Top 5: Reasons I Drop Manga

I don't always stick to a manga. I read far too many manga to keep the ones I've lost interest in. And so some of them go into the 'On Hold' folder... AKA 'I don't really care about it anymore'.

I'm not sure if my reasons are in the correct order but these really are the big five. Here we go!

So often one of the reasons I drop a manga is because the initial plot has fizzles out. The main direction is towards a goal and then suddenly that goal is fulfilled but then the manga tries to continue. Often with the children of characters or a new successor etc. I find that these rarely work and I stop reading them. Sometimes the manga just becomes a series of mini-chapters/extras at the end because of this and I'm not usually interested in a minor characters story as a substitute.

Now in this post I'm not going to list a heap of manga that I've dropped but I'm going to emphasise on this one: Nisekoi Doumei. Now, before I start on it I will remind you that this is a 'Top 5'. These posts are all based on my own opinion. If you do like something I say I don't; that's life. I'm not expressing my opinion to be hated or to put down yours. With that out of the way, iku yo!
So... I hated the main character. With a passion. I have a collection of manga pages that I love on my computer and they're all appropriately labelled by their manga. I have another folder on my computer that is in preparation for what I don't like about shoujo and it is filled with manga pages of Nisekoi Doumei and is labelled 'Annoying'. I'm not joking. I hate her that much. Hate is a strong word but fuck did she piss me off. She had every aspect of a terrible shoujo character. There was nothing special or strong about her and every chapter is her whining about something. I couldn't do it. I couldn't go through every chapter listening to her shitty story and watching her cause problems for everyone and herself. She just bloody cried ALL THE TIME. And so I dropped the manga. I only made it through about forty chapters; I really did try. But fuck. I hated her.

Now this isn't necessarily a choice to drop the manga but it is a reason and one of the big ones. If there's no updates then I don't really have a choice. Some of them I can find translations for and some of them I can read a little through the hiragana but if there's nothing more, I forget about it and eventually drop it.

I don't know if it's a translation error or if the pages are jumbled up but some manga don't make a whole lot of sense. I have a few of them in my dropped section. A lot of things the characters are saying don't make sense, at least in English, and the plot itself seems disjointed. There are random romantic developments that didn't have any lead up and sometimes it's not even clear who the romantic desire is towards. They're suddenly at a new place doing a job that I has little to do with their original personality/purpose. Supernatural themes are suddenly real etc. Sometimes there are new characters that aren't identified but randomly become central and I find myself wondering if I've skipped a few chapters by accident. There are stories where I don't know what's going on no matter how many chapters I re-read. If I can't make sense of it and I can't keep up; I give up.

Shoujo is a genre and so of course there's going to be recurring scenes and conventions used throughout but most can make something unique about it. That's why they thrive and keep us coming back for more. Manga that doesn't have it's own uniqueness gets boring and it's easy to find these in the shoujo genre. It's the same thing with the other genres but is most prominent in shoujo and oneshots. Romance has a lot of ingredients that are reusable. Other genres are often more independent with their concepts.

So! Those are the Top 5 reasons that I drop manga. I don't like just simply getting rid of manga I've started reading and so here's a pretty accurate number of those I have in the 'On Hold' folder: 161.