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Manga Thoughts: Minami Nanami wants to Shine 3
When I ordered the third volume of Minami Nanami wants to Shine (after commenting on three of the translated light novels it’s an “alternative universe spinoff” of had got in between it and its previous instalment), I hadn’t known it would be the final part of its series. That hard fact was revealed from the comments of others. Receiving the manga as I was finishing up the anime adaptation of some more of the original novels, and going on a vacation afterwards, did sort of get in the way of reading it too.
It didn’t seem that hard to catch up to the story once I had picked it up. I suppose I did note its narrative tilting from “Minami is finding success doing something she didn’t do in the original story” to “but she’s worrying about suppressing some genuine part of herself for the sake of insubstantial online points.” Tomozaki himself manages to become aware of this (and Tama does show up a bit too, something I’d sort of missed before), although I suppose that made me more conscious of how Bana Yoshida’s art does a better job with Minami than with any of the other original designs, such that my overall impressions of the look of things kept sliding towards “it’s adequate.” (This does give the anime something to stand above looks-wise.) Comments from Tomozaki how Minami is beginning to seem a bit like Aoi Hinami in looking impressive but being enigmatic did seem to link the spinoff back to the original story. It also managed to offer a bit more commentary on certain quick conclusions that the whole story is “about fitting in.”
For all of my dismissive thoughts about the manga’s art, it did at one point stand against complaints seen about a different adaptation, namely it not bothering to do very much with an attention-catching moment at the beginning of the novels when Aoi demonstrates just how much she can improve her appearance with her assortment of tricks. This thought popped up when Tomozaki provided an election speech for his mentor, something that didn’t happen in the original story. He does seem to make that mentoring more public than has been established in that original story, but it’s enough to lead into another alternative take on another part of the original, with Minami and Tomozaki going to see fireworks.
Here, I guess, I got to confronting a certain familiar shrug of mine that I hadn’t been all that invested in Minami’s “triumph” in this spinoff extending to “getting the guy.” It might not, however, have been so much a matter of “that sort of thing doesn’t matter as much to me as it obviously does to others” as “having become invested in having read the first clues of the mainline story the way it appears you were supposed to” (rather than, say, “disdaining the official setup as once more not getting how romance is supposed to work...”) I suppose it all brought back certain thoughts about how, had a certain character not been settled on (“for the moment,” I’m sure some continue to insist), she might as well have never appeared at all. I can’t say I ever noticed her here.
After all of that’s been said, the manga was a bit more satisfying in three volumes than I might have thought at the point of just knowing the third volume would be the most we’d ever get. A few thoughts about how these days I just bounce along to some other story rather resort to the fanfiction of others did continue to register in my mind, but that was just one more part of the experience.
It didn’t seem that hard to catch up to the story once I had picked it up. I suppose I did note its narrative tilting from “Minami is finding success doing something she didn’t do in the original story” to “but she’s worrying about suppressing some genuine part of herself for the sake of insubstantial online points.” Tomozaki himself manages to become aware of this (and Tama does show up a bit too, something I’d sort of missed before), although I suppose that made me more conscious of how Bana Yoshida’s art does a better job with Minami than with any of the other original designs, such that my overall impressions of the look of things kept sliding towards “it’s adequate.” (This does give the anime something to stand above looks-wise.) Comments from Tomozaki how Minami is beginning to seem a bit like Aoi Hinami in looking impressive but being enigmatic did seem to link the spinoff back to the original story. It also managed to offer a bit more commentary on certain quick conclusions that the whole story is “about fitting in.”
For all of my dismissive thoughts about the manga’s art, it did at one point stand against complaints seen about a different adaptation, namely it not bothering to do very much with an attention-catching moment at the beginning of the novels when Aoi demonstrates just how much she can improve her appearance with her assortment of tricks. This thought popped up when Tomozaki provided an election speech for his mentor, something that didn’t happen in the original story. He does seem to make that mentoring more public than has been established in that original story, but it’s enough to lead into another alternative take on another part of the original, with Minami and Tomozaki going to see fireworks.
Here, I guess, I got to confronting a certain familiar shrug of mine that I hadn’t been all that invested in Minami’s “triumph” in this spinoff extending to “getting the guy.” It might not, however, have been so much a matter of “that sort of thing doesn’t matter as much to me as it obviously does to others” as “having become invested in having read the first clues of the mainline story the way it appears you were supposed to” (rather than, say, “disdaining the official setup as once more not getting how romance is supposed to work...”) I suppose it all brought back certain thoughts about how, had a certain character not been settled on (“for the moment,” I’m sure some continue to insist), she might as well have never appeared at all. I can’t say I ever noticed her here.
After all of that’s been said, the manga was a bit more satisfying in three volumes than I might have thought at the point of just knowing the third volume would be the most we’d ever get. A few thoughts about how these days I just bounce along to some other story rather resort to the fanfiction of others did continue to register in my mind, but that was just one more part of the experience.