MBQ contains short episodes in the lives of a handful of acquaintances in LA. Workers at various menial jobs, cops, a drug dealer, a struggling comic artist. I was interested in trying it, as while it doesn't sound horribly like the kind of thing I'm interested in, it's gotten a lot of praise and came off to me as one of the perhaps too few OEL out there that aren't afraid of not being Japanese. Being able to read the manga style we like but still able to read about our own/other cultures besides Japan's is one of the greatest reasons for OEL to exist (besides my #1 reason of 'because there's no reason it shouldn't') to me, so it always makes me happy to see something like this.But as I read it I felt I must be missing something. People had called this manga 'gritty,' and it certainly does contain more than it's fair share of violence, rough language, and some sexual content. But when I think gritty I think something like 'harsh realism.' Is that what this is? I feel like people are just impressed with it's 'honesty,' as if this were slice of life. But is one gruesome scene of a man getting his faced kicked in and another of a woman and man getting much too personal in a karaoke room only to have the woman lose her lunch outside 'honesty?' It's unflinching, sure, but I need more than that. And how about a grossly obese woman getting angry about getting the wrong order at the fast food joint? Ok, that's honest, but it's also an overused scene and too overdone and wacky to feel like some nugget of American city life. From what I've seen of the characters' personalities, I am interested in getting to know some of them, but the little snippets of their lives this manga shows me usually feel less like something that will help me get to know them better and more like something that will make me go, 'Wow! How very unflinching of you to show me that! (...Remind me why you did again?)'This manga is trying extremely hard to be gritty and different. While the goal is quite respectable (even if the self-indulgent rant of the artist that takes up an entire last chapter is quite a turn-off) and I can't really say that it's *not* accomplishing this... What's it accomplishing besides that? The art's not my style, but it's definitely good for what it's doing, and it would probably grow on me a lot more if I liked the story more. But something in the writing isn't working here for me. Showing one extreme scene after another can work for some stories I've seen, but here something's missing. I feel looking at it rather like I feel about the sort of
people who try to be this exaggeratedly IN YOUR FACE. It might be impressive and swaying at first, but if you step back and look past the attitude, the things they're saying have no real substance or meaning. It might not even be that they're stupid. But somewhere along the way they learned or internalized accidentally that the show was more important, or at least got more response, than anything else.Or maybe I'm just crazy? How can a whole internet of reviewers and fans be that wrong?
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