Manga are comics created in Japan by creators in the Japanese language, often regarded as the true vision of how the creator envisioned their story to play out. When a manga gets popular enough, it is often then turned into an anime for fans to consume. However, sometimes the anime adaptations tends to go their own direction and creates its own story separate from the manga itself. It’s one of the reason why fans tend to advocate for people to read the original source materials to see how the creator wanted you to see it. Despite knowing this, I still opted to stop reading manga for a number of reasons.
The first reason is quite simple, I enjoy the suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen next. When I used to read the Naruto manga religiously, I often found myself not wanting to watch the episodes, and when I did, it wasn’t as exciting for me as it should’ve been since I knew exactly what was going to happen next. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed watching Naruto, as it was amazing seeing what I’ve read to come to life. But somewhere along the way, the magic was gone.
Secondly, I found myself constantly nitpicking everything the anime did wrong. I wanted them to follow the source material exactly as I’ve read them in the manga. Any deviation from how it was portrayed infuriated me (for about a minute) and then I got over it.
It wasn’t until I started watching the Attack on Titan anime that I began to really enjoy watching an anime without reading the source material. Been constantly surprised while enjoying the amazing animation made me come to a decision to stop reading manga. Once I had completed the remaining manga that I had left to read, I just stopped. I even dropped My Hero Academia manga so I could watch it without spoilers (well once season 3 concludes that is). The only manga that I have yet to drop is Boruto.
Of course I know that manga has some advantages to them such as less to no censorship, beautiful artworks and accurate portrayals of the story. Without manga, there wouldn’t be any anime, but I’ve reached a point where I just care about the entertainment value of a anime. If the anime is entertaining and compelling enough, then I honestly don’t care how the manga has done it. I might change my mind in the future but that’s how I feel right now. I simply have no interest to pick up a manga anymore. Now this only applies to manga that have been confirmed to get an anime adaptation. I’ll still be reading manga like I do do comics, but only sparingly. You never know when the next big hit might show up.
Am I alone in this? Let me know how you feel about what I’ve written.
