[Felyndiira]

There are plenty of cans of worms being opened in this thread.

Originally Posted by teja208

After some thinking, in a way, the claim that we didn’t consider Shizu as a monster because we never get to know detail about her match and ability doesn’t hold much water. Why is that? Because a lot of foreshadowings about other monsters doesn’t really involve revealing their ability at all. I will go over the lists of all the confirmed monsters and the foreshadowings given to them before their match. Correct me if I’m wrong

Just wanted to comment on this - there's a significant difference between a few forewords given for an opposing player and the girl that we've been following for pretty much 20 chapters, give or take.

Think of it in terms of an RPG boss. If the heroes goes to slay a dangerous dragon, and it is revealed that the dragon can animate undead, that's not something that we really would bat a single eyelash about. It's just a boss with X and Y ability. However, if that dragon was a main character, and we've been following its story for the equivalent of 5 volumes of manga without knowing that he has a single ability, and suddenly, he reveals that he knows necromancy with no prior explanation or reason, that is what we call the author pulling something out of their butt.

Koromo, Jindai, and Teru's abilities were never foreshadowed, certainly, but before they entered the playing field, we only knew them by the few snippets of personality and the few comments that we were given. Shizu? 500+ pages written from the perspective of Achiga. I would certainly hope that she would be held to a different bar now than Koromo or Teru when they were first introduced as players.

This is funny because monsters and pseudo monsters are usually treated as the team's ace OR their secret weapon. Shizu, on the other hand, wasn't seen that way until this very final chapter. In a sense, you could consider her situation to be similar to that of Toyone as in she's probably hiding her actual ability until the quarter finals.

We've been reading the thoughts and perspectives of the Achiga players for literally 20 chapters now, each with at least 60 pages. If Achiga is actually hiding Shizu's abilities, we would have expected to know much more than nothing about it now. On the other hand, the fact that Miyamori was hiding Toyone's abilities was introduced pretty much the moment that Toyone came into being as a major character.
There's about 500 pages of difference between the two situations, just as there's a world of difference between the introduction of the antagonist monsters and the suddenly developing power of a protagonist that we've been following for an entire manga.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever refered to her as "Blessed by the Tiles" or "A Dangerous 1st Year" likely due to the first two reasons above. Actually, I began to think that people may start taking Shizu's potential as a monster more seriously if only we had a slight glimpse of her ability in Saki ending preview which is impossible, because Achiga-hen wasn't even exist yet.

And there lies the crux of the problem. Twenty chapters of the manga, and the only clues we have about Achiga is that they are a good team, but nowhere near the monster levels that some (not all!) of the national aces exhibits. We have entire segments that enforced this belief, in fact; Achiga losing to a number of the Nagano players in the anime was a prime indication of their strength (in fact, Shizu, if I recall correctly, lost to Kana). Pros that should know better (going by some defenses of Harue's omniperception) have skimmed over this "monstrous ability", with Kokaji actually implying at one point that only the older students in Achiga has abilities.

Perhaps Kokaji was wrong (in a series when a pro has never really been wrong in an objective analysis before), and Achiga losing to the Nagano teams can be retroactively explained away, etc. It's certainly possible, but this is pretty much what an author saving throw is defined as - Achiga was portrayed as a underdog for most of the manga, and suddenly, when the author realized that they will actually be appearing in the main manga and thus must be main threats instead of "an underdog team", they suddenly are aces in a can.

Other reasons may involve what most people pointed out like pacing issues which can be seen as rush, thus, no time to elaborate on every single match and to add more foreshadowing which could be done without having to catch up with the anime. I mean, the only serious foreshadowing regarding Shizu's power happened in chapter 17 when Koromo warned Saki about her. I think it won’t hurt for Ritz to add some more hints like having other member of Achiga discussing about Shizu’s potential or her role as the team trump card against monster players which explain why she was placed in the captain position. Something like that early in the manga would help a lot.

And pacing is one of the main problems of Achiga, in my opinion - somewhere alongside the "sparkle power mahjong," "Ryuuka is now Toki," and the fact that most of the Achiga characters has less personality than some of the supporting characters of the main manga. When I finished reading the semifinals arc of Saki, I actually felt as if I know and cared about the dreams of these characters - as if they are actually human with motivations, dreams, and a personality. Not a single team in Achiga-hen (not even Senriyama after spending four chapters crafting Toki's character) was able to even inspire a fraction of that feeling.

(And in case if anyone extrapolates the 'sparkle power mahjong' to the main manga - we're currently in an arc with a huge battle of wits between the two characters. Even the power-filled captains match of the semifinals had a ton of characterization behind it. Most of Achiga doesn't even show us the player's starting hands, much less anything more than "it's my turn to sparkle" and "my ability trumps yours, I have flaming wheels behind my back!")


I apologize if this sounds somewhat more forceful than I had intended.