Forum - View topicREVIEW: orange: The Complete Collection 2 GN 2
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Started reading this today. Don't really consider reading this to have spoiled anything since, lets face it, it's shoujo & it was always going to have the "happy" ending, even with all the complications that come from that realisation. Must admit from the moment the future selves of the characters showed up, I wished they hadn't. A story where the characters/audience come to terms with the sad but unavoidable reality that you can't change the past (perhaps by having the story told from the perspective of Naho having found her high school diary & reminiscing with no direct mention of Kakeru's fate, her future with Suwa etc until it happens) would have had much more emotional weight than one where a letter in time saves nine. I don't think Norwegian Wood would have had the impact it did if began with Toru hearing the song & then writing a magic letter to his past self with the message spoiler["DONT LET NAOKO DIE!".]
It also, in a weird, tropy way, feels like a rather extreme example one of the most overused romance tropes, that protagonist girl/guy is supposed to fall in love & walk off into the sunset with obvious best girl/guy character even if it means she has to change the future where she had a relationship with a support character along the way. Weirded me out when the first page of volume 2 had an image of adult Naho & baby with Kakeru in Suwa's place. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself (only at volume two, after all), but this review leads me to suspect I'm not entirely off the mark. Also, a minor thing I guess, but so far I've found that quite a few panels have rather a lot of speech bubbles/text in them, which can leave the page looking rather cramped. Not the biggest manga reader by any stretch, but this one doesn't, for lack of a better word, flow as smoothly as some I've read. |
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Merida
 Posts: 1946 |
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I discovered this series on CR by accident and reading it was a very emotional experience for me for various reasons and sometimes really hard to bear, but overall the "bittersweet" ending was pretty fitting...i also would disagree about the portrayal of depression and suicide not being very realistic, from my experience Kakeru's behaviour was pretty realistic for someone suffering from depression.
The pseudo-love triangle wasn''t exactly my favourite part of the manga (though the parallel world setting sure gave us a refreshing take on resolving it...) because essentially it's a story about the power of friendship, but it's shoujo so i guess it couldn't be helped. I'm really looking forward to the anime and with that i mean, i'm expecting it to crush my soul into a thousand tiny pieces again (and hopefully stay as true as possible to the manga). |
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lys
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 1018 Location: mitten-state |
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This is the two-pg spread at the beginning of Letter 5, yes? The left image is present Naho and Kakeru, but the right is future Naho and Suwa and baby. (sorry if I'm misunderstanding what you were commenting on.) I hope you'll read the whole series! I do think it deals with regret and facing the inevitable reality in various good ways, so hopefully you won't be disappointed. As for the crowded panels with lots of bubbling... part of that is just her art style, with heavy use of flat screentone patterns and multiple fonts and hearts and stars and sparkles :) I like it, personally, but I get that it's not everyone's thing. I think in later volumes it gets toned down some (she switched publishers between v2-3 and was no longer writing the series for a mainstream shoujo magazine but one with a wider/more general audience). edit: one more clarification for the review (not that it matters really). Haruiro Astronaut had a chapter at the end of each Orange volume (I think just the Futabasha editions, not the original incomplete run from Shueisha?), but SS collected them all together for this edition, probably to make the two books more equal in length without having to split any volumes in half (and because it makes more sense than interrupting the main story multiple times in each omnibus volume). I think the last three chapters of Haruiro Astronaut were also written after the publisher switch, which I found interesting because the story seemed to switch directions a bit mid-way and I wondered how much that had to do with editorial oversight (or freedom, or just artistic growth). I loved the ending of that story, so whatever it was, I'm happy :) |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
 Posts: 2664 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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Sorry, I didn't mean Kakeru himself - that is pretty spot on - I meant the spoiler[idea that you can "save" someone just by loving them, basically the other characters' and the plot's reaction] to depression. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Nope, you're right & I have in fact misinterpreted. I was thrown off by the fact that Naho & Suwa's hair is never shaded in the regular panels, so seeing them all with dark hair next to the picture of teenage Naho & Kakeru made me connect the two. |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2273 |
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I had a very different takeaway; that Kakeru's friends finally realized the importance of a support system, and that Kakeru himself realized he needed help. I never really got the impression that the cast was riding off into the sunset, so to speak, but rather that they'd all found themselves at the very start of a long, bumpy road towards healing. Which is still kind of riding that "savior" fantasy, I guess, it just didn't feel quite as definitive to me. Though granted, I have very little knowledge of how mental illnesses are handled in Japan, and whether therapy and medication are seen as common and viable responses rather than just trying to tough it out. |
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killjoy_the
 Posts: 2496 |
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I think that if the author didn't actually try explaining how the letters came to be and just left it entirely open the whole thing would've been better off. I really didn't need all that pseudo-science getting in the way.
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Merida
Posts: 1946 |
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That was my interpretation as well. But i also agree about the manga being a bit of a "saviour fantasy", i just don't see that as negative. It's primarily a story about a group of friends and the power of friendship, there may be more realistic ways to deal with the topic of depression and suicide, but the story still worked for me on an emotional level. |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2273 |
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Yeah, it dawned on me rather belatedly that I'm speaking as someone who hasn't come into close contact with suicide myself, so my position might be a little privileged (or maybe just naive) in how I was able to connect with this emotionally. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
Posts: 2664 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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^I think this is what makes the story so difficult for me. Savior fantasies are wonderful in a way, but they can also be dangerous - speaking from my own experience (which is not strictly analogous to the plot), you can drown yourself in "if only"s: "If only I had been there more," "If only I had done this differently," "If only I had made them listen." It's a terrible cycle to get trapped in. That's why I have such conflicting feelings about orange as a savior fantasy - it's a beautiful fantasy, but a painful one.
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Merida
Posts: 1946 |
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I can see where you're coming from and i agree that these fantasies can be dangerous in real life, in fact the manga even acknowledges this because those "what ifs" play a large part in what drives Kakeru (deeper) into depression. But for me the saviour fantasy still works because in the end the "what ifs" don't make people feel powerless but rather the opposite because there really is something they can do. To me that was painful but also rather comforting, but my personal experiences with the topic happened quite a couple of years ago, so the wounds aren't that fresh anymore... |
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garlogan78
Posts: 171 |
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I haven't read this but plan to watch the anime, but isn't it a big spoiler to say suicide warning in the review tag? I get that it is a trigger warning or whatever, but like...if that is something important to the conclusion of the series I am upset it was posted as the main blurb.
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TooLazyToComeUpWithaName
 Posts: 55 |
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It's not a spoiler. I can't really say much without spoiling it, but just know that you haven't been spoiled by the article's blurb |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
Posts: 2664 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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I like your interpretation better than my own.  My personal experience was much more recent, and I think that definitely colored my reading of the manga. If I can bear it, I may try to re-read this in a few years and see how it strikes me then - I suspect I might like it better rather than simply appreciating how well it was put together.
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2321 Location: Online Terminal |
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I just watched the live-action movie adaptation. It felt a little long but not unnecessarily so. It's the only adaptation I've seen but based on this review, I feel like it plays it similarly enough. What I got from the film was that Kakeru probably had a genetic history of depression and that the events of orange didn't necessarily cure him, but rather controlled it enough to change the story. In fact I was under the impression up until that fateful event that spoiler[Kakeru was still going to die, but it would've clearly been an accident.]
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