Final discussion thread of the year! If you think back to this time last year, most of us probably had never even heard of Lemmy, so it has been an eventful one. Having a smaller, but active community has exposed me to a wider variety of series that I hadn’t checked out before, so I look forward to more in the new year!
As always, this is a general discussion thread. So, feel free to reminisce with me or post about all the new manga you got for the holidays or anything else!
Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).
Much to my surprise, I’m currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Skip Beat.
I was familiar with it (it’s hard not to be - it’s been in print for 20-some years now), but I never felt any great urge to read it, mostly because it looks so quintessentially shoujo (and it strikes me now that it’s likely not that it looks like so many other shoujos, but that so many other shoujos look like Skip Beat).
But just the other day, I happened to come across a chapter on the Mangadex new updates page, and on a whim, I clicked the link, and skimmed it, then went back to chapter 1 and read it, then went on to chapter 2, and so on, and 40-some chapters later, here I am.
It’s not great literature by any means, and the translation really shows its age, but it’s an engaging comedy/drama rollercoaster and the characters - and the protagonist in particular - are exceptional.
With almost 300 chapters to go to catch up, I’m not sure if I’ll catch up entirely or just skim through a lot of it, but for the time being…
I have had a similar experience plenty of times. My wife is a big film buff, and likes to go back and watch old, influential movies like you would find on the AFI list etc. Plenty of times watching with her I would comment on how something was predictable or formulaic just for her to remind me that it wasn’t at the time, that the movie we were watching established the formula.
Yeah - that’s why I suspect that’s the case with Skip Beat.
I first noticed it with Love Hina. Harems are one of my guilty pleasures, and I’d often recommend Love Hina, and a not uncommon response was that it seemed cliched. And yeah, it does. But that’s because it was the first really successful one. When it did it, those things were new - they only became cliches later, when other series copied them.