Review 4... november? december? I forgot how i do these

 Welp.

The funniest part of this is that I still haven't finished dhalgren. I went all the way to the last chapter and I've just been letting it sit there. Haven't touched it in prolly over a month.

But! I did finish Dorohedoro! So that's gonna be our review for right now.

Here's my review:

I'm tired and trying to get a diagnosis on whatever-the-fuck-is-up-with-me (hint: I'm 90% sure it's autism) 

Oops that's not a review! What the fuck!

I'll say this. The whole last like... 30-60 chapters of it were actually exhausting to go through. That might not necessarily be the manga's fault but there it is. And for some reason the endless plot twists were getting on my nerves. Usually I enjoy that sort of thing because it's funny and ridiculous but it just felt like... running a race and being dragged a mile to the end by like 10 people who are all also tired and you're all just falling over eachother and dragging your feet and hyperventilating. Maybe it's that Kaiman was out of the picture... I'm not sure. I haven't put enough energy into assessing my feelings about it and I only finished it yesterday. But it just felt like I was enduring the story instead of actively enjoying it, although it is a good comic and I did enjoy it. There's also lots of character things that seemed to... not make too much sense to me? And again, that sort of thing is usually fun/funny and enjoyable when it's not pretending to be perfect or disguising its ridiculousness but I just felt this like... 

Hmm. I'm kind of saying the same thing over and over. But, for example: One of the comics that got me back into reading comics in the first place was Kazuo Umezu's 14. That shit was bonkers. There was shit happening and plot twists that were definitely a reach, and absolutely ridiculous. I like it when people don't obligate themselves to align with expected trajectories or 'making sense'. Maybe the difference for me lies in that Dorohedoro was really bouncing back the same sorts of twists... They were things you really couldn't have guessed as far as what you were presented with story-wise, but they weren't actually surprising, and really got kinda old. Like, okay this guy has a head, theres another head, oh lord this person can actually do THIS now! like... I don't really feel like the story changed much as a result of these twists, they seemed more like a means to an end. Which was fun the first several times. But kind of tiring the other times.

But I'd still recommend this to people. I think if I'm supposed to be conforming to USDA standards, I'd give Dorohedoro a 7/10 as a whole, but those first 100 chapters were solid gold. But maybe the gold just wasn't packaged correctly or stored in the right temperature zone or whatever.

As an aside, I imagine that it's possible Q Hayashida was under a lot of pressure and I know the longer a manga goes the more money you make, so I wonder if that has anything to do with how that last chunk came out... I'm not at all dunking on her ability to create or write or draw, I already know she's absolutely #sick. But these are just all my opinions! I've been going through my own shit so who knows! I'm sure that affected my experience as well!

Anyway.

There's that. happy birthday. thanks for reading