Preface:
Mangaka Taizan-5 debut in our beloved Weekly Shōnen Jump was received with high expectations. The young author began his career with ''A Story After Everything Went Well'', a one-shot published in 2020, and soon afterwards published two other good one-shots;''Hero Complex'' and ''Kiss Shitai Otoko''. But it was in 2021 that he achieved his first success, in his very first serialization, the excellent ''Takopii no Genzai''. His fantastic art style together with his engaging narrative ensured the young author's initial success, and his new publication in Japan's biggest comics magazine was a sure bet by Jump's editorial staff, who seemed to have found an outstanding talent, it was unlikely to turn out wrong. Unfortunately, that's what ended up happening. Due his incapacity in some aspects, in others because of external circumstances beyond his control. What went wrong with Taizan-san's new work, and why did it go wrong? Is Taizan-五 a deceptive fraud and its stories were never any good? Was Ichinose Family a horrible, shitty work that past the damn time to be canceled? Perhaps editorial and public pressure has hampered the progress which has been treated unfairly? I don't know, maybe we'll find out. And before you, the spoiled and immature reader who treats your favorite story as a personality trait feel offended, I'm going to give you a trigger warning:
I DON'T LIKE Ichinose-ke no Taizai.
I have several problems with its narrative and I intend to elaborate on them in the following paragraphs. So if you're someone who gets frustrated at discovering that other people don't share your tastes and can only absorb positive things in your life as a poor, helpless little baby, avoid reading what I have to say. Now, if you don't like Ichinose Family, here you'll find refuge, come with me on this fun and enjoyable adventure that is to be a hater.
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You see, my life is already a drama. It's extremely dramatic, I don't have any money, I don't have a car, no bitches, I haven't finished college yet, I'm not 1.90, I'm not famous and I was born Brazilian, it's not easy. I don't need more drama than necessary. Everyone loves a good dramatic and engaging story that you feel compelled to continue, chapter after chapter, and Ichinose's debut delivered just that, a promising world, art with personality and an interesting mystery to be solved. We see from the very first chapter that this close-knit family isn't all that close-knit, and that even before the accident and the loss of their collective memory, they already had a ton of problems and were far from being a happy family. And knowing Taizan-san's former work, it was nothing new to expect heavy themes and a family drama in the middle of this whole mess. And that's fine, despite the drama of my life, I still have more room to appreciate the drama of other lives, I love stories with heavy drama, everyone does. Now, there's a limit to everything, just as my personal drama is supported by my routine, I couldn't bear to see my problems tripled and repeated, again and again, without interruption. What I don't want for my life I don't want for my stories, and it's a narrative waste to destroy an entire dramatic construction by delivering one problem after another, without pause, and with more and more layers of problems interspersed.
I UNDERSTOOD, I must be sad Ichinose-ke no Taizai!!! I'm supposed to cry at this point, I'm supposed to be shocked, YES, SHIT, I didn't expect a story that delivers a different Plot Twist in EVERY chapter and escalates the protagonist's problems non-stop, to deliver another Plot Twist and another problem in the next chapter, you've really got me with my pants down this time. The biggest crime that an unpredictable story can commit is to become predictable, to naturalize the unexpected in such a way that everything becomes absurdly obvious. You know that nothing matters because every discovery is going to be emptied soon after by a different problem, you don't have time to breathe and internalize the problems that the story solves, because as soon as it's over you're faced with a new problem, even worse, more abrupt and even more confusing, and that's not the problem in itself, the problem is knowing that this new problem, which was the amplification of the past problem, will become outdated in 7 days with the release of a new chapter, which will make the urgency of this new situation pointless, because now I have another concern in front of me, which will also soon lose its validity, in another 7 days.
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We understand Ichinose's first major problem, the destruction of all immersion and empathy for the characters through overdrama, which stupidly naturalizes problems in such an idiotic way that any conflict delivered becomes extremely predictable and with no impact. Now let's discuss an aggravating factor, the overplot-twist. As if it wasn't enough to annoy me by pushing dramas with no weight on a weekly basis, Ichinose likes to spice things up with another annoyance, his twists.
Okay, now I don't have my memory, okay my brother is behind all this, no no, it's actually my grandmother, no, she's doing it only for my grandfather, it's my mother who's behind it, no no, it's actually none of those, it's someone else, okay now I'm actually dreaming and I'm in a coma, ok now I'm out of the coma but actually my coma was shared with the dreams of my life and everything was real, ok now I know that someone is manipulating my coma and my family's memories, ok my brother actually has another family, oops, this family is fake and they split up, let's go back to our real Souta family. STOP, LET ME BREATHE. My man writes as if his life were on the line, racing against time, afraid of being axed, and that fear will catch up to him. I can't keep up with you Ichinose (the story and the character), my CPU can't process information at this speed, it's old, I no longer know what to be surprised by because there are too many surprises, my birthday has passed and I keep getting presents nonstop, it used to be fun to be surprised, but it's become inconvenient, I don't want to anymore. What I DO know is what NOT to be surprised by, and that's this story. Once the whole mystery thing is trivialized, once the unexpected becomes routine, why in the hell should I care? It doesn't matter anymore.
The Final Sin - Taizan Himself
The same man who produced Takopi's Original Sin produced Ichinose-kun. Everything he managed to do well and with quality in his previous story, which, by the way, was published in Jump+, was only possible because of the more flexible structure in terms of publication and pages that the author was given, a much healthier format for both authors and readers. There's no doubt that countless successes have been produced in the weekly format, the examples are endless, you can't just blame the format or the magazine (Shonen Jump), but this clearly wasn't the case for Taizan, he didn't make it work in the new conditions presented to him, so maybe he should rethink what worked and what didn't in his career. It's less about the format and more about his inability in the new environment.
This review has been written taking into account the first 40 chapters and ending with those 40 chapters, the show is still at enormous risk of being canceled and has a good chance of ending before it even reaches the one-year mark. If that doesn't turn out to be the case and the story improves from here on it, I don't care, im not reading and i doubt it. A team that loses the first 30 games of the season only to win the last 8 games continues to be relegated.
^^ * this part was written months ago, with the story still in publication, 40th cap. I'm reuploading it now, without editing anything, to show my incredible analytical superiority. I already knew the obvious a long time ago, not that hard. *
Taizan-五 has already demonstrated his competence, he has a fantastic artistic style capable of carrying a story on its own, but it's a pity that this time it wasn't enough. May the author return soon enough with a new story, but this time, please, try to treat me less like a complacent, ultra-empathetic idiot.
