It's been a long time I've read something that I feel quite strongly about. Usually if something is just plain bad I either don't read it or do it for humor value like New Prince of Tennis. Kaguya: Love is War is about Kaguya and Miyuki who are in love but don't want to confess it and come up completely retarded plans that they thought are pure genius to get the other to confess. Unlike most manga that involve actually retarded plans that claims to be genius, Kaguya is well aware that the majority of the cast are utterly moronic. There's no question that the humor part of Kaguya is top notch and it's a pure riot to see all the harebrained plans that the cast came up with, and it's got a good variety as sometimes these crazy plans even work in unexpected ways. However, somewhere around part 120 or something the story decides to actually go into the serious part. I know a lot of people find this to be touching or whatever. I normally don't mind it, but it's rather bland, and in the case of Kaguya, it's downright disgusting. This is because Kaguya is a person who is seriously messed up in the head. When her plot to get Miyuki is doomed to fail in the comedy section it's funny. It's not funny when her romantic overtures are actually successful. There is no reason why anybody should like her if it's not for her unimaginable wealth. She even says that herself. She is constantly jealous of her best (and for a long time, only) friend Chika and accuses her of being a slut whenever she is anywhere near Miyuki, even though her actions doesn't even touch manga standards for confusion of being flirty let alone any real standards. To top it off, literally every girl in the story that is actively in a relationship is at least ten times sluttier than Kaguya imagines Chika to be in her delusion.
I mean, I get that Kaguya is meant to be unrealistically innocent and jealous which is why she thinks anybody getting anywhere close to Miyuki is a shameless slut. It's not even the fact that the relationships get somewhat steamy (but still tame by manga standards). But the whole gag of the story starts out with the standard of a slut being Chika who literally has no interest in boys whatsoever, and it's disgusting that you have about 10 volumes of stuff with the gag being Kaguya in her delusion always believed Chika is a slut if she so much says hi to someone and then move on to a real relationship (a rather boring one, really) and now she expects to have a pure and innocent relationship with Miyuki.
In some sense this reminds me of Kare Kano, another shoujo I liked a lot early on and then it turned out Arima is actually insane and wanted nothing more than tie up his girlfriend and whip her or something along these lines even though the series start out as your typical shoujo innocent love, except in the case of Kaguya it's the girl that turns out to be the crazy one.
I notice there seems to be this school of thought in fiction of a character who is nasty to everyone but never actually means it and we're supposed to think that since that person meant no harm of course everyone forgives the said character. One particularly egregious example is when Kaguya accidentally broke her flip phone, losing all the pictures she has stored with no way of retrieving it. Her friends convinced her to get a smartphone and uploaded all the pictures of them together to cheer her up. She then proceeded to ignore all her friends (Miyuki, Miko, Chika, and Yu) just because she felt like it, figuring she can just lie about not seeing their message because she doesn't know that in a modern chat application it tells you when the recipient has read the message. Eventually she figured out that all her friends knew she was lying, so she made an even bigger lie to counter Miyuki's plan to make her confess (which is actually pretty good for once), and never bothered explaining what happened to the other 3. Now this was still in the gag phase of the manga so of course by the next chapter nobody remembers this, but you can't have this stuff and then make a pivot to realism. You'd likely have 3 less friends if you pulled that stunt in real life, since Kaguya is a very difficult person to get along with in the first place so it's not like her friends are likely to be forgiving about her lying.
I mean, I get that Kaguya is meant to be unrealistically innocent and jealous which is why she thinks anybody getting anywhere close to Miyuki is a shameless slut. It's not even the fact that the relationships get somewhat steamy (but still tame by manga standards). But the whole gag of the story starts out with the standard of a slut being Chika who literally has no interest in boys whatsoever, and it's disgusting that you have about 10 volumes of stuff with the gag being Kaguya in her delusion always believed Chika is a slut if she so much says hi to someone and then move on to a real relationship (a rather boring one, really) and now she expects to have a pure and innocent relationship with Miyuki.
In some sense this reminds me of Kare Kano, another shoujo I liked a lot early on and then it turned out Arima is actually insane and wanted nothing more than tie up his girlfriend and whip her or something along these lines even though the series start out as your typical shoujo innocent love, except in the case of Kaguya it's the girl that turns out to be the crazy one.
I notice there seems to be this school of thought in fiction of a character who is nasty to everyone but never actually means it and we're supposed to think that since that person meant no harm of course everyone forgives the said character. One particularly egregious example is when Kaguya accidentally broke her flip phone, losing all the pictures she has stored with no way of retrieving it. Her friends convinced her to get a smartphone and uploaded all the pictures of them together to cheer her up. She then proceeded to ignore all her friends (Miyuki, Miko, Chika, and Yu) just because she felt like it, figuring she can just lie about not seeing their message because she doesn't know that in a modern chat application it tells you when the recipient has read the message. Eventually she figured out that all her friends knew she was lying, so she made an even bigger lie to counter Miyuki's plan to make her confess (which is actually pretty good for once), and never bothered explaining what happened to the other 3. Now this was still in the gag phase of the manga so of course by the next chapter nobody remembers this, but you can't have this stuff and then make a pivot to realism. You'd likely have 3 less friends if you pulled that stunt in real life, since Kaguya is a very difficult person to get along with in the first place so it's not like her friends are likely to be forgiving about her lying.
