Manga Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [Week 52]

Final discussion thread of the year! If you think back to this time last year, most of us probably had never even heard of Lemmy, so it has been an eventful one. Having a smaller, but active community has exposed me to a wider variety of series that I hadn't checked out before, so I look forward to more in the new year!

As always, this is a general discussion thread. So, feel free to reminisce with me or post about all the new manga you got for the holidays or anything else!

Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).

9 comments

Much to my surprise, I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Skip Beat.
I was familiar with it (it's hard not to be - it's been in print for 20-some years now), but I never felt any great urge to read it, mostly because it looks so quintessentially shoujo (and it strikes me now that it's likely not that it looks like so many other shoujos, but that so many other shoujos look like Skip Beat).
But just the other day, I happened to come across a chapter on the Mangadex new updates page, and on a whim, I clicked the link, and skimmed it, then went back to chapter 1 and read it, then went on to chapter 2, and so on, and 40-some chapters later, here I am.
It's not great literature by any means, and the translation really shows its age, but it's an engaging comedy/drama rollercoaster and the characters - and the protagonist in particular - are exceptional.
With almost 300 chapters to go to catch up, I'm not sure if I'll catch up entirely or just skim through a lot of it, but for the time being...
- I have had a similar experience plenty of times. My wife is a big film buff, and likes to go back and watch old, influential movies like you would find on the AFI list etc. Plenty of times watching with her I would comment on how something was predictable or formulaic just for her to remind me that it wasn't at the time, that the movie we were watching established the formula.
  
  Yeah - that's why I suspect that's the case with Skip Beat.
  I first noticed it with Love Hina. Harems are one of my guilty pleasures, and I'd often recommend Love Hina, and a not uncommon response was that it seemed cliched. And yeah, it does. But that's because it was the first really successful one. When it did it, those things were new - they only became cliches later, when other series copied them.

I didn't have a chance to read a lot of manga recently. On one hand I'm focused on personal project which means no time (and at times will) to look for new things, on the other almost all of the series I'm already invested in either update once every few months or not at all.
It's a strange time but despite that I'm already more active than I ever was on reddit - that on itself isn't particularly surprising as I wastly prefer smaller communities and tend to slip into background/lurking mode as things become more crowded but it's a nice change of pace. It's been years since I actively participated in online discussion (excluding like 3 anime rewatches on reddit).
I hope to catch up on manga and anime backlog next year as both grew quite a bit but we'll see how it goes.
I'm not exactly sure what I was trying to write honestly. I'm kind of wiped after having to spend time with people on christmas and ended up ranting.
Happy holidays and new years and stuff, I guess?
- This fall anime season I have been super busy with work projects and have really only had time to keep up with 2 shows regularly. Manga is a bit easier for me since I can usually knock out a chapter or two while I am waiting on something to finish at work (I work in a lab, so there are plenty of steps where I wait like 5-10 minutes). It's been a few years since I last got to visit family for the holidays, but it can be utterly exhausting. I wish you the best of luck tackling the backlog next year. I know my to-read list has exploded in length since I started this community and people have posted tons of great series that I hadn't checked out before.

I mentioned up top about how Lemmy was a new discovery for me this past year, so out of curiosity, I thought I would pull up the ol' reddit account and take a look. I was a redditor for 11 years, and over that time I only made 24 posts (many more comments, too many to count). Hard to believe when you look at my account on this instance and I have made 314 posts since November 3rd and am now moderating 2 communities.
As for manga this past week, I have had the chance to read more since I am feeling mostly better (now my wife is really sick). I absolutely binged all of "My Dear Aster" over the course of two days. I really liked it. Somewhere around the end of the first season, the story connected to me on a very personal level. I don't really want to get into the details in a public way online, but it is one of those stories that I happened to read at just the right point in my life, under the right conditions, for it to hit 100 times harder. If I had read this series a year ago, or a year from now, it probably wouldn't have had the same impact.

Maybe a bit more tech, but still manga related:
Today I got a Komga web server up and running on an old laptop for the digital manga that I bought. Komga is basically a selfhosted manga/comic streaming service (similar to Plex). I'm a big server/networking and linux noob so it took some figuring out, but I'm happy with the result for now. Now I can clear my ereader and phone and keep and read my manga from one place, but still have control over it myself. I still need a Windows installation to get the manga from Kobo, but once I figure out how to get Kobo running in Linux, I'm fully set (with the exception of safely exposing it to outside my home network, which I'm doing later).
As for reading manga: I've been catching up on Dosanko Gals this week. Fun stuff. Glad I could binge read parts of it though. I can imagine some parts dragging on if you had to wait for new chapters.
- Welcome to the selfhosting journey! I started ~5 years ago with plex and now I am running maybe 30 docker containers over 6 different hosts (3 VPS's are part of that). I had not heard of Komga before, but after looking it up, I certainly see the appeal. Most of what I read these days is done through Tachiyomi reading things from Mangadex, but the legally downloaded series are always a maze of apps/services to navigate. Bringing all those into a consistent webui is very appealing. I have tried to do the Tachiyomi local content thing before with cbz archives, but never really got it to act consistently and file management on a phone is not the easiest. A while back I had tried setting up Tachidesk to essentially run Tachiyomi as a web service, but it wasn't really feature complete at the time. I just looked it up again now and it seems to be in a better place, so I might give it another go.
  
  Thanks! If you have any tips or useful resources, please let me know.
  Most of what I read these days is done through Tachiyomi reading things from Mangadex
  I use that a lot too, but try to read legally where it's possible. There's a Tachiyomi extension for Komga as well!
  but the legally downloaded series are always a maze of apps/services to navigate. Bringing all those into a consistent webui is very appealing.
  Yeah, and with most of them, there's DRM on them, so you need to remove that before you can actually use that with Komga. Thank goodness for Calibre for that. I tend to buy my digital manga from Kobo. I used to do this on Bookwalker, but you can't remove that DRM unfortunately.
  Of course you can also put stuff obtained from the seven seas on it.
  A while back I had tried setting up Tachidesk to essentially run Tachiyomi as a web service
  Interesting. Might check this out too.

9 comments