Kanojo ni Naru Hi Another
Finished this one off, and... well, I liked it better than the non-Another series as I really liked the core cast and felt like it had some really strong moments... but I also feel like it had the bigger issues too. But it kind of comes down to the same thing: feels like it was too compressed down and just plain didn't have enough time.
Like, the biggest issue for me is that Kurokawa's story is just kind of left hanging. It seems to me like once things got rolling towards the finale, there just plain wasn't a great place or the time to squeeze it in, but... I mean, the idea of a character essentially being treated full up as though she was her dead sister after her gender flips, and then her trying her best to BE that dead sister as well, essentially... is just a real messed up place to leave a character. Also disappointed at the light nudge towards glasses guy shipping at the end negating her lesbianism to some degree. Like, it was at least light enough that I felt okay reading it as "Well, she resigned herself to following the demands of society rather than her true feelings" instead of full on gay-negation bs, but... still not great.
And then there's the big story beat with Sagara's mother. And like... the pieces are there enough, I suppose, but that really needed some more pages to drive it in more naturally and make you really feel it, as it landed pretty weak for something like that. Oh, and... the "I guess I was denying my feminine side because I didn't want my mother to be jealous of people admiring me as beautiful and girly" is just plain weak and a bad fit for what we'd seen of the character up till then. Which also leads to the Sagara flipping to girly mode waaaaaaaaay too abruptly, which is also a shame (and likely, again, comes down to the compressed nature of things).
Still, I did like it a lot, warts and all. Plus it was pretty fun the way it just kind of casually worked in Nao and Miki from the other series, which isn't the kind of thing I'm used to seeing a lot of in manga.
