Even if Hikaru’s behavior can be a little offputting, she has one thing the other girls lack: experience. Not only is she a popular mangaka, she knows how to advertise her stuff. It’s simple: the club should just post their work on social media. Rei even approves of this plan. Still, I’m a little surprised that the other girls never thought of doing this before. I mean, c’mon, it’s 2026. Even if they are out in the country, what teenage girl doesn’t post on Instagram or Twitter on a regular basis? Do these girls live under a rock or what? Still, they need a new idea for their social media-only manga. So out of the hundreds of ideas in Ai’s notebook, Kokoro hones in on the one about Ai’s cat. Well, it’s an easy win. The internet loves cats. No better way to get some cheap retweets and likes by drawing a few shorts about a cat or two. Eventually, the girls start combining ideas into one, and thus, a winged cat named Fuwa is born.
Like always, Ai creates the drafts, which Kokoro polishes to a sheen because she can actually draw. Ai really needs to start improving, though. She doesn’t have to reach Kokoro’s level, but maybe there are some classes she can take. I’m just sayin’, she already has her own independent manga separate from the rest of the club, right? And she couldn’t sell a single copy (except to her friends and Rei). That’s precisely why she needs to improve her art. This chicken scratch is kinda charming, but it’ll never reach a larger audience. Ai doesn’t need to completely sell out for views and engagement, but you have to consider your readers’ experience a little. After all, manga requires extreme visual clarity. I was just reading about how the average manga enthusiast can go through an entire magazine in like twenty minutes or so. We’re talking about a book with hundreds of pages. Apparently, the average manga reader takes only 3-point-something seconds to consume a page (for a source, check out Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics). That’s wild. But that also means you gotta convey your information succinctly and efficient. Even if it only takes the reader an extra second to understand what’s going on — that a flying cat just saved an old woman by headbutting a truck — those seconds all add up. You don’t want people to walk away from your work feeling like it was a slog to read through.
With each subsequent post, the girls get more and more likes and retweets. But this is how they get ya. It becomes a drug; you can’t help but try and get more validation from complete strangers on the internet. But then you plateau and start wondering why. You start chasing a goal rather than letting your readership develop organically. That can be problematic. Hikaru has to warn Ai not to lose sight of the human behind the manga, i.e., she needs to balance drawing for herself with drawing for her audience. Ai quickly remembers that her teacher always insisted on them doing this as a hobby and nothing more. After all, they’re just kids. There’s plenty of time to pursue manga seriously later once you’re done with school and everything. And even then, you gotta take a measured approach. You shouldn’t turn your hobby into your day job before you’ve found sustained success. You gotta make sure you keep a roof over your head and put food on the table. Also, you need to set a reasonable deadline, i.e. “If I can’t get X amount of success by Y date, then I need a plan to move forward.” Of course, that doesn’t mean you should drop your hobby completely. Don’t turn into Rei and look back on the experience with regrets.
As Ai deliberates over what to do, the club has stopped posting new comics completely. Rei is a little concerned, especially since she sees so much of herself in them (and specifically Ai). Welp, you know what that means: it’s flashback time. We get a scene where Rei’s editor actually thought her latest work was close to serialization. Immediately after this meeting, Rei was predictably over the moon. She was so close to success, she could taste it! But Hana’s approval doesn’t guarantee anything. After all, she wasn’t even a senior editor at the time. She couldn’t actually get the rest of the company to agree to serialize Rei’s work. Rei would need to compromise her vision even more. This is what it means to draw for yourself versus drawing for an audience. This is why she wanted to keep her students’ flame alive by insisting on this being just a hobby.
Hana finally proposed the obvious solution: Rei should try her luck elsewhere. Man, why did this take so long to happen? Instead of hammering her head against a brick wall over and over, Rei should’ve switched gears a long time ago. This is Japan, remember? New publications pop up all the time. Experimental ones, too. You could start up an anthology for a very narrow audience like… I dunno, isekai manga where the main characters are always reincarnated cats. I’m not saying that such a publication would’ve been successful, but again, this is Japan where people live and breathe manga. People get on the train and read manga on their commute to work. It’s a core part of their daily routine. As a result, companies were constantly experimenting with this stuff. So what if you don’t make it into a mainstream magazine like Shounen Jump (I’m only using this as an example, because Rei was actually targeting a seinen magazine)? Why not “settle” for a different, less popular anthology that publishes monthly rather than weekly? Up until now, it just felt like Rei kept letting Harvard reject her over and over without even looking at “lesser” schools.
I guess one of the few good things about social media is that amateurs and independent artists can still get their work out without jumping through all the corporate loops. I remember how Yasutaka Tsutsui (he wrote the Paprika novel which the beloved anime film was based on) ran into a few protesters for one of his stories. People didn’t like how he handled people with epilepsy. I’m not going to weigh in on whether or not the complaints were justified. That is neither here nor there. But what happened was that Tsutsui briefly staged his own counter-protest by swearing off print media. He would instead publish his stories online. I have no clue if this was available to Rei back when she was young and still had that burning passion — what she refers to as her magma — in her belly. But it probably would’ve helped her a ton if she could “self-publish” like her students. Oh yeah, Tsutsui went back to print media eventually, if you were curious.
In the end, Ai finds her balance, so her winged cat returns to its roots.
Stray thoughts & observations:
— I wasn’t really expecting a scene at the beach for a show like this. I also wasn’t really expecting Hikaru to show up in such a skimpy bathing suit. I mean, these are children. We don’t really need this, do we?
— Naturally, Rei also shares my annoyance, but she’s a little grumpier about it. Eh, I guess you could argue that frolicking in the sea might serve as yet another source of inspiration.
— The kooky and offbeat Hikaru has never had friends before? I’m shocked! All of a sudden, she tries to be affectionate with Sachi of all people. She’s just… weird. This also forces me to remember how Hikaru kissed Rei on their first encounter. The anime has never brought this incident up again. I guess the teach will forgive and forget, but if it wasn’t a big deal, why include the scene at all?
— Yes, yes, hammer internet safety into their minds. Back in my day, we gave ourselves cringey account names, because being embarrassing was better than leaking your private information. But everyone these days sticks their full ass names online! What? You thought my legal name was Sean? Hah. Well, it is a nickname…
— Rei is so silly in a sweet and cute kind of way. Her personal wins are anticipating her students’ needs and immediately walking in with a solution in hand. She’s basically hovering outside the classroom with a bulky, semi-heavy scanner in her hands, giggling to herself like a gremlin. Sadly, Rei’s moment of glory is dashed by the simple fact that smartphones can already do the same job.
— Sadly, their first comic gets no engagement whatsoever, but it’s also a brand new account without a single hashtag attached to it. I never use hashtags either. I’d probably get more referrals from Bluesky if I stopped being so stubborn, but meh… Luckily, Sachi has no shame.
— What a small world internet: their first response is from that tsundere girl Ai met at Comitia.
— Man, I’ve seen so many people suddenly decide to become full-time content creators or streamers. Then reality hits and they find themselves streaming to a single person at best. The top .01% makes it look easy, but it’s not. Just imagine trying to captivate a room of, say, 20 people. That sounds like such a paltry amount, right? But that’s only because you’re used to watching popular streamers with thousands upon thousands of viewers. So you need to give yourself some perspective. Could you, right now, go out in public and gather a group of 20 people and keep their attention? So why should it be any different online?
— For now, the girls are simply determined to keep drawing but also draw faster. That’s fine and all… I only hope they don’t end up neglecting other areas of their lives. But hey, that’s why we have Rei to keep them in line, right?
— Honestly, I used to let anyone comment on my posts. I figured more replies would be better. But you gotta gate-keep a little. If people wanna troll, they should have to put in the effort to create an account.
— Bro, with those demands, you might as well replace the whole damn manga.
