Barakamon

tl;dr: A manga about someone completely out of their element that starts off strong with good character growth, but that gets less interesting as they get more used to their environment and their character arcs results in them being less amusing. This manga is about a calligrapher, Handa, that has an overtly strong sense of pride despite being completely incompetent at everything despite calligraphy and who isn’t very considerate of others which results in various issues. To combat this, he is forced to live in a small village on a rural island, where due to the change in environment as well as how everyone in thevillage forces themselves into his life, he ends up going through growth. The first third or so of the manga, which is the portion of the anime adapts, handles this really well. Handa is an amusing character who is heavily flawed but seems like a good person at heart, and he goes through very clear slow and steady growth which as a result of him being pretty likable is satisfying to see. Watching him interact with the rest of the villagers was also amusing due to how much variety there was to the interactions as the cast is pretty large and have a pretty diverse set of personalities and they all seemed to clearly be having an influence on him. I found Handa being a fish out of water in a rural environment also acted as a good lens for me as I have absolutely no experience with rural living either, and hence could very easily put myself in his shoes. Seeing everyone else living their lives out there was interesting as well. The cast and environment also work well for the comedy which is overall pretty solid. I think the manga begins to decline in quality after the first third though. In terms of character development Handa does grow further, but I’m not really a fan of where that growth took him. It felt too sudden and not built up too properly, and the resulting Handa just wasn’t as interesting as the one that was purely an artist. There’s also a lot of emphasis on the stories of other characters, but they all felt pretty wishy washy without anything too major happening. The manga was much more just the story of people just living their lives without any particularly exceptional stories occurring, but I also found myself getting more bored with the setting because as Handa got used to it, it was simply less of something interesting in and of itself. In terms of characters too things felt like they weren’t changing too much, wherein while there were lots of new characters introduced, none of them really stood out as much as the older characters did at first. There was a pretty major exception to that, but she was actually a character that wasn’t a resident of the village but rather Tokyo who only appeared briefly and was then dropped entirely. The comedy still has its high points, but that too started getting kind of repetitive as it played on the same personality traits for the most part. The endings were decent enough I suppose, both the ending in the 18th volume and the extra ending in the 18+1 volume, but it didn’t feel like they had all that much impact. The art was okay but nothing special.