(L) Ichigo 100%

[KoroshiyaX]

I'd have to agree with someone's earlier post which stated that Nishino and Manaka were already acting like boyfriend/girlfriend for the good part of the manga even though they had already broken up. I was an Aya fan for the most part, but if you really looked hard between the lines... it was obvious that his feelings for Nishino were growing everytime they met.

[Forbin]

Sorry, but I don't believe that Koroshiya. If you look between the lines, him and Aya should've already had a child before Ichigo 100 finished.

Ichigo was written so that even Satsuki had a chance of getting Manaka. But it was just so abrupt considering all the buildup.

[Vexx]

As Forbin says, his "feelings" were growing for each girl ... enough so that he was completely indecisive for 99% of the story. That's why I say the ending was a coinflip just to get the story shut down since the publisher had pulled the plug on funding.
I'll jump on a limb and say Nishino was the most *interesting* possible ending simply because it would have been less obvious, but that Satsuki would have been a very unexpected ending (the girl who is actually forthright about what she wants actually gets the guy.... so rare in these little fantasies).

[be0wulf]

The mangaka herself has said she wrote the manga originally planning for Aya and Manaka to get together...but apparently it didn't turn out that way.

Ichigo100% did drag on needlessly for...oh I'd say...5 volumes? The mangaka sure is strange: for Lilim Kiss she ends it at 2 volumes (granted, it was unpopular) but Ichigo...holy carp. Right now I'd say Suzuka's also headed down the same road.

[Vexx]

Lillim Kiss is actually a fairly tightly written story (albeit the ending was a bit annoying) .... it shows she *can* write decent stories but the long form is not her strong suite. One of the reasons I *got* interested in manga and anime is because I found stories that have clear beginnings and endings. These "neverending story" things only work if there are clear arcs (or "ministories") that DON'T reset everything at the end of the arc. The readers get frustrated with periodic resets. Let the damn characters grow...

[be0wulf]

Ichigo100% has great character development, but the plot dragged...on...forever...

Lilim Kiss: My biggest beef is with the ending, it's got all the characteristics of a rushed ending. Plus most of the stories don't even seem to be connected. At least with the repetitiveness of Ichigo there's some sort of connectivity between the stories.

[nellA]

I saw a video about choice and happiness just after I finished reading the manga and felt that it applied to Manaka’s situation.

The Paradox of Choice and the Secret to Happiness – Barry Schwartz

Everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice... All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people.

One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from people find it very difficult to choose at all. I’ll give you one very dramatic example of this; a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million employees and about two thousand different workplaces. And what she found is that for every ten mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer fifty funds, ten percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with fifty funds to choose from it’s so damn hard to decide which funds to choose that you’ll just put it off till tomorrow. So that’s one effect.

The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from, and there are several reasons for this.

One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it’s not perfect, and you know, what salad dressing is (sarcasm), it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is that this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.

Second, what economists call opportunity costs, …whenever you’re choosing one thing, you are choosing not to do other things and those other things might have lots of attractive features and it’s going to make what you’re doing less attractive.

Third: escalation of expectations. Adding options to peoples’ lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be and what that’s going to produce is less satisfaction with results even when they’re good results. Nobody in the world or marketing knows this, cause if they did you wouldn’t all know what this was about (editorial cartoon: “It all looks so great. I can’t wait to be disappointed). The truth is more like this, (editorial cartoon: “Everything was better back when everything was worse.”), the reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in, we affluent industrialized citizens with perfection the expectation, the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness, this is what you all came for. The secret to happiness is low expectations (editorial cartoon of wedding: “You’ll do”).

Finally, one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why who is responsible, the answer is clear, the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why who is responsible, it is equally clear that the answer to the question is YOU. You could’ve done better with a hundred different kinds of jeans on display; there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them, they blame themselves.

Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant, not the only, but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that are disappointing cause their standards are so high and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves they think they’re at fault. And so the net result is that we do better in general objectively, and we feel worse.

Why choices make people miserable:
1. Regret and anticipated regret
2. Opportunity costs
3. Escalation of expectations
4. Self-blame

There’s no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jD_Si2z9WQ
Starts around 2:40 if you do not want to read.

[anselfir]

ah nvm, manga. >_<

[Mango_ice-cream]

Didn't end up with who i wanted.... but she was my second pick, so eh

[KuchikiByakuya]

....To read, makes it much more easier to understand the story, true......Haven't read a singel mange 'bout "Bleach"....But still......It ain't anythin' that I can't/don't understand though....=_=

[dkrandom]

i recently just finished the manga
i thought it was entertaining to kill sometime and the ending wasnt all that shocking. except i kinda wish that the jump wasnt so vast... wish it showed some particular events and show the other characters also growing up

also i really thought this series was closely similar to Shuffle! in the beginning but now i conclude it isnt. i hope there are some more interesting manga's like this in the future

[aFlipGuy]

oh how i love this manga so much <3

Spoiler:

i really liked satsuki the most just cause she was the kind who he had the most fun w/....plus she really tried the hardest. i felt so sad when she was mopping around after the final rejection.

[dkrandom]

Originally Posted by aFlipGuy

oh how i love this manga so much <3

Spoiler:

i really liked satsuki the most just cause she was the kind who he had the most fun w/....plus she really tried the hardest. i felt so sad when she was mopping around after the final rejection.

ah same here. i just felt bad for her in general cause she was never close to him through all that effort and even after all that time she still was >.> poor satsuki... i think shes gonna be a bachelorette for life

[aFlipGuy]

thats a negative sir. i'd marry her in a heart beat =D


just gotta work on my pretending to love movies and read the manaka for dummies

[dkrandom]

yo got a quick question guys look at this clip if possible
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a61AGRcRa6s
at 00:44 manaka is beat up really bad... the only time i remember of this type of incident is in Chapter 26
but i know its not that. so is that pix something someone made? or is it the original concept? clarify it for me please ty in advance

[Maskedstranger]

I think that is the part where he went to returen Yui's notebook, and all hell breaks loose I just checked and its around ch.60

[aFlipGuy]

yea maskedstranger is right. after nishino helped him escaped, he returned the favor by telling all those guys to leave her alone. they beat him up for it.... assholes

[Mykas]

I just finished rereading the story and I think I have to disagree with the people who hate the ending. It isn't what I would have chosen, since I didn't like Nishino at any point in the manga really (I prefer Satsuki) but the ending really isn't important. if it was then all we would need to do is read the last volume. I think the journey is the best part; how they got there, what they did along the way. Even if the ending isn't to your liking the journey was a great one.

[aFlipGuy]

i enjoyed the ending as well. it just makes you want to reminisce about YOUR own high school life(for those who have graduated). i really didn't mind nishino, but i really wanted satsuki cause she was the only one who was really true to herself and never held back.

[Mykas]

exactly if you like 3 or more girls equally i think the best way to decide to between them is to figure out which one likes you most and puts in the most effort twards you. in this case that would completely be satsuki, at one point she even says her dream is to marry manaka and take care of him. not fly off to france or become a writer etc. anyway I am just postulating since I have never and (now that i am married) will never be in that position.