Oreimo: Kuroneko

tl;dr: A manga focused on Kuroneko that does right by her for the most part but missed the mark in a few areas. This manga is technically a sequel to the first Oreimo manga, but not quite. It’s very different from the first manga because unlike the first manga which is from Kyousuke’s perspective like the light novel and anime, this manga is from Kuroneko’s perspective. Additionally, there’s a massive gap between where the first manga ends and this picks up. To put it in anime terms since I am not familiar with the original light novel, it skips half a season’s worth of content. Andto be clear, this gap can’t be explained away as unnecessary due to this manga being focused on Kuroneko, as the part skipped heavily involves Kuroneko. Thus, this very much is targeted towards people that are already familiar with the story and thus should only be read in that context. As such, there will be spoilers in this review. The choice of doing a manga from Kuroneko’s perspective I think was an incredibly good one as there are a number of strengths that such a narrative could have that wouldn’t really be possible in the original. I think this manga managed to identify what these strengths were pretty well, but only did a so-so job at utilizing them. The largest strength is that because it’s from Kuroneko’s perspective, it can focus on her personality and character arc much better than in the original, and for a lot of it it handles that quite well. Her character and relationship development comes across incredibly well and aspects that were only touched upon in the original are shown much more clearly, such as her awkward feelings that arose from not being able to be as social as her friends and her attempts to overcome that, or her complex relationship with Kirino where she’s both jealous of her relationship with Kyousuke but doesn’t want to be treated like he treats Kirino but rather as something more, but also doesn’t want to interfere with the relationship the two have with each other either as she really likes Kirino as well. Plus, there’s just in general a lot more Kuroneko fluff with her just being her which is kind of fun in and of itself. Kuroneko is the fan favorite character for this series, so having more of her and adding more depth to her is obviously a plus, and I think this manga did a good job at that. Another thing that I think many may consider a strength is that there’s far less Kirino in general. I don’t dislike Kirino but think having less of her with a much stronger focus on Kuroneko is a good change of pace. However, I think the implementation here was somewhat lacking. For the first half of the manga there are no issues because it’s centered around an arc where Kirino isn’t there and where even in the original the focus was entirely on Kuroneko. However, after she returns things start to get somewhat messier. Firstly, there are blatant gaps where major things clearly happen with Kyousuke and Kirino that just get skipped over. These are events that Kuroneko isn’t involved with directly, but it is clear from what happens afterwards that she was told about them. However, portraying Kuroneko being told about them would basically be straight up info dumping which would be really weird, so it pretty much just skips these explanations. This felt a bit strange even from the perspective of someone already familiar with the plot, though I suppose there was no perfect solution here. Another issue, is that this tries to follow the original story structure even when it doesn’t really make sense to. As this is from Kuroneko’s perspective, the reader should see events that happen to Kuroneko as they happen to her and receive information in the order that she does, but that doesn’t happen. Rather, towards the end of this manga there are plot events that in the original were centered around Kyousuke not knowing certain things about Kuroneko and why she was doing what she was doing, and this manga preserves that despite it not really fitting. It does attempt to get around that somewhat by switching from Kuroneko’s perspective to her sisters for a bit, but the issue is larger than just that could solve. That combined with Kyousuke’s perspective where he figures out what’s going on not being shown either makes this whole arc feel like it’s not told all that well. Since doing this arc properly from Kuroneko’s perspective would take a considerable amount of effort as it would require the writing of a lot of new scenes and events without much guidance from the source material I can understand why the easy way out was chosen, but I still find it kind of disappointing. Lastly, there’s the ending, which is completely different from the anime and light novel. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that because the back of the last volume blatantly says “A different ending to the Oreimo story” so I think that’s supposed to be one of the selling points. Well, to be super technical about it, I don’t think it’s necessarily a different route from the original, as the ending in this manga is after a time skip where you have no clue what happened and thus it could technically coexist as something that occurs after the ending to the original. To be frank that the ending of this manga occurs after the ending to the original is what I’m keeping as my head canon. I’m not someone that hated the ending to the anime, rather I thought it fit and had value for what it was. Still, I do get the complaints, and the ending here is pretty much exactly what I think everyone complaining wanted the ending to be instead. However, the issue with this is that no explanation is provided for how it got there, which made the entire things feel really rushed. In my head canon the events at the end of the original provide closure to Kirino and Kyousuke and once things settle down things can properly go in the direction that Kuroneko originally wanted, which has obvious issues, but as no explanation whatsoever was given in this manga, I’m going with it. The art is still incredibly solid. I think I liked it a bit less than in the first manga series though because it didn’t have as much variety to it and felt more repetitive.