Still Sick

I still don't know exactly why I don't like Still Sick. It's a manga about being a mangaka, and maybe part of me finds that kind of self indulgent? Maybe it's the characters, who despite feeling pretty realistic, are also deeply annoying to me? Maybe it's that the story feels light and fast, but also slow as fuck where it matters? This is going to be a little different to my usual review style, because I'm still having difficulty articulating exactly what's going on here, so you'll be seeing a lot of how this manga made me feel, and some tentative guesses as to why,but fewer analytical conclusions. Sorry about that. Still Sick feels contradictory to me. I should like it. It has all the hallmarks of the kind of story I would normally enjoy, as a serious, slowburn gay romance, but every second I spent reading it I ended up comparing it unfavorably to the Korean work 'It Would Be Great If You Didn't Exist'. It's essentially an OL romance about being a mangaka, and that's a great premise, but it kind of feels like Still Sick meanders around that topic for hours. Maybe it's because I'm not a very artistic person (I prefer prose tbh) but the way Still Sick approaches talking about the act of drawing feels very shallow and lukewarm, in the same way that 'power of friendship' shonen are a shallow and lukewarm view of what friendship is. It reminds me of Your Lie In April's take on what music is, and I do not intend that as a compliment. Considering how much of the manga focuses around this one idea of what it means to draw manga, it rang incredibly hollow as a result. Was the author trying to inspire themselves to draw, or was this in some way autobiographical? I don't know. It asks me to think about why people draw, and the problem is, for me that was like asking me 'why do you play croquet?', to which my answer is 'I don't. I'm bad at it and have little interest in improving'. This probably also explains why I don't particularly enjoy sports anime. I have little to no passion with regards to drawing, and while I can in some way understand this manga's points intellectually, it doesn't make me FEEL anything, and the language it uses to discuss these points are very plain, often lacking in evocative scenes or dialogue to describe why I should care about what happens in Still Sick. It probably works for some people, but I personally did not find it compelling or relatable when Still Sick says that drawings inspire people, and that people inspire others to draw. That's a very surface level observation about the nature of art, and the manga lacks the artistry to get that point across outside of simply telling us that that is the case. If Still Sick showed me some inspiring art and how it inspired the characters it might run the risk of coming off as pretentious, but at least then it might be using evocative language and storytelling so that I can empathize with the characters, rather than telling me what they feel. That lack of evocative language and presentation extends into the characters, who are well rounded and multi-faceted, and technically sound. But I just don't like them. Sometimes, like with Shimizu's nerd speeches, I found them vaguely funny in that she sounds kind of like people on Tumblr or AO3, but at the same time, there's just a lack of emotion behind the characters that's difficult to pinpoint. Like with the 'I draw manga to inspire people' thing, the characters are very on the nose a lot of the time. They specifically namedrop the will-they-or-won't-they trope and say 'screw that', but it's like the honestly kind of vapid mangaka stuff eats into the romance angle so much that the romantic tension falls flat. They have arguments that felt very forced, and the manga doesn't avoid the tropes it namedrops enough to make that melodrama feel like it has actual stakes, at least for me. And that made them irritating, which made me like them even less. Maekawa is tsundere, Shimizu is in the closet, but their reasons for being so don't get enough focus, which undermined the romance for me. If the manga showed me more about why they behave as they do, as LGBT people, and spent less on telling(not showing) me why making manga is important, I would probably find their manga-inspired romance far more compelling. I could maybe see a through line between what Maekawa draws at different points in the story and her romantic feelings for Shimizu. We could even see her tsundere nature reflected in her rejection of the unconscious themes of her drawings, thereby getting a more nuanced view of the relation between art and artist, in that themes are not necessarily a conscious choice by the artist. But we don't get any of that. The romance, as a result, felt pretty bland and lacking in tension to me, despite clearly trying. Essentially, I don't really care about working in the manga industry, and this manga didn't really give me enough reasons to feel passionately about it, despite that clearly being its angle. This coming from someone who finds grannies having cut throat drama over knitting patterns on web 1.0 sites interesting in the right contexts. Essentially, it's like showing me a sports anime. Unless it's really exceptional in how it frames why the players care, I'm not going to care. If I had any definite criticism, it's that I feel the manga stuff starts out getting an acceptable amount of focus, then becomes an absolute tumor that crushes the life out of this series. Everything becomes about the manga, even the protagonists' relationship is framed around wanting to draw, and I just can't get behind it because of the way that wanting to make manga is framed in this manga. If you like the process of making manga, or are an artist going through writer's block, maybe this series will hit home for you. It didn't reflect my feelings of writer's block, but maybe you're different. Still Sick is technically sound, but if you're interested in it for the romance, it might not be your thing.