APADFTMOM Day 31: Thank You, and See You Soon

This feels like kind of a copout in the long haul, doesn’t it? My day 1 post was an introduction and my day 31 post is a conclusion. I doomed myself from the start by not making an actual content post right off the bat so fuck it, we’re capping it off in a similar manner.

APADFTMOM Day 30: Naruto, and Writing Compelling Rivalries

Ever since I started writing these posts at the beginning of May, I’ve wanted to write about Naruto. Naruto isn’t the worst series on the planet by any means, but recommending it and having that recommendation taken seriously are both a bit difficult due to its notoriety for being long as all hell and carrying the label of entry-level weeb material. Nevertheless, I’m of the opinion that any series regardless of popularity is worth a try. You never know what might hook you in and make you a lifelong fan unless you try. I could frame this post in any number of ways, but I have a very specific one in mind. Today we’re going to discuss why Naruto is worth your time, and we’re going to do that by focusing on Naruto’s rival Sasuke.

APADFTMOM Day 29: Tonikaku Kawaii, and Romance As A Spectrum

Over the past month we’ve slowly expanded a bit on two topics: My enjoyment of romance manga that keeps compelling me to write about it, and how romance manga is a spectrum. The genre of romance in manga splinters off into multiple specific subgenres such as wacky harem romcoms, one-on-one love stories, single parents learning to love again, and stories about the magic surrounding a first love, to name a few. I could write about romance for days because it’s such a broad topic that I have a lot of strong opinions about, but today we’re focusing on a series that’s part of yet another romance subgenre. Today’s topic is a story of two newlyweds titled Tonikaku Kawaii.

APADFTMOM Day 28: High Priority Reading: Claymore

If I have a chance to talk about my reading calendar, I’ll talk about my reading calendar. At the end of February I bought a calendar for the sole purpose of giving myself daily reading goals so I could read consistently while also finishing things that I had dropped out of laziness. It’s worked wonderfully so far and with the end of the month on the horizon, it’s about time to fill up June. For May I decided to buckle down and finish reading Claymore, which I started and dropped a few years ago for no particular reason. I loved it. We’re talking about it today.

APADFTMOM Day 27: Hadi Girl, and Directness In Romance

It’s been a hell of a week going over thirty years’ worth of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. To be honest I felt like taking a day off after that because we went in so hard on parts of that series, but I promised a post a day for the month of May. That’s actually not the worst idea for this challenge name. May 27th will be the day when we decided on a name, and that name is “A Post A Day For The Month Of May.” Let’s get right back into our regularly scheduled content with a nice short series. Today’s topic is Hadi Girl, a 30-chapter romance series by Akino Miyabi.

APADFTMOM Day 26: JoJo Week Part 8: JoJolion

And so our journey through JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure comes to an end as we reach the current point of the series. Throughout this past week we’ve directly compared each of its components against each other to see how consistent story structure in a multi-work piece does not mean the stories have to be the same. We’ve seen a wide array of personalities, motivations, and relationship dynamics that may be similar but are never the same. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has proven to be a machine whose parts can be swapped out at will without fear of it breaking. Today I’m honored to cap off our JoJo Week by going from 1890 America to 2011 Japan for the eighth installment of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled JoJolion.

APADFTMOM Day 25: JoJo Week Part 7: Steel Ball Run

Think of all of the JoJo lore we’ve touched on this week. It isn’t much due to my intent to keep my posts as spoiler-free as possible, but there’s still a lot of lore established in the introductions to help begin each section of the story. Up until this point, we could sum up JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure as the legacy of the Joestar family as they battle a man with a personal vendetta against them as well as the rippling effects of his ideals for over a century. Despite being broken up into multiple sections with multiple protagonists, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has had that one overall narrative to help keep things coherent.

APADFTMOM Day 24: JoJo Week Part 6: Stone Ocean

No two parts of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure are the same. Sure, we’ve been discussing how the series hammers out a format for itself and sticks to that format for the majority of its run and that format is a very important piece of the identity of the series as a whole, but at the end of the day it’s just a meta tool used to help with coherency. By no means is it a recipe for success on its own. The material used to flesh out that skeleton is what pulls people in and keeps them there. Today our trek takes us from Italy in 2001 to Florida in 2011 for the events of the sixth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled Stone Ocean.

APADFTMOM Day 23: JoJo Week Part 5: Golden Wind

With the end of Diamond Is Unbreakable and the full establishment of the template for our plot structures moving forward, we can finally consider ourselves to be in “modern JoJo.” Today’s topic exists in a weird place overall in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Diamond Is Unbreakable introduced a format and showed that it can work, so it rests on the shoulders of the sequel to prove that there are enough variables within that format to present a new, different story. Today we move from 1999 Japan to 2001 Italy for the fifth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled Golden Wind.

APADFTMOM Day 22: JoJo Week Part 4: Diamond Is Unbreakable

With some adjustments to how conflict is established, the fourth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure provides the series with its finalized template for its storylines. There are many small changes between future parts to help keep things feeling fresh, but for the most part the series now has a set structure with which it can reliably frame its stories while keeping readers invested. Today we will be going over that finished product and showing how this part showcases how it can be used to great effect. We now make the jump from 1989 Egypt to a fictional town by the name of Morioh in 1999 for the fourth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled Diamond Is Unbreakable.

APADFTMOM Day 21: JoJo Week Part 3: Stardust Crusaders

While Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency helped cultivate a lot of the long-term storytelling ideas behind JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, the series really found itself in 1989 with the release of the third part, Stardust Crusaders. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure takes a hard turn here as battles become more plentiful and much more unique due to less of a focus on a martial arts style of combat, the parts begin to get much longer, and the chapter-to-chapter narrative structure is given more of a monster-of-the-week feel with mini-arcs highlighting the various small-time opponents that the cast needs to overcome. We now jump from the 1930s to the 1980s with Stardust Crusaders, the most popular part of one of the most popular manga series of all time.

APADFTMOM Day 20: JoJo Week Part 2: Battle Tendency

The biggest trademark difference between each part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is the uprooting of the whole series for the continuation. Each part does not share a setting and later on we’ll see how shared characters are used more to bridge the gaps between parts rather than help serve as a direct continuation. Each part submerges the audience in a brand new setting and as time goes on, we’ll discover the familiarity established during these transitions to help readers feel at east. Today is the beginning of those transitions as we jump from 1880s England to 1930s New York for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, part 2: Battle Tendency.

APADFTMOM Day 19: JoJo Week Part 1: Phantom Blood

There are some series out there that are so captivating and stand out so much that they seem to transcend their mediums as a whole. This is much more prevalent in anime than in manga with series like Dragon Ball Z, early Naruto, Boku no Hero Academia, and Sailor Moon holding special places in people’s hearts even if those same people otherwise have no interest in anime. Many factors can play into this such as universal praise for the series, nostalgia, getting caught up in the hype, or just experiencing it in the right place at the right time, and all of these are valid. At that point, though, it’s no longer just about consuming media; There’s a personal attachment to something that feels like it’s more than just a piece of media.

APADFTMOM Day 18: Chainsaw Man, and Character Motivations

Everything happens for a reason, and not in some galaxy brain too-deep-for-you type of way. People do things because they’re either trying to reach a certain goal or their actions have some sort of justification behind them that falls in line with who they are as people. I wake up and go to work because I really like money, and I don’t get gas until my tank is almost empty because I’m lazy and I think going to the gas station by my house is kind of a chore. Fictional characters have the same types of motivations. Today we’ll be taking a look at how Chainsaw Man finds comfort in giving its characters simple motivations.

APADFTMOM Day 17: High Priority Reading: Made in Abyss

I’m going to level with you: The idea behind High Priority Reading was to give me a reason to write about today’s series. There are some series that I love which are well-respected and do a lot of things, if not everything, right, but writing about them is a little difficult since it’s hard to focus on just one of those things. Each individual part can be executed almost flawlessly, but sometimes those parts all compliment each other so well that the work as a whole is exponentially better than each aspect of it. Today we’ll be looking at Made in Abyss, which is one such series.

APADFTMOM Day 16: Gokushufudou, and Subverted Expectation

My office has a Game of Thrones death pool going on and I went against the grain with it and came up with a pool with more living characters than dead. I’m ridiculed daily for this even as the final episode of the series draws near, but I approached this with a mindset heavily focused on today’s topic: Subverting expectations. Today we will take a look at what subverting expectations is and how Gokushufudou uses that subversion as a comedic tool.

APADFTMOM Day 15: Dungeon Meshi, and Creativity In Building Lore

Fiction is pretty good. Fictitious storytelling can consist of whatever you want it to with as much or as little detail as you want to give it. As the author, you have control over everything from the characters and setting to how and why things are the way they are. There’s a delicate balance to maintain between all of the pieces to keep them coherent, but ultimately you can do whatever you want. A lot of works tend to put the smaller details off to the side in favor of focusing on larger things such as characters or storylines, but today we’re checking out a series that puts those little details on a pedestal and makes them the focus point. Let’s talk about Dungeon Meshi.

APADFTMOM Day 14: Dr. Stone, and A Primary Focus On Education

This month has been a journey of self-discovery for myself as I’ve written these posts. My goal with my series-centric posts is to showcase a manga series while highlighting an aspect of its writing that it does really well. So far I haven’t had any repeats on the series or topic and I’m proud of that, but today’s topic is a little similar to one we’ve covered. With Misoshiru de Kanpai!, we discussed how its educational messages give the series an additional merit but are not necessary to its overall plot. Today our focus will be Dr. Stone, and we will be taking a look at how it’s possible to not only thread a story around education but make learning a requirement as the whole plot is built on it.

APADFTMOM Day 13: Samurai 8 First Impression

It’s May 13th in Japan right now, I’m waiting for Game of Thrones to start, and Samurai 8: Hachimaru-den just dropped on the Shonen Jump app. Samurai 8 is the much-awaited new IP written by Masashi Kishimoto, known best for a little pillar of the manga industry known as Naruto. I just read the first chapter which clocks in at a little over 70 pages, which is about what I expected considering the hype generated from its marketing and its author’s prominence in Shonen Jump for well over a decade. Let’s take a very brief look at Samurai 8’s opening although I can tell you well ahead of time that if there’s any time to pick the series up and start following it, it’s right now while it’s first coming out.

APADFTMOM Day 12: High Priority Reading: Enen no Shouboutai

As we continue our month of experimentation, I want to try yet another new approach to this. Welcome to High Priority Reading, which will be a curation of recommendations for some of my personal favorite series that I recommend whenever somebody asks me what I like. We won’t dive too deeply into any one aspect of a series with this. Our goal is to have a general overview of the topic, touch on a few key characters, and check out some of the lighter aspects without going into a full high school book report. Today’s manga series is Enen no Shouboutai, known also by its western release title Fire Force.

APADFTMOM Day 11: Tonari no Seki-kun, and Comedic Structure

Comedy is subjective and writing about it is hard. Everybody has a different opinion of what’s funny and what’s not, which makes trying to convince somebody to read or watch something a complete shot in the dark. On top of that, there are only so many ways to say something is funny or unfunny. That sounds challenging and I’m down for a challenge this month so let’s look into why Tonari no Seki-kun is funny.

APADFTMOM Day 10: Kakegurui, and Making Contests Matter

Professional wrestling is really cool and absolutely worth your time to follow if you’re interested in the inner working of the writing process. At first glance it seems that pro wrestling is just a bunch of people pretending to hurt each other, but there’s a complicated psychological aspect behind that which starts way before the match. Pro wrestling is all about convincing the audience that everything matters, and I mean everything: The wrestlers need to look like they’re beating each other up, the story needs to be something that people will care about, and the fallout needs to have an impact that justifies the buildup and execution. Today we’re taking a look at the second part of that process and what better series to illustrate that than Kakegurui?

APADFTMOM Day 9: Ashita wa Doyoubi, and Side Content In Manga

That new Avengers movie just came out. Let’s be topical and discuss something about it.

APADFTMOM Day 8: The "Single Parent" Subgenre

Today we’re going to be doing something a little different and taking a closer look at a larger topic as a whole instead of picking an individual series and seeing how it expresses itself through larger topics. The “single parent” subgenre is one of my favorites and I find it one of the easiest to read due to mostly being wholesome, cute family-based stories. I was originally going to pick a series from it to elaborate on, but I was undecided between a couple of them and we would have ended up touching on a lot of the same points anyway.

APADFTMOM Day 7: Cardcaptor Sakura, and Clear Storytelling Intent

Clamp’s Cardcaptor Sakura is a classic manga and anime series that is essential reading or viewing if you’re looking to go down the rabbit hole that is the magical girl genre, which I recommend you go down because it’s a wild ride with decades upon decades of history. There are plenty of topics worthy of writing about in Cardcaptor Sakura and I may go over another one later in the month, but today our focus will be on how the series handles the simple action of telling us what its plot will be and then following through on it. We will be a little looser than usual with spoilers today due to the series being twenty years old, but only a little.

APADFTMOM Day 6: Kekkaishi, and Split Narratives With Limited Settings

For the past few days I’ve been reading 10 chapters of Blood Lad by Yuuki Kodama a day as one of the two series currently marked on my reading calendar. I’m currently about halfway done with it and it’s fine, but there was a stretch of chapters that shared a few similar beats with today’s topic. Sometimes an author may place a restriction on their main character that, for some reason or another, prevents the whole story from being told. We may go into how Blood Lad handles this in the future, but today we’re taking a look at how masterfully this is handled in Kekkaishi by Yellow Tanabe.

APADFTMOM Day 5: Fushigi Neko no Kyuu-chan, and Taking It Easy

Hobbies are meant to be fun. That’s the mindset I try to keep with my handful of hobbies, but sometimes it feels like I need to force myself to take them seriously because just enjoying something doesn’t feel productive enough. Reading manga is by far my biggest hobby and I take it much more seriously than I need to with a reading calendar to make sure I’m not slacking and now a series of blog posts where I spend hours combing through a series to find what makes it tick. Constantly keeping yourself at a 10 is a great way to burn out and kill your motivation to ever come back, so sometimes it’s nice to bring yourself down to a 2.

APADFTMOM Day 4: Kanojo, Okarishimasu, and Giving Love Interests Room To Breathe

There were a few months in 2018 and early 2019 when Kanojo, Okarishimasu by Reiji Miyajima was my favorite manga on the planet and I looked forward to new chapter releases more than I looked forward to payday. While this series has roots firmly planted in the “harem romance” genre where the story focuses on 1 character with multiple potential love interests, it sets itself apart from the pack by ignoring popular tropes and writing styles in the genre in favor of a different approach to how characters interact with each other.

APADFTMOM Day 3: One Piece, and The Battle Against Stagnancy

One Piece is a long, long series that is nearing its thousandth chapter after 22 years of consistent weekly chapters being printed with minimal hiatuses and breaks, all penned by its author Eiichiro Oda. The series spans over 90 volumes with almost half a billion copies having been sold worldwide. If there was ever a series to be called a cornerstone of modern manga and a piece of history, it would be One Piece. It would be foolish of me to try and write about manga without touching on One Piece, so today we’re ripping that bandage off and diving into why One Piece is worth your time and how reading it seems like a much more daunting task than it actually is.

APADFTMOM Day 2: Misoshiru de Kanpai!, and Strong Educational Messages

I am of the opinion that when it comes to manga, an educational message can do nothing but enhance the series. Whether it’s a series that is thoroughly enjoyable but still peppers in little fun facts, such as Taisho Wotome Otogibanashi’s tidbits about life in early 1920s Japan, or a series that takes a vile turn that makes over half of it irredeemable, such as Gyaru Kuri’s transition from cleaning tips to sexual assault (which we’ll cover in detail at a later date), the sole act of being able to take real world facts away from reading makes the experience feel all the more worth it.

APADFTMOM Day 1: Introduction, and Oh God What Am I Doing

What’s up, internet? It’s ya boy ConfectionWitch here with a new pet project for the month of May that has no title and came to exist at the ass end of April as a spur-of-the-moment thing. Don’t forget to smash that Subscribe button and ring that notification bell so you know when the party’s starting. Haha. Ha.