Maddies Manga

I have recently come into a problem when talking about my likes and dislikes of certain manga, and wanted to talk about it a little bit here.

Normally, when I talk about a series that I’m reading I don’t really give my opinion. I prefer just giving a synopsis of whatever manga I’m reading, so that people can make the decision whether or not to read it themselves. That isn’t to say that I’m not bias in my synopsis, just I don’t typically say “here is what happens in volume 1 of Inuyasha, by the way, I really hate Kagome”.

Reading Nina the Starry Bride…

However, I recently started reading Nina the Starry Bride, and right off the bat I LOVED Azure and HATED Sett. It was the first time I so clearly had a favourite and least favourite when reading a shoujo manga, and so I made a little video on tiktok just saying that I didn’t love Sett at the moment. Note – I never said he was a bad character, just that I didn’t like him at that point in the story! I shared that this opinion came to me after reading volume 3 – his introductory volume – and that I was hoping he would grow on me as I continued reading.

This was enough to set off a rather large group of people, telling me things like “how dare you not like Sett when in volume 8 he does XYZ” and “but in volume 9 Azure does ABC and so he’s actually worse than Azure, how can you not like him??”. Completely disregarding the fact that I was only 3 volumes into the story.

I tried to remind everyone that the story was being majorly spoiled for me, but that didn’t matter to them if I didn’t have the same favourite character as them. In the end, I had to take a little break from reading as I felt like the story had been ruined for me.

While I was busy reading some of the other series that I own, I stumbled upon an interview with the mangaka (author) of Nina the Starry Bride: she claimed that she really wanted to create a story with a ML character that was absolutely hated at first, but as the audience read their story, they would then slowly grow to love him. This helped me to feel absolutely justified in my feelings – I felt exactly how the author herself meant for me to feel at the time! In equal parts though, I felt even more irritation at those trying to spoil the story for me.

For a characters redemption to have meaning, at least to me, I need to follow them along on the journey. If I am just starting the journey, and am told that I must like whoever because of what happens at the very end of the journey, it deems the whole thing pointless to me. I need to be made to feel various emotions over a certain length of time to have that connection to a character. By spoiling a story right at the start, people take away the emotional connection needed (by me at least) to actually enjoy it.

I think it’s perfectly acceptable to have favourite (and least favourite) characters, and it’s also fine to fight for them! However I absolutely think we need to draw the line at ruining stories for those of us with opposing views. To me, part of the fun of enjoying this type of media is listening to views that differ from my own! I love Azure because of his actions early on in the manga, but you may strongly dislike Azure because you interpreted his actions differently than I did – and that’s okay! But what’s not okay is trying to ruin something for someone else because they don’t agree with you – so please don’t!

How about you?

Have you ever had something you were really enjoying spoiled for you? How did you deal with it?