[MANGA] Renai Daikou (2023)
Kaguya-sama: Love is War and Oshi no Ko by Aka Akasaka are some of my favourite manga of the past several years, so I was really looking forward to his next work, Renai Daikou. Unfortunately, when it was cancelled just shy of 40 issues, it felt like a mercy killing.
It's not to say that this manga was bad, per se, it was just severely underwhelming compared to its genre-shattering predecessors. When the story started as a light-hearted rom-com, I kept expecting the character work to improve and gradually get darker, as per Akasaka's style, but this never really happened. The story meandered through bizarre and left-field plot developments with out-of-place interjections that felt more like the author's current real life interests than anything that added thematic depth.
I still have enough confidence in Akasaka based on his prior work to pick up whatever he does next, though - hopefully this is just a one-off misstep.