Kaguya Wants to Write a Blog Post

Have you heard of a manga title called Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen? Perhaps the more popular English title of Kaguya Wants to be Confessed To: The Geniuses' War of Love and Brains? It's a lovely manga about two geniuses liking each other but not wanting to confess to each other because of pride. The set-up is pretty straight forward but the execution is excellent.

I could assume that two geniuses pitted against each other with the intent of getting the other to confess would be fun. I mean, the art of either achieving victory through sheer brilliancy or sabotaging the opponent has been around for a long time. This wouldn't even be the first artistic work to feature that in a comedic/romantic setting.

Kaguya Wants to be Confessed To goes the extra mile by mixing it all up with great pacing, writing and design. Initially, I didn't quite get into the art style coupled with the contents. But the development curve for the characters (Kaguya in particular) is so smooth that you'd be riding the roller coaster before you even knew you got on.

The manga does poke a lot at the Shoujo genre but it isn't a parody manga unlike KonoSuba or Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun. It just loves to rebound off the fact that people see it as a Shoujo manga. Yes, there are romance elements and romance-specific chapters too but it's most certainly a comedy manga. The comedy doesn't hit all the time but 99% of the time, it does it very well. You'd even expect the hooks and punchlines but the execution, as I said, is on point so much so that you can't help but give in. At this point, the art style even backs it up so damn well! Going up right behind Grand Blue, this is the 4th series that's hitting the God-tier level of comedy for me.

The characters are very well written and understood. Fujiwara is a great example for this because while she's a pampered, protected daughter of a very powerful and rich man, she's also a kind person. The key point here that I'm trying to make is that she's not a mean girl. So, that aside, everything else works exactly as it should given that background. 

She's a ditzy girl who loves romance, gossip, travelling and playing around. She's quirky, occasionally whiny and completely unpredictable. She's not kept out of the loop because of an overabundance in wealth but she's not particularly studious because of the exact same reason. She can't read the mood and invades privacy often due to her social status upbringing but she's also curious and observant (that word may be a stretch) of others because of the exact same reason. She complains about her friends taking a trip without her but she readily hops the world with her family without a second word.

I can go on and on but Fujiwara is just one example. It's the same with other characters like Ishigami too. This type of character writing is usually akin to long-running mangas like shonen mangas simply due to a wealth of build up and character development that can paint them that way. You shouldn't normally write a character that goes from 0-100 in a single chapter simply due to a lack of background information that we can wrap them in. But I got all this from just a few chapters from the manga. I'm inclined to believe that the author had these characters in his/her head for quite a while before he/she decided to start writing because I know of a lot of stories that don't quite sell the characters as fast as this one.

BEST GIRL

Just go and read it!