(L) Shokugeki no Soma [Manga]

[Diluc]

Originally Posted by Kanon

At least this interview made it clear the series didn't turn to shit because Tsukada was forced to rush it. He's just a plain bad writer.

He is the most densest writer alive, the worst type one. Someone must save Tosh, his talent wasted on this piece of shit.

[GendoAizenPig]

All that I've seen since this series ended is some pretty childish entitlement from a lot of the "fans" along with delusional claims that this or that is canon. This interview has more of the same types of reactions.

I mean it's one thing to not like an ending of a story, but readers don't deserve anything. The vast majority of people reading this manga haven't spent a dime on it. Hell it doesn't even matter if they did. I don't think Tsukuda wrote a good story personally, but I don't think he should've wrote it based on what the fans wanted either. I agree with his statement on Erina and Soma completely. Skipping from where they were at BLUE to them being in a relationship with a time skip would've been stupid and artificial. It wouldn't have been a natural transition at all.

People really just need to chill out and stop taking everything so personally. I don't think the anime will change anything about the ending and I doubt the fanbook will have anything notable in it either, but this won't be truly over until both of those things come out. Seriously though, it's one thing to get a little heated in discussion, but in the end this is a freaking shounen fanservice cooking manga. It's nothing to get so upset about.

[ImperialFlameGod8190]

Originally Posted by GendoAizenPig

All that I've seen since this series ended is some pretty childish entitlement from a lot of the "fans" along with delusional claims that this or that is canon. This interview has more of the same types of reactions.

I mean it's one thing to not like an ending of a story, but readers don't deserve anything. The vast majority of people reading this manga haven't spent a dime on it. Hell it doesn't even matter if they did. I don't think Tsukuda wrote a good story personally, but I don't think he should've wrote it based on what the fans wanted either. I agree with his statement on Erina and Soma completely. Skipping from where they were at BLUE to them being in a relationship with a time skip would've been stupid and artificial. It wouldn't have been a natural transition at all.

People really just need to chill out and stop taking everything so personally. I don't think the anime will change anything about the ending and I doubt the fanbook will have anything notable in it either, but this won't be truly over until both of those things come out. Seriously though, it's one thing to get a little heated in discussion, but in the end this is a freaking shounen fanservice cooking manga. It's nothing to get so upset about.

For somebody whose been on this page as long as you have that's an incredibly stupid comment. Whether we spent money on it or not we've read this story from beginning to end and invested our time in it. It's natural if a story ends in a way that's unsatisfactory to be upset and that's part of being a manga reader

[GendoAizenPig]

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with being upset which I said in the post. Personal attacks on the author and people acting like the guy ran over their dog because the story didn't go their way is going overboard.

Saying the author is bad at writing or you didn't like the story = reasonable
Calling him names and saying he should go die = extreme immaturity.

Next time don't cherry pick my post. I myself wasn't happy with the story which I again said in my post. I don't think anyone on this forum was. Hell I didn't even specify users on this forum, just was throwing out a general impression based on multiple boards I frequent. The money comment was just a way of saying that a majority of readers lost nothing but time. Nowhere did I say people weren't allowed to be upset, just that they should remember that it's just a silly story.

Thanks for the unnecessarily aggressive reply though. Really helps prove my point that people take this stuff way too seriously.

[RDNexus]

Agreed. Paid or not, anyone is always free to jump ship if a story isn't satisfying them.
Those who don't pay a dime for it have even less reason to complain to an author, or even go as far as threatening him/her.
But people feeling entitled to every little thing that catches their attention is a trend nowadays, so...

Commenting about a story on a forum or such is OK, it's what they were made for.
But going as far as nitpicking to an extreme about plot quality, character dynamics, shipping wars, author or editor decisions about a plot point/twist, etc...

I usually simply try to enjoy a story for what it is. Only casually do I criticize something.
If it's weak from my part, sure, it may very well be. But I'd rather be like that, given how nowadays hardly any story seems good enough to please the audience.

The fault may mainly lie in the blessings called network, globalization, mainstreaming.
As the double-edged sword it is, it attracts people who wanna consume stories they deem decent-to-good or rage at any and every thing under the spotlight.
To not forget how many burn-out quite quickly, or get so bored of the "more of the same" that their expectation bar goes on rising like a drill that pierces the sky.

I don't have a definitive answer to you, just that you could try to enjoy the stories for what they are, regardless of how average-to-crappy they may be.
More so if you feel like investing on said stories, whether you're paying for it or not. If not, just jump ship. Another story may be awaiting you.

[DragonOsman]

@GendoAizenPig: The main problem isn't even the fact that Soma and Erina being confirmed as an official romantic couple by the end wouldn't feel natural, it's more the fact that Tsukuda wasn't able to write the story in a way that they could've ever naturally hooked up at all and that he kept doing too much other stuff without developing the main couple and their feelings for each other at all. Basically, if he really wanted them to hook up, he should've developed their feelings for each other and given us something that confirmed earlier on that they love each other. All we have now is just them hinting in the last Epilogue chapter that they might be in love with each other with nothing definite.

But yeah, the fact that Tsukuda wanted to be able to have them hook up means they most likely do love each other in the last Epilogue. It just sucks that he couldn't write the main romance any better than this.

[James Rye]

I wish we could at least have seen Alice and Kurokiba become a couple...

[GendoAizenPig]

@DragonOsman

It's really hard to say. I don't think this interview really adds anything definitive or substantial either way on the ending. I think pretty much every reader knew what he attempted to do with Erina and Soma. It was never a secret. Sounds like to me he went for the open ending because he couldn't come up with a scenario that made sense with them getting together. Pretty funny that even the author didn't find it believable. It's bizarre to me that people (on other forums) are taking a victory lap because Tsukuda stated his original goal for the story. It changes absolutely nothing about the open ending lol. It's right there in the text. He wanted them to get married, but couldn't come up with a way to make it make sense so he went with the ending we got.

@James Rye

That was the one couple that I thought would actually happen. It's weird that it didn't considering they acted like a married couple from the very beginning.



Best thing that came out this interview was that he realized Rindo is awesome. A spin-off with her dragging Tsukasa around the world could be fun. It's also interesting that the Noirs were planned for a long time apparently. Totally didn't see that one coming.

[alex_drian]

This need a The Last/Tamako Market LS movie.

[MCAL]

Originally Posted by Arabesque

The first was on this:



"Colorful combatants", lol. What a diplomatic way to describe the Noirs.

I know of Chuuka Ichiban!(and I know that it has a new anime coming up) but it wouldn't have been my guess as to why the series all of the sudden introduced supernatural abilities. I guess it does make sense that Tsukuda would draw from a better series as a way to improve on the one he's writing, but maybe he should have instead read how Bambino handled the run in with the Mafia and kept his premise more grounded ‾\_(ツ)_/‾

You know, when the Noirs were first mentioned (Before the "superpowers" thing, mind you), I thought Tsukada might have gotten the idea from Chuuka Ichiban (Who knows, I might have even mentioned such here), so its nice to learn I was totally right.

Originally Posted by MCAL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūka_Ichiban!

I guess this is where the concept of underworld chefs comes from

I in fact did mention it!

[Endscape]

Originally Posted by GendoAizenPig

@DragonOsman

It's really hard to say. I don't think this interview really adds anything definitive or substantial either way on the ending. I think pretty much every reader knew what he attempted to do with Erina and Soma. It was never a secret. Sounds like to me he went for the open ending because he couldn't come up with a scenario that made sense with them getting together. Pretty funny that even the author didn't find it believable. It's bizarre to me that people (on other forums) are taking a victory lap because Tsukuda stated his original goal for the story. It changes absolutely nothing about the open ending lol. It's right there in the text. He wanted them to get married, but couldn't come up with a way to make it make sense so he went with the ending we got.

The fact that he went to all the trouble of creating Asahi and wasting time with a pseudo NTR plot and he couldn't figure out how to write a romance is the issue, I'd say.

[Arabesque]

Originally Posted by GendoAizenPig

All that I've seen since this series ended is some pretty childish entitlement from a lot of the "fans" along with delusional claims that this or that is canon. This interview has more of the same types of reactions.

I mean it's one thing to not like an ending of a story, but readers don't deserve anything. The vast majority of people reading this manga haven't spent a dime on it. Hell it doesn't even matter if they did. I don't think Tsukuda wrote a good story personally, but I don't think he should've wrote it based on what the fans wanted either. I agree with his statement on Erina and Soma completely. Skipping from where they were at BLUE to them being in a relationship with a time skip would've been stupid and artificial. It wouldn't have been a natural transition at all.

People really just need to chill out and stop taking everything so personally. I don't think the anime will change anything about the ending and I doubt the fanbook will have anything notable in it either, but this won't be truly over until both of those things come out. Seriously though, it's one thing to get a little heated in discussion, but in the end this is a freaking shounen fanservice cooking manga. It's nothing to get so upset about.

See, I actually do agree with a lot of your post. But I don't want to meta commentate too much about the fandom, so much my own perspective on the series and how it ended.

I'm someone who did pay to read the series when it was running in Viz's Shonen Jump since they picked it up during the Fall Classic finale, and had been collecting the volumes and plans to complete my collection of the series if nothing but for completion sake and my prior love for the series, but I don't feel like Tsukuda owes me anything for having paid to read his story. At the end of the day, as you say, this is entertainment. I got a lot of enjoyment of the series, and early on upto the early parts of Central, I was in love with this story. Even though I can point and say that the series dropped massively in terms of narrative quality, I can't say I didn't have fun reading it week to week when I did. Well, maybe not this year, but I suppose ~85% ain't bad.

I don't even disagree about the idea of Soma and Erina not having a natural progression to a relationship as the series had portrayed their "relationship". I said it before, but I don't think the pairing works as the story that Tsukuda wrote shows! Erina and Soma, at best, have this attraction to each other but are simply either too stubborn or hardheaded to ever enter into healthy, serious, romantic relationship. I can buy that in a scenario where he wanted to display their hooking up as being a natural concluding point for the series, he would struggle to take the story to that point where the majority of it had shown the two being in a semi-antagonistic struggle.

However, and this is why his answer got me so irritated, was because when you look at this last year of the series ... what exactly came across as being natural in the first place?

Is it really okay that I did this? Are the readers going to be satisfied with this sort of ending gets to me precisely because a lot of what happened to the series during the final year, at least to myself, was not satisfying at all. My favourite character in this series had been Megumi, and while I won't say that Tsukuda owed anything to any Megumi fan to give her an appropriate conclusion (she might be the third most prominent character in the series, but she's not a main cast member), I can't help but feel disappointed by what he did end up doing with her by the very final battle she got involved in. I can't help but feel even more so saddened by how little she got to matter in the grander scheme of things, and how it felt disappointing seeing Asahi just shit on her progress and for the series to leave it at that.

I liked where Takumi was developing in term of his rivalry with Soma, even if he wasn't my favorite of Soma's rivals. I liked how he grew and learned in a way that made him less of a duo and more of his own character. So seeing his final battle, being one with one of Soma's most significant rival figures in the series, just end up being fodder for Erina losing her senses? What satisfaction can be taken from that?

I didn't like how the rest of the secondary cast was regulated into the shadow realm by the end. I like Alice and Hisako, and seeing them being used as cameos to explain Azami's return (oh god, that fucking chapter where they tried to whitewash him ) and I didn't like that, when Erina having been kidnapped, and forced (somehow) to marry her kidnapper, and in the process of losing her mind, they were nowhere to be found.

I didn't like that, after as much attention was brought to Kurokiba and Hayama being rivals for Soma to improve with, they were essentially written out of the series.

I don't like Erina, as the series had presented her. I think that the manner her character progression had went from the start of the series to its conclusion had been, frankly, bad and ill advised (why was she made the headmaster? Why did Senzemon's plan end up being this "everyone is a sacrificial pawn for Erina"?). I don't like where the series took her character by the final arc and made her regress into being this really odd character that has a mother issue while also being unsure if she wants to marry her kidnapper ().

But by the end of it all, if Tsukuda wanted to have the two get hooked up/married/dating ... then just do it, because there was nothing else left after strong arming the series into making their nonexistent relationship work. You might as well just do it, because nothing else made sense by the end.

Originally Posted by MCAL

You know, when the Noirs were first mentioned (Before the "superpowers" thing, mind you), I thought Tsukada might have gotten the idea from Chuuka Ichiban (Who knows, I might have even mentioned such here), so its nice to learn I was totally right.


I in fact did mention it!

Yeah, I knew of the series, but it wouldn't have been my guess of where the Noirs came from.

Congrats on being right at least. I just wish he had managed to integrate them into the series better than he did.

[choreprince]

Look at the end of the day he said himself that he changed up the the story in it's entirety in order to ship Erina and Soma and yet and the end he failed to actually do it. It just doesn't make sense and that's what's so frustrating about it. It like pawning all your shit to pay the rent and then blowing it all on whatever. Now all your shits in pawn you can't pay rent and you look like an idiot. Also as I've said before don't write characters that are impossible to work with in a way you desire. All that being said I didn't hate the ending like I said it just didn't make sense to set it up and not go through with it. It was a half baked ending and people are intitled to be upset about it. Also there is always the possibility that there could be more added to it.

[Sixth]

Originally Posted by Kanon

At least this interview made it clear the series didn't turn to shit because Tsukada was forced to rush it. He's just a plain bad writer.

Indeed. It is almost like he "took" the script from someone in the past and then the one who wrote the following script either dead or went missing, so Tsukuda has no one to rely on anymore, so he "had" to wrote the story on his own and turned out to be garbage.

[GendoAizenPig]

@Arabesque

I'm right there with you on buying the series. I own the blurays and that Erina figure on the throne. I'll be getting the last season when it's put to disc too. Even if it does cover the BLUE arc. Such is the way of the collector lol.

The point of view that he hasn't cared about logic/realism for a while is definitely a fair point. Looking at it that way, it's definitely reasonable to feel he should have just went for it at the end. Might as well be consistent in nonsensical writing.

It's crazy how badly the secondary cast got shafted. They were always the main draw for me personally, so it really took a toll on my enjoyment when they were pushed out. I definitely feel you on Megumi. I also thought she deserved better. I guess Tsukuda felt that little hotel mini arc was her moment. Just like implying Takumi was as good as Soma was his moment.

[NAJ P. Jackson]

Let this manga thread rest already you guys. There's really nothing more to discuss now that it's finally over. Shame how badly it ended really.

[Skyterror3381]

My reaction to the ending: nothing. I’m speechless. And not exactly in a good way.

At least we know they didn’t rush or tried to milk this. But such a shame... this was a great series up until azami’s arc - went downhill since then, for me. Not saying it’s azami’s fault, but it certainly started with him. I read this series for its cooking element. Yeah, I don’t mind some teen drama but not in large amount like latest arcs.

I also noticed hardly anyone tried to defend/white-knight this series anymore

I expect some tough questions from western reporters/interviewers in California’s conference, if it’s indeed happening. Maybe then, he’ll see what people really think of the series. I mean, what do they (author and his staff) think people’s opinion of the series is? Good? Excellent? From what I’ve read here and other sites - far from it. Yeah, can’t please everyone, but you can try to please the majority. At the moment, hardly anyone’s pleased.

Probably my last post about this series

[Olengie]

I would have preferred them to do an International School Arc where its revealed that Totsuki wasn't the only Culinary Academy in the world. Totsuki was just the best and the other schools wanted to challenge them. Asahi could've been from the American Academy or something.

Oh well. It's over.

[RDNexus]

If only the author had managed to come up with that idea... It seemed like a decent-to-good idea.

And yes, Tootsuki seeming to be the only academy of that kind in the whole world is farfetched enough.
The usual "Japan is the only place in the world with all the nice stuff"...

[bastek66]

Found this on /a/

Interview from the recent Fanbook:

1. "The relationship between Soma and Erina."

> Actually in the final epilogue of Le Dessert, Tsukuda wanted Soma and Erina to get married. However he couldn't fit it into the storyboard so in the end he's decided that it's still too early for them to take that stage.

2. In the anime "Macross", there's a character called Basara Nekki who only thought about Music and the people around him were crazy about his music. When Saeki told him, "Isn't that kind of feeling really good?" Tsukuda considered whether he should give that kind of ending to Soma.

> But he's well aware that after 315 chapters and three extra epilogues, if Soma x Erina's relationship never progressed the readers would get mad and saying something like "Geez, Soma doesn't have guts!" "Come on, just realize your feeling and do something about your love life!"

So Tsukuda did some romantic progress by making Soma realized his feeling and made an oath to Erina in his heart.

3. Hayama

> Hayama is the only character who got married. Soma and Erina's relationship (the context is that eventually they will end up marry each other only Tsukuda didn't want to explain how) and the future of their friends is up to our imagination.

> The fanbook showed that the characters who are confirmed having love interests are Soma, Erina, Shinomiya, Mizuhara, Hayama and Hinako. It never exactly stated who Hayama's wife is but based on Hayama gossip section in the fanbook it most likely to be Jun.

>5. Mizuhara also used to have a crush on Shinomiya in high school

6. Souma's Scar Flashback
> The nine pages in the fanbook is about the flashback of Soma's scar when he was still a little child and Erina showed up at the end in her limo.

> Erina passed the shopping district in her limo and suddenly feel a sinister aura coming from that place. She said to herself, "it feels like someone from here will piss me off a lot in the future"

7. Asahi
> Tsukuda received a lot of letters from the readers asking who Soma would end up with. So the author decided to add Asahi into the story to make Soma realize his feeling to Erina.

> The scene where the girls gathered together in Polar Star talking about Erina's ideal type is the editor's idea to make her awares of romance.

8. Soumegu and Ryoalice

> There's a reason why Tsukuda made a lot of duos and made them always stick together (he gave the example of Soma/Megumi and Ryo/Alice) in the series, it's because he needed a third party to illustrate the shokugeki. He never intended for them to become couples.

9. Souma Traveling
> Although Soma has reached his goal to surpass his father, he went abroad to further his study. To serve the one and only person he wanted to dedicate his food to, he set off to achieve those new incredible tastes and continue his travelling in the endless wilderness."