oh you see shiraisi-san, if you use two fingers like this, you can avoid staining your clothes with grease if the bag tears
What is it with Japs and endless fucking minutiae about daily life? I don't give a fuck about the best position in the room for a kotatsu or how to sort recycling in suburban Tokyo. And I don't want to see the characters in my supernatural mystery romance go to the public pool or barbecue on the beach or vacation to their rich friend's beach house either.
I recently read Bambi to Ako, because it's by the woman the did Horimiya, which I liked because it specifically avoided all this generic pace-killing shit. Bambi starts with a great premise-a guy moves into a new apartment that's haunted by a cute ghost girl and becomes romantically interested in her (so far so generic), but it turns out that she isn't a ghost, she's the psychic projection of a girl that tried to kill herself. The girl who tried to kill herself remembers what happens when she's astral projecting, but the astral projection has a separate personality and identify from the girl. So there's a lot of interesting conflict around where the girl ends and the ghost begins, and the ethics of the guy keeping them separate so he can date the ghost girl.
HOWEVER as the series goes on, more and more of the chapters are just incremental progress towards the guy and the ghost confessing to each other, or plodding side stories about the various human acquaintances of the couple, or (most annoyingly) endless fucking minutiae about living in a Japanese apartment, from dripping faucets to convenience store snacks to what to make for dinner. None of it's fucking relevant to the main hook, which is largely forgotten where it isn't rendered incomprehensible by poorly paced lore dumps where characters ask 1 or 2 questions of someone knowledgeable then nope out of the conversation to fry some eggs or pick up the dry cleaning, as though hearing whether your girlfriend is going to vanish isn't more important than that.
Why are nips so allergic to taking their premises to their logical conclusions? Why do they try so hard to come up with original ideas for stories if they intend to try as hard as possible to ignore them? I used to think it was just a "playing for time" thing for authors that didn't have a clear idea or where to take a series, but TONS of manga do it, as though they think that this is what a manga is supposed to be, an interesting premise that gets ignored in favor of banal bullshit. I don't think it was as much of a problem before web publishing (~2010) either. You'd have manga by people like Rumiko that were constitutionally allergic to plot progression, but they weren't the norm for the romance genre. It's like the Japanese have developed some sort of mental disease that makes then incapable of pacing a story, I don't understand it.
