Zeal and Annihilation

Key Events:

With the same story in the same issue agreed, Nanamine sets to work with the 20 left from the 50. Everything looks to be going well even though Nanamine is consecutively placed 16th, but of course he doesn’t tell any of his 20.

Nakai overhears the ranks and secretly sneaks into Nanamine’s room to get everyone to think of good stories, but he didn’t know Nanamine was lying about the ranks and lets slip they’ve been 16th. That causes anger about Nanamine lying so everyone quits.

In the same story issue, Nanamine is destroyed dropping to 19th in rank with PCP at 3rd. PCP took all of Nanamine’s votes. Nanamine freaks out and quits, this angers Kosugi to punch Nanamine. And somehow, Kosugi convinces Nanamine to write the rest of the manga himself until the next serialisation meeting where it’s mostly likely going to be cancelled.

Ashirogi meets Nanamine at the new year’s party, his manga is getting cancelled, but he says he’ll beat them next time.

After a primary school reunion, Ashirogi Muto get back to their house to see news broadcasting a crime and then relating it to PCP.

Thoughts:

Exactly as Takagi says, ideas get jumbled together, nothing makes sense, characters lose what makes them unique and you just get a mess of a manga. The inevitable result is Nanamine’s loss, but at least he finally sees sense in his stupidity. Maybe he’ll do it the proper way with his editor now, maybe he’ll leave forever and we won’t see him again. Either way, that was one of my favourite arcs as it challenges the status quo of doing things, unfortunately it was an interesting idea that didn’t work out. However that may be down to how Nanamine did things. He for one, definitely wasn’t leadership material, so he was going to fail, but I wonder, if you got people who cared, who had a stake in the manga, and then a proper leader, would it work out better? I think it would.

Not much else this episode, pretty relaxed as the Nanamine arc finishes and we enter a new arc. From the last few seconds of the episode, I think we all know where this is going. I’m not that surprise, imitation was mentioned before hence why they couldn’t create an anime so it’s only natural they’d actually do this in the manga’s real life and cause problems.

Gonna have a short rant, so I’m separating this into a new paragraph. The last few seconds come onto a real life related issue with the media always blaming something like games or manga or basically an external influence rather than blaming and investigating the source of the insanity. I even recently read an article about the Sandy Hook shootings where a UK tabloid related it to Dynasty Warriors, albeit the tabloid was The Sun, so you know it’s a load of crap. But even so, you wonder why the media are always so quick to point the finger at something else, does the madness of the person in question not come into it at all? Must all mass murders, huge crimes be influenced by something? I play Dynasty Warriors and I know it’s one of the tamest games out there, so they don’t know what they’re talking about for one thing. I know that most sane people with some logic will agree that those who are quick to point fingers to influences are ignorant and time wasters. They could easily blame the person who actually did it, because that’s pretty logical in my opinion, get down to their investigations into what was wrong with the person and help others from there. Pointing fingers at unrelated sources will slow people down and cause unwanted conflict between many groups of people. It’s just so stupid, for this particular PCP thing, the criminal is obviously not a child for one thing, no child can break into a vault. Probably some very accomplished criminal gang and they just got one idea from a manga one guy skim read at some point. If that one point of similarity didn’t exist then PCP wouldn’t have been mentioned. The crime was going to take place either way, why not stop wasting time to blame manga and go catch the criminals that were responsible and sort them out.

That’s my rant done, we’ll see how Ashirogi Muto sorts this out. They could easily ignore it like most people, but something this big doesn’t seem like it’s ignorable and the editorial department will likely be pulled into it. So things will get interesting again. Oh and nice to see Kosugi finally snap and punch Nanamine in the face, he had it coming for ages.