Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches

For the first 100-ish chapters, Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches is consistently amazing. The core cast is entertaining, interesting, and avoids being artificially pinned into roles over being who they are. The plot moves at a brisk pace with consistent forward progress while nonetheless avoiding being predictable. The powers are varied, interesting, well-thought-out, and used for more than just the obvious. They're also integral to events without dominating the story. I can whole-heartedly recommend to anyone at least reading what I consider the first 'arc', ending with the first Witch Ceremony being completed.

Past that, the story is a bit more troubled. It's never bad, exactly, but it's not nearly as good as what came before. Powers are less integrated with the plot, and are used in less interesting of ways, pushing the story into being more a slice-of-life high school story than anything else. The core relationships largely stop moving, though this is made up in part by pushing the attention onto the development of relationships with new characters. The new core plot takes a while to clearly come into being (There's a good 20+ chapters where I'm convinced the author was stalling while trying to come up with the next overall arc), and even once it arrives it tends to alternate between moving a bit too fast and being left to go stale, forgotten in a corner. The funniest, most entertaining character interactions remain great when they get a chance to be in the limelight, but this is much less frequent, and the newer characters are mostly less entertaining. (Though 'that was all calculated?!' is one of the best moments of the entire series and occurs in this part)

Character behavior is also fuzzier. There are several characters where even with the benefit of hindsight I don't really understand what was supposed to have lead them to make the decisions they made in this part of the story. One of them is particularly memorable since explaining what's really going on with them is a pretty good chunk of the end of the story, and yet I still don't actually get them!

There's also this weird layered mystery thing whose sheer absurdness gets in the way of taking the story seriously. It involves memory wipes, but it still ends up just... being weird all-around, and I particularly dislike how it undermines the initial, great portion of the story.

Though the clearest mistake in the latter part is that an explicit plotpoint that gets played up as a question to be answered, one that Yamada is actively trying to find the answer to, is 'why does Yamada have his power? What motivated that?'

It's a mistake because it never does get answered after all that buildup. The pursuit of the answer just gets dropped without commentary when the story is nearly done, instead rushing off to a kinda pointless and uninteresting flash-forward to showing the characters in their adult lives. I was expecting to see, like, the next generation of Witches start up, with the adult lives of the characters touched on through the lens of their children, or something like that. I don't really get what the ending is supposed to be about, given the general positive vibe of it is already implied by the leadup, and the details are largely uninteresting/unsurprising.

Still, while the last 150~ chapters are overall downhill from the first 100~, that first 100~ is legit amazing.

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