That Time I Got Reincarnated In The Same World As An Anime Podcaster

I've fallen behind on my writing and my reading, so I'm about a month late coming in coming to Just Listen to the Song (Japanese, Futsuu ni Kiitekure, lit. "Listen to Me Normally") written by Chainsaw Man manga-ka Tatsuki Fujimoto and illustrated by Oto Toda. Toda is a former assistant of Fujimoto's who recently released a critically acclaimed short story collection called "To Strip the Flesh" in English. Coming in at only 20-pages, Listen to the Song is on the shorter end of one-shots, but it is no less impactful. It tells the story of a boy who confesses his love to his classmate by way of uploading a song he wrote for her to an online video sharing site. In an act of teenage cruelty, the girl then shares the video with everyone at their school, in addition to rejecting him. Before the boy can delete the video, it explodes in popularity. People begin reading all sorts of messages into the video that the boy never intended. Eventually, the video becomes...

Another week, another new series in Shonen Jump. Yesterday (6/12/2022) saw the release of the first chapter of Ruri Dragon by Masaoki Shindou.  The plot is fairly simple. A girl named Ruri wakes up one morning to find out that she has grown dragon horns. The tone of the manga is immediately set when both Ruri and her mother treat this as an unexpected inconvenience and not a horrific disfigurement. It's not that such things are common place in the world of the manga, they most certainly are not. It's just that if you wake up one day with dragon horns, well, what are you gonna do about it? Life goes on.  Ruri's mother reveals in an equally matter-of-fact tone that Ruri's father, who has never been present in her life, is actually a Ryu (龍 I'm guessing was the kanji used), a dragon. Specifically, he is a Japanese dragon. It's not really explained in the chapter, but there are a lot of differences between dragon myths in Europe and Asia. For the time being let'...

Shonen Jump has launched a new manga. The editors seem to have decided that after hits like Bleach, Blue Exorcist, Tokyo Ghoul, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Twin Star Exorcists, and Demon Slayer that the concept of teenagers fighting demons might be just a little played out. That's why in Aliens Area, the teenagers will be fighting Aliens!              You've never seen a guy with a jet black arm that is also stretchy before. Right? Oh.  Well, what if I told you that our hero is a down on his luck guy who goes to work for a supernatural police agency and his boss is a weirdo?   Dang. There's only one chapter of Aliens Area out, but I don't predict a bright future for this manga. This feels a bit like shonen madlibs. Everything I'm seeing in this manga I have seen done and done better. This isn't even the best version of this that debuted recently. While I was researching for this blog post I stumbled on a reddit thread that summed it up ni...