IS: Otoko demo Onna demo Nai Sei

This is going to be a hard review to write, because I have very mixed feelings about this manga. IS: Otoko demo Onna demo Nai Sei is a manga composed of 3 different stories, the first 2 being only 6 chapters each and the last one taking up the majority of the manga. This is by far the best one and the only one I will be discussing in the review. To me, volume 2 (chapter 13) is where the actual story begins, so if you start at the beginning and really aren't feeling it I'd recommend just skipping volume one as it has no effecton the rest of the story. So, how is the story? Well it's fantastic, and very interesting to boot. Haru is a great protagonist and you really feel for him throughout the story. We follow him from birth all the way to early adulthood and his character development, as well as the development of many of the side characters is so well done it deserves praise. The art style is your standard shoujo, nothing to write home about but gets the job done. Character design is decent which I don't mind as long as they look distinct enough from each other, which they do. The drama is great and almost brought me to tears at points, and the story itself is really moving. So why do I have mixed feelings about it? The pacing. For the first 30-40 chapters the story moves at a great pace, but then we get stuck in "almost-filler-land" for I don't know how long. Basically most chapters take place from a single characters viewpoint, and that character is often the main character, Haru. Now as I said, Haru is great, and there are several other characters that are great, but at some point the author decided that every single minor character needed their own chapter, their own problems, their own tragic backstory, and it just totally messes with the flow of the story. You're so into it and then all of a sudden it feels like half the chapters become unnecessary side-story filler about people you really aren't that invested in. What makes it worse is how formulaic it eventually becomes. I wasn't exactly counting but it felt like there were at least 15 chapters in this manga that all followed the exact same formula. We get to know some minor character, they have it rough for some reason, (boyfriend only wants sex, rough family life, is bullied, can't stand up for themselves, dead mom etc) then they meet Haru, is sometimes mean to him at first but he just takes their abuse and then calmly relates their problem to his own, tells some personal story about his life and then gives a motivational speech which makes them respect him/feel better. Not only does this get extremely repetitive but it also makes Haru seem really one-dimensional when we know he isn't. The problem is that these chapters are split up so you don't get them all in a row, and while some of them really could be skipped without missing anything of note, others cannot, so you need to read it all unless you want to risk becoming confused later. For the record, I'm not saying all of these chapters are bad, they just feel like they're interrupting the flow of the story and all I could think while reading some of them was that I wanted to get back to following Haru and his journey. Eventually the story more or less gets back on track and from that point on it's pretty good again all the way to the end, which I liked well enough although I was kind of hoping for a bit more (that could very well just be my preference though) Overall, IS: Otoko demo Onna demo Nai Sei is a fantastic manga plagued by some baffling pacing decisions here and there. If I could judge only the good parts this would be a 9, but as a whole it's probably closer to a 7. That said, when it's good, it's really good and I'm glad I read it.