The creator might be milking his own franchise to death.
Ever since the release of its first volume in 2017, Reiji Miyajima’s Rent-A-Girlfriend manga has been a critical success, sparking both an anime and a live-action adaptation. Its unusual plot, charming characters and a highly intriguing approach towards the romcom genre resonated with fans worldwide causing the sales of manga alone to surpass a monstrous height of 11 million copies.
Over the last couple of years, however, this enormous popularity seems to be on a somewhat downward trend as an increasingly more significant portion of the fanbase starts to grow dissatisfied with Miyajima’s creative decisions. In other words, they just want the story — that has been going on for the last six years and has just recently reached the 300 chapter milestone — to finally reach some kind of conclusion. And preferably a satisfying one.
Miyajima, on the other hand, seems to have a very different view on this issue, offering fans a consistent flow of new and new chapters that, while still continuing to retain their entertainment value, provide little to no character development for the main heroes with the overall story moving at a pace of an old snail.
In some sense, it all boils down to the romcom genre itself, which over the years has grown to have certain standards that fans have come to expect. One of these standards being a gradual character development of the main couple with their relationship slowly but surely evolving into an open mutual love that climaxes the whole story into a big heartwarming and tear-inducing finale. And, after 300 chapters of story and 6 years of time wasted, Rent-A-Girlfriend is sadly still nowhere near this kind of conclusion.
Naturally, this does not sit well with a lot of fans who have taken to Twitter in order to express their disappointment. Some even accuse Reiji Miyajima of incompetence as a writer and advise him to hire a professional to help him finally get the story going in any kind of meaningful direction.
While currently Rent-A-Girlfriend continues to enjoy an enviable popularity, in the eyes of many fans the manga’s overall trajectory has already become one of self-destruction. As, in the absence of any meaningful character development, it is only a matter of time before a sizable chunk of the fanbase gets tired of being stuck in this ‘story-telling limbo’ and simply decides to move on to something else.
The creator might be milking his own franchise to death.
Ever since the release of its first volume in 2017, Reiji Miyajima’s Rent-A-Girlfriend manga has been a critical success, sparking both an anime and a live-action adaptation. Its unusual plot, charming characters and a highly intriguing approach towards the romcom genre resonated with fans worldwide causing the sales of manga alone to surpass a monstrous height of 11 million copies.
Over the last couple of years, however, this enormous popularity seems to be on a somewhat downward trend as an increasingly more significant portion of the fanbase starts to grow dissatisfied with Miyajima’s creative decisions. In other words, they just want the story — that has been going on for the last six years and has just recently reached the 300 chapter milestone — to finally reach some kind of conclusion. And preferably a satisfying one.
Miyajima, on the other hand, seems to have a very different view on this issue, offering fans a consistent flow of new and new chapters that, while still continuing to retain their entertainment value, provide little to no character development for the main heroes with the overall story moving at a pace of an old snail.
In some sense, it all boils down to the romcom genre itself, which over the years has grown to have certain standards that fans have come to expect. One of these standards being a gradual character development of the main couple with their relationship slowly but surely evolving into an open mutual love that climaxes the whole story into a big heartwarming and tear-inducing finale. And, after 300 chapters of story and 6 years of time wasted, Rent-A-Girlfriend is sadly still nowhere near this kind of conclusion.
Naturally, this does not sit well with a lot of fans who have taken to Twitter in order to express their disappointment. Some even accuse Reiji Miyajima of incompetence as a writer and advise him to hire a professional to help him finally get the story going in any kind of meaningful direction.
While currently Rent-A-Girlfriend continues to enjoy an enviable popularity, in the eyes of many fans the manga’s overall trajectory has already become one of self-destruction. As, in the absence of any meaningful character development, it is only a matter of time before a sizable chunk of the fanbase gets tired of being stuck in this ‘story-telling limbo’ and simply decides to move on to something else.
