Okay, this is as far as my suspension of disbelief goes.
Touma-kun doesn't have any redeeming quality that'd make her attractive or charismatic.
I dont care what the characters of the story think, because that's not how you analyse a work. Of course the characters are going to believe this narrative the author cooked up. But us? We have no reason to believe Touma-kun is in any way charismatic or has some quality that makes girls stick to her like flies. To top it off, she's dumb and an airhead, she doesn't seem to have been built for this story. Rather, it feels like the author wanted to make a female harem story, and decided to make of the protagonist an air headed woman that's too oblivious or dense to notice anybody else's feelings, so that she doesn't really have to deal with any sort of conflict or anything interesting. Hell, she feels almost inhuman or alien-like.
Manga is a visual medium, so those things above wouldn't be too bad if Touma-kun was at least framed in a way that made sense. I mean, c'mon, shoujo manga has spent decades honing the art of making a character look charming just using a screentone. But there's so little effort put into this manga, that Touma-kun is not even portrayed in an appealing way.
To give an example, it's like if you had a Death Note kinda story, and instead of having Light do smart stuff, you got to hear people tell you that Light is "really really smart, you guys". It'd feel like a cheap trick, and you wouldn't really believe that he was smart after a while, just that the author wanted to make a smart character and failed due to their lack of talent.
Tbh I tend to like the "woman playboy" trope. It's a nice "power fantasy" of sorts, but it usually works because the woman in question has some sort of outstanding quality or embodies some sort of "irresistible" trope, making their seductive aspects believable . Here, the author has given me no reason to believe in their premise. (And even if people like Touma-kun may exist in real life, it doesn't work for a story. The idea that a person can be seductive just because she exists is pretty weak, and it doesn't really match up with the way people generally think about partner selection, attraction or sex. It's like a story whose sole gist is that bad people get great luck in life, it doesn't go with people's narratives and ideas about how the world works, as wrong as they might be)
The only possible twist that could make me like this story going forward is one in which Touma-kun to be revealed to be an alien or supernatural being of sorts that is trying to mate with as many women as possible for reasons.
last edited at May 21, 2018 3:16AM
