Rottcodd

Hmm... I might have to give this a shot.

I generally don't watch manga adaptations, since I'm almost always disappointed by them. But I've tried to read this manga a few times, and I keep bouncing off of it. I just find the enormous contrast between the public and private versions of the sisters to be too extreme and jarring to be believable, or even reasonable. It's almost as if there are six different girls, or as if the scenes with the sisters in their public personas are fantasy sequences.

Maybe if I just let it wash over me as an anime, it'll work.

Yep - forced confession part 1.

I guess it'll be okay all in all - I mean, they're going to end up together, and that's the important part.

I just wish it could've kept moving at its own pace and reached this point naturally.

If you hadn't posted that picture, I would've.

That was quite possibly the best moment in the entire manga.

More heartfelt emotion and absolutely stunning art from Hiro.

And a bombshell with the very last word of the chapter.

Yeah - that was a hilarious reaction.

The mangaka is really doing a great job of capturing that age, when you're very interested, but you don't really have anything more than a vague notion of what it is you're interested in.

I did not see that coming.

This is actually one of the best use cases of LLM.

No, it's quite simply not. At all.

LLM is an entirely statistical model. To the degree that it strings words together in an order that makes some sort of sense, it's ONLY because those words are statistically likely to be strung together in that order.

Japanese is an extremely imprecise and contextual language, particularly in its written form. Most kanji have multiple meanings, and often even a notably wide range of meanings, so a purely statistical model is already handicapped in any attempt to translate the intended meaning to another language. And Japanese creative writing, and manga especially, depends heavily on deliberately unusual uses of specific kanji to convey subtle bits of background information, moods, attitudes, hidden meanings or the like, or just as wordplay - puns, alliteration and the like.

And LLMs have no way to recognize any of that nuance. All they can do is regurgitate the most statistically likely string of words.

That will likely provide tolerable results with something that's written simply and straightforwardly, but as soon as it gets to any of the countless manga that rely on unusual kanji readings and wordplay to convey nuance, it's going to utterly and completely fail, since it has and can have no actual understanding of the author's intent, so no basis on which to choose the correct reading of the kanji. All it can do is regurgitate the most statistically likely one, which in those sorts of cases is the one that's absolutely guaranteed to be wrong.

I guess probably Kaiba (and it's also one of my all-time favorites).

It's odd though, because the settings and art design and such are very, very weird, but the storylines themselves - both the individual episodes and overarching plot - are actually fairly straightforward. It deals with some fairly serious themes - love, loss, loyalty, hope, betrayal, redemption and so on - and it does it very well really. It just also does it in very weird settings with very weird characters.

For that matter, FLCL qualifies in the same way. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it right off - I guess I stopped noticing how weird it is somewhere along the way, because it's just... FLCL. It is what it is. But it is very weird. In the same way as Kaiba though, behind the very weird details is a fairly straightforward story. And in a way, it's even simpler - where Kaiba deals with some relatively broad and complex societal issues, FLCL really just deals with a boy coming to terms with growing up in a bleak nowhere town, and starting to sort out how to deal with the opposite sex.

And as long as I'm here, I want to mention Ergo Proxy, which is exactly the opposite type of weird. Aside from a highly stylized science fiction setting, it's really pretty straightforward from moment to moment. It's odd, but no more odd than should be expected from the setting. But all the while, behind the current things going on, there's this background story that's bizarre to the point of near-incomprehensibility.