Oshi no Ko

1/5 on this site. 4.4/10 in general. Anime is hard carried by music, op, voice acting, and art. Had this been released as a novel everyone would understand why it is awful. It’s the most overrated manga ever written. Literal incest, grooming, and false advertising.

How the hell is this mystery or psychological?? I’d rather read boys abyss than this trash. Actually… probably not. Boys abyss is a different breed of garbage. I wanted to get into it but found myself physically incapable, I hate how I’ve been too picky my anime and manga lately and I’ve been trying to change that. But this, is too far.

Aside from the incest and my other various nitpicks, u/Htdt2 summarizes my complaints on the series much more timely than me.

Godly yap incoming:

Oshi no Ko is one of the most pretentious manga I’ve ever read

I know I will get downvoted, but I have to put this here. Spoilers for the manga –

So, a few years ago I started reading Oshi no Ko. The premise was weird, but Ai’s death was a great cliffchanger so I thought this manga could achieve at least one of two things – 1)depicting the dark side of the entertainment industry, or 2)be a good revenge story. As of now, it hasn’t achieved any of these, and unfortunely I’m starting to lose the respect I’ve ever had for the series. Why, you might ask?

Let’s start with my first problem in the manga, and it’s Ai’s character, specifically the way it’s been handled. Ai was a kid with unfortunate circumstances. One day, she gets scouted by an agency and she wants to turn the offer down. Ichigo, head of the company, emotionally manipulates her into thinking that by pretending to love her fans, she will learn how to feel the emotion. There’s zero commentary on how these kids are exploited by agencies and how it’s disgusting that grown up adults sexualize them, better yet, we get a scene where Goro, a man in his 30s crushes on said teenager. Ai gets pregnant at a young age, then the doctor who wouldn’t have minded dating her gets to be her specialist. Again, nothing wrong according to the narrative. Ai gives birth to stillborns, but the gods are all so kind that they give new souls to the babies, namely two idol fanatics who were obsessed with Ai, and they continue their creepy behaviour in their next lives as well. This is the point where the series could have gone the NG Life route – have the characters retain their memories, but realizing how their feelings in their past lives changed with who they became in this lifetime. But later about this issue.

Ai works hard to make the children happy, until she’s eventually killed by her stalker. Worst of all, her final moments are about her apoligizing to the stalker for not being able to love him. It’s honestly upsetting how Ai tries ti explain herself to a deranged person here who kills her in front of her children, and how the mangaka makes this scene about the killer and his feelings. Ai owed nothing to this person and didn’t fuel his delusions. After this, we get to know little things about her from the people who worked together with her. Keep in mind, there are zero people who knew her closely, except the father of the twins who is the supposed antagonist. Yet, Aqua decides to take revenge by making a movie about Ai’s life. But here’s the problem – nobody knows almost anything about her real life. There’s a reason why a lot of celebreties refuse to be featured in biopics after they pass away – they do not want their lives to be sensationalized. Aqua’s revenge exploits Ai’s life, based on no factual information because there’s no one who could provide it, made-up scenarios which are downright insulting, like how the twins play the love interests, or how rookie actors get in the main cast. At the end of the day, Oshi no Ko preaches about how celebreties are exploited by the industry, while the revenge story does just the same with Ai’s character.

There are also no repercussions to conflicts. Akane’s suicide attempt gets brushed aside in favour of her superhuman detective abilities. Kana almost gets assaulted, yet she wants to work with the same director. And the list could go on.

But the one thing I absolutely cannot forgive is how a child’s feelings towards the only adult who cared about her were romanticized. It’s disgusting, even if you ignore the incest part, and should have never been added as a plot point. Ruby was a kid and she was emotionally dependent on her doctor, a man in his 30s. Maybe the problem is with me, but I simply cannot understand why this needed to be a romantic connection, coupled with the incest plotline, and how these two still grew up together as siblings in the current timeline.

Oshi no Ko is a shallow work that depicts almost nothing realistic about the dark side of the industry and relies too much on cheap shock value.

Edit:: So I made this post here in hopes of a civil discussion, I don’t know why some people questioned my reading comprehension skills as a result lol The thing is, this is my subjective opinion, and I can understand some people like how the story is unfolding, I’m just not one of them I guess. And for the record, to those who said I cannot keep up with weekly releases, I’m a long-time manga reader and I grew up reading series like One Piece, Naruto and Detective Conan. Heck, I’m a big Magic Kaito fan and there have been only 30something chapters since 1987 so my problem is not the waiting time between new chapters or forgetting old ones lmfao. I can keep reading something if I feel like it deserves my engagement and time, so anybody can call my opinion biased or say that I have no reading comprehension, but I wish we could have a more civil discussion here without insulting each other. Also, my problem is not that I need every issue spelled out for me, but every single thing related to the industry is literally described to us through the characters, even when the two mangakas try to justify to Aqua why the movie needs a kissing scene (why, I still wonder though??), yet a lot of things which are problematic are brushed aside or dealth with in a superficial way. Surprisingly, Kamiki’s story is not like this, but it’s not him who actually narrates the events which could actually make it more impactful.