(sorry for bad english !)
talking from experience, i actually have male friends that look like that, tsubaki rlly hasnt a 'bodybuilder' psyche for me, he is just tall and rlly buff, all my friends ages go from 17 to 21 and if theyre not that tall, theyre definetely that buff from hitting the gym rlly young, they didnt like looking skinny, they talk a lot about volume and protein lmao, so for me when i look at tsubaki i think its kinda realistic in my context, although i don't know in a japanese one. my towns gym's also full of young people that look buff and like models, i think its because my towns small, so they gather in the one few gyms, even before hitting it myself i used to watch a lot of sporty activeish ppl around town overall. but my point being that them being students isnt rlly stopping anyone from looking super muscly and getting jacked, and in my surroundings its extremely common, they don't have weird ass super strenght though or are extremely attractive lol
oh and i have a rlly young friend (2 yrs younger) who was all veiny like that, i think its genetics even tho they werent 'poping off' off his skin (? but when we hit the gym like 2 years ago his veins started to really pop off, i was scared it was from doing too much or idk, but apparently its normal?? im a girl so i wasnt lifting as much weight as him. they do look like theyre gonna burst esp when he is lifting so thats another thing i noticed from tsubaki that wasnt that weird for me from seeing irl but i def thought for others its looks strange
Fair enough, I see where you’re coming from. I think the goal of good character design is to ‘sell’ the type of person the character is, and while I essentially understand Tsubaki’s personality and think his appearance represents who he is well enough, I just don’t feel entirely convinced that he’s pretty much a teenager. I wish the story would put some more emphasis on him hitting the gym a lot or something to make it more believable for me. I guess I’m just a little bored of insanely attractive protagonists, lol. Thanks for commenting, I love hearing other people’s opinion :)
oh i totally agree, maybe one small panel where they talk about how much he works out (maybe even calistenics and not a necessarily a gym), because there's those panels where they talk about how much meat he eats but you can't get that ripped just from eating hehe. maybe little things like that that would have helped to better "sell" the character like you said. And while i'm bored of those type of protagonists as well (not only in this genre), I think this is the mangaka first original work (i'm not sure though!!) so i hope in the future they can bring us more variety, because the art it's amazing.
Id love to see mangas where teens act like teens and look like teens tho, where they have acne bumps or acne scars, or have to shave, etc. and arent extemely perfect looking. I think i have only encountered ONE shonen ai where the teen protagonist is, looks and acts like a teen and has pimples, i love it.
and np i love hearing others ppl opinion as well, or imput on manga and how they percieved it !!
I’m not entirely sure why so many manga about high-school kids refuse to make their characters actually look like kids, but whatever. Apart from finding it hard to believe the protagonist isn’t in his (late) 20s, it’s fine. I like the art, and even though I don’t find the plot very compelling, it’s not something I’d necessarily call bad. I just find it uninteresting and doesn’t have anything that makes me care enough about the characters to keep reading. My complaint about characters in high-school not looking their age isn’t really specific to this manga, I just find it funny that a student is supposedly in peak physical form you’d see in a bodybuilder. Though it IS possible, I think it’s extremely uncommon, which is why I start getting bored when so many mangas about students have these absolutely jacked protagonists