Glad I am not the only one being reminded of Young Ladies don't play fighting games, though the comparison was not a good one for me. I hate trashtalk, did not like it there, and do not like it here.
"Hey, let's play together - LOL you suck"
That is some LTG - shit right there
All I could think when the two of them were playing was "OK, so the new girl is a really shit drummer then."
Like, if you're drumming to try to make the other instruments disappear, you're DOING IT WRONG.
I dunno, I'm not into this. I mean, ooh, they're subverting a silly old trope that has only been subverted, I dunno, ten million times already. We've long since reached the point where the subversion IS the cliche.
Also this. A band is supposed to be a harmony, not a fight for attention between the members. That can work, especially in rock, but only when all the band members are on the same page that this is what is supposed to be going on.
I am gonna check out the next chapter, mainly because I like the protag, but if the other girl stays that way, I might drop this sooner than later.
She's a kid in a school that is incredicly oppressive, it's probably the first time in her life that she's been able to just let it all out. I think the dynamic is supposed to be that Suzunomiya slowly starts taming Kurogane through their relationship & Suzunomiya goes back to being herself when they are together. Add in parts where she's like "I know the real you", and there might be an arc where the rest of the girls realise that they aren't prim ladies at all, it's a nice dynamic and I don't think it's supposed to be taken seriously, mostly just to get you to recoil in the first chapter.
We actually don't know how oppressive that school is yet, the protag is hiding her love for rock to fit in with the other girls in an effort to adjust to her new familiy. We have not been shown any signs that the school forbids rock or anything. The protag never mentions being regulated by the school in any way. For example, the protag held on to the pick not because she feared retalitation from the school for her or the owner, but because she did not want to out herself to her peers. That makes me think that it is only social pressure that the protag creates herself. Maybe her family or new father is oppressive, though I would prefer it to be something entirely in the protags mind.
But even so, lashing out at a innocent bystander -to put it dramatically - is shit behaviour, no matter how oppressed you are. So I also hope that the story goes in a "Taming of the Trashtalker" - direction.
The "not supposed to be taking it seriously" - defence only works for me for clearly absurd comedies like Leslie Nielsen or Monthy Python movies. I know why the scene is here, to set up conflict between the two leads, shock value and comedy, but the exectution is lacking IMO.
I'm a little confused why people are criticizing Kurogane for being a poor bandmate when they aren't actually, you know, in a band (yet). >
Because it is shit behaviour, to put it simply. I think I wrote that it would only be ok if they were in a band and had that established style. To go into a bit more detail: She invited someone to play a song together, which is supposed to be a collaborative effort, then did not adjust to her partner, but actively tried to overshadow her. That would be like me invinting you to a chess game, then proceed to flip the board over, throw the pieces at you and then boast of my physical prowess and call you a looser for not flipping the board before me, when you were rightly assuming that a normal game of chess was supposed to be happening.
In contrast to this, in Bocchi the Rock, the main character is seen as a bad guitarist by her bandmates at first, because she cannot adjust to the other members and play accordingly, because she was used to playing on her own.
I think another problem with this scene is that it is not exactly clear what the drum girl is actually supposed to be doing. Since we can't hear the music, the scene can be interpreted differently. What I think the author wanted to convey was that drum girl simply played "better" than the protagonist, setting her up as a foil. Maybe she was freestyling, or following the beat and notes flawlessly etc. But the scene could also be seen as her simply drowing the protag out with noise, which is very easy to do with drums. This in turn makes her shittalking even worse, since in this case she is boasting despite basically bringing a gun to a knife fight.
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