Back to Adam_________'s Profile Adam_________'s Profile

The Aku no Hana story, as I see it, has two halves. The first is how a vulnerable individual can, uh, receive trauma, and the second is how to confront it later on.

If you want to see an upsetting, dramatic, yet realistic story of a boy understanding life despite trauma and confusion, this would be a good read.

The first half is really infuriating, and I was really considering dropping it at the time. It revolves around the protagonist and the psychotic girl present on the cover of the manga. 

The second half portrays the challenges of assimilating after trauma in a relatable and heartwarming way. It ... was satisfying enough to make me forgive the mangaka for the pain and anguish inflicted by what happened up to this point. This segment also depicts confronting the past and trauma to move forward.

A bit melodramatic at times, Aku no Hana still provides an interesting coming of age story that will resonate with you emotionally throughout the read and is structurally sound throughout. You don’t have to like everything that happens, but everything does make sense, even when it really seemingly doesn’t. Even though my enjoyment went different places when reading, it ended in a good one. 

If a dramatic yet relatable coming of age story that's emotionally resonant sounds interesting to you, this should be a good read.

Eh I was getting tired of the old constant fucking stand battle routine. Personally needed something else after a minute. Still, Jolyne is cool enough. Everyone in this manga is mean as hell for some reason lol.

Jotaro being in the story was a direct upgrade because he's the goat and has THE COOLEST ABILITY IN FICTION DONT @ ME.

Also the ending here is the best in the series. Since I can't pull myself through more stand battling routine I won't be reading SBR (tragic), but Part 6 ended the main universe timeline anyway. I'll let my headcanon tell me there's no need to read ... parts 7+...

Simple fun, i actually enjoyed seeing Goku annihilate the red ribbon army with no damn trouble because it totally subverted expectation in a funny and simple way. neat. Yamcha, Tien, and Krillin are forever the GOAT trio of the whole Dragon Ball series.

Also this includes Z. Z was good and prob better than DB. I didn't like cell saga and most of buu, but holy fuck the end of buu saga was so good. actually recaptured that intensity from Frieza even better by pinning Gotenks against fucking Super Buu right after he slaughtered humanity. AND THEN TIEN REVEALED TO STILL BE ALIVE BC HE ... IS ALWAYS READY AND DODGED THE BEAM. SO HARD. TIEN SWEEP. Uh anyway Z had higher highs than DB for sure.

But yeah it wasn't super impressive with the writing and tension waned here and there. Power creep was a big issue with Z. Yamcha, the aforementioned goat, had his hole resized pretty much every arc. Poor vro.

It definitely went downhill from here. Hard.

So fire. Slowed down with Near's introduction and that was half of the manga here. The show was better with the iconic music, coloring motifs, shortening the post L story, etc, but the way the ending was altered and its different portrayal of Light's fate was kinda bad. Whoops. Also, the extra content like the epilogue and bonus Donald Trump Goes Anime one shot were cool, and they fleshed out the world more than the anime did. Not a fair comparison, but such is life I guess.

Pretty much perfect the whole way through, for the manga I'd say the main problem--not much of a problem ... by the way--was that pretty drawn out second half.

Was just alright. So short that It's worth reading, so short that it hardly does anything. Made me happy to read about these characters again.

If you read OMK, read this because literally why not. It was a very quick read. It's literally just two chapters and the word count is 9,000 or something (?). We get to see some old characters--the field trip crew--and other than that it's insubstantial. Still worth it though. Especially to squeeze out just a BIT more Sugawa and Kurosawa content out of the OG writer.

Realizing there was a NOVEL made based on OMK, or some adaptation or whatever, made me ... sad since that is NOT getting translated to English man...I wish this series wasn't so enigmatic to the west.