Manga Notes: Maison Ikkoku 3
May. 29th, 2021 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer“Getting to each new volume of manga in the order I acquired it” might always have been a basic strategy for me; still trying to get past fears it’s a risk to really handle anything at all brought in from outside “too soon” might have made that strategy just a little more rigid. I was interested in working my way to the third volume of the new release of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku, but right around when I managed to pick it up I just happened to see a blurb for its review on Anime News Network criticizing the instalment as in a wheel-spinning rut. It was an unfortunate reminder of uncertainties raised by their blurb for the volume before.
Making efforts to manage my expectations, though, I did pick my way through my latest block of the story. It’s just possible an extended story where Godai jumps to conclusions about Kyoko and the tennis instructor Mitaka and moves out of Maison Ikkoku countered first speculations that “nothing much happening” would amount to “one inconsequential one-shot chapter after another,” and even if the misunderstandings and missed opportunties that stretched things along had their own uncomfortable familiarity, circling back to where things had stood wasn’t that bad in the end. When comparing this story to Urusei Yatsura (which I keep piling up volumes of manga out of the vague impression “getting through the anime should precede seeing how the manga did each thing to start with”), the cast of characters not expanding without end has its own appeal, as does the other residents of Maison Ikkoku not all being college students like Godai. “The journey’s better than the final arrival” can sometimes seem a too-familiar sort of faint praise when it comes to manga serials and the anime connected to them, but in this case I might be getting by without too many personal demands to see an expected conclusion draw ever closer.
Making efforts to manage my expectations, though, I did pick my way through my latest block of the story. It’s just possible an extended story where Godai jumps to conclusions about Kyoko and the tennis instructor Mitaka and moves out of Maison Ikkoku countered first speculations that “nothing much happening” would amount to “one inconsequential one-shot chapter after another,” and even if the misunderstandings and missed opportunties that stretched things along had their own uncomfortable familiarity, circling back to where things had stood wasn’t that bad in the end. When comparing this story to Urusei Yatsura (which I keep piling up volumes of manga out of the vague impression “getting through the anime should precede seeing how the manga did each thing to start with”), the cast of characters not expanding without end has its own appeal, as does the other residents of Maison Ikkoku not all being college students like Godai. “The journey’s better than the final arrival” can sometimes seem a too-familiar sort of faint praise when it comes to manga serials and the anime connected to them, but in this case I might be getting by without too many personal demands to see an expected conclusion draw ever closer.