Kanojo no Idea · review
Spoiler warning
This review may discuss plot details.
They are only minor spoilers in this review. I found this to be an incredibly boring manga with many wild coincidences that fueled the plot and a confusing, passive protagonist. I do not recommend this. Art: Overall, the art was fine with decent portraits. However, backgrounds were sparse, character designs were at times too similar to each other, and more generally I would say the designs aren't particularly memorable. A minor gripe I have is the dearth of interesting outfits throughout the manga. Interesting fashion is one of my favorite things about quite a bit of yuri and shoujo ai, particularly when it's set in thecity or involves, say, a model or actor as this one does. I personally felt most of the outfits were generally uninteresting.
Story: The first half of the manga is so so slowly paced. It's wild. I'm all for a good slow burn, but the main reason this manga is not that is that the main love interests hardly interact with each other for the first half. Worse, even when they do, the attraction one of them has for the other is abstract and poorly articulated. I don't know, maybe it made more sense in Japanese, but it didn't make sense in the translation I was reading. I'm generally of the opinion that great romance involves characters who simply must pursue one another combined with them having obstacles which totally prevent them from doing so. This creates, you know, conflict! I neither understood why one of them was interested in the other (the protagonist at least kind of made sense. A little bit), nor did I understand why exactly they couldn't get together. Also, much of the angst that fueled the actor just didn't make sense. That is to say, her mom and dad were poorly written characters with poorly defined motives.
Chemistry: I usually don't write about this in reviews, but the chemistry between the two main characters was so lacking. I guess I just wanted to shout this out.
There's a lot of great yuri, shojo ai, and more generally sapphic romance out there. Even if you're scraping the bottom of the sapphic manga barrel like I am, I would not recommend this one.