I initially posted it without the tag because that was my opinion too. But then I reconsidered in part because of the subject matter and the one image of the cover, but more broadly because a lack of an NSFW tag is one of those things that catch the attention of self-righteous prigs who are just looking for something to be offended over, and better safe than sorry.
Yeah - this definitely felt like it was just filling in some gaps - not enough to give away any secrets, but just enough to sort of firm up the foundation, so that it can then go on with the story.
And I'm ready.
I didn't know that the author of that godawful trainwreck even had another series.
I was curious to see if he could actually write something good, so I looked it up, then tracked it down and read the first dozen chapters or so, and I'd say the answer is no.
Well - it is better than Rent a Girlfriend, but only insofar as it couldn't possibly be worse.
The basic setup is seven siblings - two boys and five girls (five girls - where have I seen that before?) - who are suddenly told by their fabulously wealthy and conveniently absent father that they're not actually blood related.
The mc is the eldest son, who's actually the middle child. The other son is virtually non-existent, which is necessary because he actually knows how to talk to girls and actually does it, so if he was interacting with the sisters at all, the story would instantly turn into NTR, since the mc is predictably pathetic and the bulk of every chapter, just like Rent a Girlfriend, is his endlessly droning thought stream of insecurity, confusion, doubting and second-guessing. He's marginally better than Kazuya, but that's not really an accomplishment.
The girls are decidedly better than any of the ones in RaG, but again - they couldn't hardly be worse. They're really just animated tropes though - the teasingly provocative oldest sister, the emotionlessly provocative meganekko, the twin-tailed tsundere, the cute sporty girl and the painfully shy but secretly aggressive youngest.
And... that seems to be about it.
When I got bored with it, I skipped forward to the latest chapter (27), which is one of the sisters basically overtly confessing to him then kissing him, believing that he's asleep, which of course then leads to him revealing, after she leaves, that he's been awake the whole time. And what does he do? He shout/thinks to himself, "What the hell was that?!"
It's probably safe to assume that if this goes 300 chapters, that's what he'll still be doing.
As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.
And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it's essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.
There's no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they're right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.
But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.
...to streamline thier efforts.
That's the key. MTL can absolutely serve as part of the process, but it needs a significant amount of human editing to end up with a good translation.
And if history is anything to go by, the publishers aren't going to be willing to invest the necessary time and resources to do it right, and instead they'll just half-ass it, and it'll entirely justifiably fail.
I contributed to TVTropes in the early days, and quit after they banned Lotte no Omocha, At the time, it wasn't so much because of any concern for that or any other specific thing, but just because the way it all went down empowered a regime of prigs and assholes.
And not only that, but the boring cardboard elf chick he claims to love explicitly asked him to do exactly and only one thing - to stay at home and not butt into things in the city - so what does he do? He rushes off to butt into things in the city, and fucks up literally everything for literally everyone.
Sorry - that whole thing just ended up roo rant-y for my tastes, so I deleted it.
Broadly, for those coming into the thread, it was about the asshole translators and their asshole employers who insist on "localizing" literally everything, including culture-specific things like honorifics that cannot ever actually be "localized."
And yes - eliminating lgbt issues is another problem. That one particularly irritates me because it's an issue regarding which the Japanese, traditionalists though they might be, are very open and tolerant - there have been lgbt characters in anime and manga, entirely non-contoversially, for as long as the mediums have existed. Then along come the Americans, who get all twisted out of shape over it.
My approach to the matter has been very simple and straightforward - I have nothing at all to do with any of the .ml communities. I never even set foot in any of them. And I heartily recommend that others do the same - just pretend that the .ml communities don't exist and focus entirely on this instance and its vastly superior communities.
Time is on our side. These communities are simply better, in all possible ways, so all we really have to do is keep doing what we do here, completely ignore .ml, and be patient.
The internet might be the new god, and Lain might be its messiah.
I could never really get into Steins;Gate, mostly because pretty much every time the MC opened his mouth, I wanted to punch him.
I'd say that the greatest sci-fi anime, mecha or not, is Cowboy Bebop. A pretty mundane answer, but it just is what it is.
My personal favorite is probably Kaiba. I'm also especially partial to Trigun (including Stampede), Ergo Proxy and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. And I feel like I shouldn't let this go without mentioning Now and Then, Here and There, Casshern Sins, Darker Than Black and Aria. And a couple of cheesy gems that aren't even close to the greatest that I just happen to like - Estab-Life and Photon: The Idiot Adventures.
Yeah - it sort of reminds me of Nagatoro in that the two people of the destined couple are pretty much the only people in the entire cast that don't see it as just a simple fact that they're meant to be together. They're still sorting it out and dancing around it, while basically everyone else just recognizes it and is entirely in favor.