MEIK0TO's manga / #supernatural(17)

I don’t exactly understand the message behind this but I suppose that all dream messages are hard to interpret. The art is eerily monotone and looks like it was drawn on paper as I can see obvious pencil marks. Kind of weird and unsettling, I’m going to need the author to tell me exactly what heck this is.

A lazy high school student earns the power to warp time. However, the catch is that he cannot turn back time and that he will have no memories of the time period that he has skipped. He ends up getting stuck in a “time crevice” but the time guardian manages to pull him out. He wants to go back to that time crevice in order to watch suspense TV shows forever. He then proceeds to skip until the end of his lifetime in order to step into that time crevice again, he doesn’t succeed. It’s a pretty interesting concept but it could’ve been utilized better if the MC wasn’t a fool. The plot is a bit nonsensical. The way that a random “time guardian” jumped out of nowhere and gave Yamada powers is ridiculous, I’m not buying it. I am annoyed that we had to follow through it with such an unambitious main character. He got what he deserved and he even ended up watching less television than the average Japanese person. Lesson learned, don’t abuse your time warping powers so you can watch more suspense mystery shows like an idiot.

I like this.The story has a really intricate plot and storyline, it’s hard to summarize when there are over 500 chapters in the novel. The characters are absolutely captivating, I’m obviously referring to Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk. Normally, I don’t like it when the main characters have reincarnated numerous times but this is different. The author really shows how Yoo Joonghyuk’s mental health deteriorated throughout his regressions, his character is honestly admirable. I also love Kim Dokja’s character. I was doubtful about him because I was unsure if he would be able to fit into the new supernatural world setting, but he played his character perfectly. There are a collection of unique obstacles that KDJ had to face and I was really rooting for him. But I also like the fact that he lost several battles because it’d be a downside if he won too much. I’m glad that they made YJH overpowered instead of KDJ. I liked how KDJ earned his abilities instead of having everything handed to him. The side characters also play an important role in the story rather than KDJ taking on everything by himself. The art is alright and the fighting scenes are exceptional. I hear people crying and saying that there is angst in this story but I don’t see it, I think it’s more about action. I relate to Kim Dokja as a fellow reader. Us readers get to see the exact feelings, emotions, and thoughts of all the characters in the story. This goes for Kim Dokja too, except he’s actually in the novel. I didn’t mark this as Isekai because it’s more like the novel came into real life, not him transferring into the novel. So that’s really unique and I honestly like the idea more than Isekai. I never knew that I liked the apocalypse-trope so this is a new experience. Overall, very interesting.

I used to be obsessed with the anime of this when I was younger, it’s not as good as I remember but it’s a magical girl fighting spirits and collecting them in cards. What more could an 8 year old girl want? The art panels in this are low quality and the animation in the anime is average. Giving this high marks because of my inner child.

Explanation + Summary for those who are confused: “Goodbye, Eri” follows the story of Yuta, a young boy who captures the last days of his mother with his phone. Yuta does this on request from his mother, who wishes to stay alive even after dying. As requested, Yuta spends several days witnessing his mother’s life with a camera. However, he couldn’t bring himself to record her final moments. So, instead of getting inside the hospital with his father, Yuta runs away from the hospital. Following those events, nothing stays normal for Yuta. After spending so much time behind the camera, Yuta starts looking at his own life as an outsider, and Fujimoto very beautifully tells the story from Yuta’s camera perspective through his art. It’s one of those rare stories that leaves the ending on readers’ perspective. The ending leaves you thinking if what happened with Yuta was real or it was just something that Yuta imagined for his movie. Even after his mother’s death, Yuta doesn’t give up on all the recorded footage. He spends several hours editing all the stuff he has recorded and makes a movie out of it. But surprisingly, Yuta adds a bit of fantasy at the movie’s ending by showing the exploding hospital as he runs away from the building. Following the humiliation after his movie’s failure, Yuta decides to end his life by jumping off the Hospital’s roof. However, before Yuta could end his life, he meets Eri, the only person in the school who liked Yuta’s movie. Eri thinks that Yuta’s movie was amazing, but at the same time, it lacked something. So, Eri decides to guide Yuta on making a better movie to prove his worth to everyone. However, before asking him to write a plot, Eri shows Yuta several good movies, so he could find the required knowledge to make his own movie. After several attempts, Yuta decides to continue the story that started it all. He writes a plot where a boy was attempting suicide after everyone hated his movie. However, he finds a girl on rooftop who is a vampire. This vampire is dying of a mysterious disease, so she asks this boy to shoot the rest of her days with a camera. So, basically, Yuta decides to make a movie about everything that has happened in his life, but with a touch of fantasy. It turns out that Eri was really dying of a disease, and she loved Yuta’s mother’s idea of getting captured on the camera before dying. Eri thinks that Yuta captured her mother beautifully, and Eri wanted to experience the same thing. So, by filming Eri in her final moments, Yuta finds perfect ending for his movie, “Having filmed a death, the thing he couldn’t do for his mother, the protagonist regains his will to live and make movies, the End.” Yuta continued his life after Eri’s death and becomes a family man, but he never stopped editing Eri’s 2,728 hours of footage. Years later, Yuta loses his wife and daughter in an accident. He couldn’t bear the burden of losing anyone else, so he decides to end his life at the place where he and Eri watched the movies. Surprisingly, Yuta finds Eri in that same spot, who tells Yuta that she is, in fact, a vampire. The Eri Yuta knew really died, but she came back to life after three days. However, this new person doesn’t remember previous Eri’s life. Apparently, the previous Eri had her death filmed so the new Eri could watch Yuta as many times she wants. So, no matter how many times Eri dies and forgets her life, she’ll always remember Yuta through the movie. This whole plan would save her from falling into despair. Yuta leaves the room, and says his goodbye to Eri. At this point, Yuta realizes why he wasn’t satisfied with Eri’s movie ending, “because it was missing a pinch of fantasy.” Finally, we see Yuta getting out of the building just when it explodes in the background. Explanation: ‘Goodbye, Eri’ very smartly plays with your mind, forcing you to wonder what’s real or not. Apparently, Yuta was inclined towards fantasy to deal with his childhood trauma. Yuta’s mother was abusive towards him and his father. But even after all that, he showed his mother beautifully in the movie. Yuta ended the movie with a touch of fantasy to deal with his mother’s death his own way. He tried to remember her through the lens, which presented her as a good mother. Now, on one side, there’s a possibility that Eri was indeed alive, and Yuta did in fact say goodbye to her. But personally, I think that Eri wasn’t a vampire in reality, and she really died in the hospital all those years ago. Everything about Eri being alive was part of Yuta’s perfect plot for his movie. Yuta ended his first movie with hospital’s explosion, and said goodbye to his mother like he wanted to. However, he didn’t find closure with Eri’s death, the woman he loved. So, he decides to add the “Vampire” part to make it easy for him to find closure. Fujimoto Tatsuki's work is excellent. It leaves you with a multitude of interpretations, almost cryptic-like. It leaves many unanswered questions for the readers to decode. Weird how a coming-of-age story about a boy would captivate me like this. I am not a picky reader, but stories that force me to think for this long deserve five stars. Support the author on official platforms. Happy reading, everyone.

Alright. I wanted to see what all of the hype was about. And first of all, I’m sorely disappointed. In fact, I bet the reason why that nobody thinks badly of this Manhua, is simply due to the reason that the list of cons is too big to bother with writing a bad review on it. Or perhaps the amount of bile slung at anyone who dares to criticize it. With a word count of 720k how could anyone even begin to list all the bad things about this Manhua? Even someone like me who has written innumerable paragraphs of complaints has trouble even thinking of where to start.. First of all, this Manhua is just eye-candy. Don’t even bother to read it if you want a story that makes sense. Read the novel, it only has..244 chapters. That’s what I did, and halfway through the third book I thought, “I could’ve spent all this time reading Dostoevsky!” Oh.. can the heavenly officials save the TGCF novel from its pacing issues? The author herself, MXTX, made it clear that she never intended to write more than 36k words. Yet somehow we ended up here. Before TGCF, I faithfully believed that book size is not an indicator of quality. The book meanders from chapter to chapter. The constant info dumps don’t contribute to the world building at all, instead it dilutes the impact of all the information we’re being given. Always hearing about the backstories of other people, ghosts, gods, heavenly officials, demons.. etcetera etcetera. The world building is simply flat and I expected it. When creating a story with time skips and constant flashbacks. The writer must always remember that the world within their story is ever changing. And MTXT dug her own grave by making a time span of 800 years, to which she must fill with interesting events whilst all the while making sure the story isn’t dragging out. MXTX failed to do that. Nothing feels purposeful because of it, and details end up being forgotten. TGCF cannot show, it can only tell. And what’s really the worst is that important plot points are often in the middle of unnecessary information. It makes the story unsatisfying to read, and I often find myself skimming the pages. The entire third book needs to return to its draft and manuscript stage to be rewritten. And it hurts me to say something like that to an established writer. The first book was alright. The Ghost Bride and wedding scene was very, very boring to me. And it was a miracle that I even managed to get through it. But the Ban Yue arc made a good enough impression on me, so I spontaneously downloaded the second book. The second book is my favorite out of the three that I read. The Gambler’s den scene was good, and I found the flashbacks to be enjoyable even. Then came the third book. Let’s talk about the characters; Xie Lian is self-sacrificing to an unbelievable degree and doesn't really make mistakes that significantly hurt anyone other than himself. He's bad at cooking and... that's about it. Honestly, you could argue that he doesn't make mistakes at all; he just gets punished for being a good person. Hua Cheng is all-knowing, all-powerful, and literally only has one weakness: calligraphy. He's also been completely devoted to Xie Lian for centuries. Phrases like “HuaLian invented love” are false by the way. No worries, I fell for it too. We don’t even see Hua Cheng and Xie Lian falling in love with each other. The whole thing is just really awkward because Hua Cheng is already madly in love with XL and that’s that. Nobody sees an issue with that? I know why HC is so devoted to XL. But don’t even get me started on the 10,000 statues that HC built of XL, that’s just straight up creepy. Besides the fact that HC literally stalked XL but that doesn’t matter because he’s the all powerful & ruthless ghost king. I find Xie Lian to be very bland despite how much time we spend in his perspective. He’s kind and selfless, I suppose. Hua Cheng is a douchebag to everyone except Xie Lian. What annoys me the most is that when everyone is warning XL of HC’s red flags, XL is just like “Huh? What? Where? How?”.. Qi Rong is a character that was probably created to make HC look like a good person. But I can defend that QR’s vicious energy brings a life to him that the revered ghost king HC could never emulate with all of his purported power. At some point, Qi Rong started insulting XL and I was amused because once I got past all of his cursing, he.. was actually making a lot of sense to me..? Like I was agreeing with him! Yes, Xie Lian is a hypocrite! Thank you for stating it explicitly, Qi Rong! I have many things to say. But I don’t believe that I have the right to say them.. nevertheless, I did enjoy HuaLians relationship and parts of the story itself. The Black Water arc, the Ban Yue arc, and the Gambler’s den scene were all entertaining. Although the rest of it was a blur. TGCF’s plot is convoluted, poorly executed, and extremely lengthy. However, author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu writes beautifully in the meat of the story. Whilst reading, I even wished that I could read Mandarin because I heard that she writes very poetically. Tian Guan Ci Fu is flawed, and although I criticized the world building, I still think that it is an immersive story and I would recommend it to readers.. if they have a very specific description closely resembling TGCF.. I am afraid that TGCF is my least favorite story from MXTX’s work.