Are you familiar with Angel Densetsu? How about Komi-san wa Komyushou Desu? Alright, you're familiar with the plot of Waratte! Sotomura-san! Sotomura is a gentle school-girl, but she is somewhat gruff and impersonal. Owing to trivial circumstances, others' preconceptions of her color their perceptions of Sotomura's actions and overall behavior. Irony is loaded onto the narrative, and comedy is delivered straight to your door.
This light 4-koma does work. For a while. However around the 4th volume or so it starts to become increasingly clear that there are no further ideas to be explored here. The same fundamental misunderstanding happens over and over again. Angel Densetsu actually contains a plot where the protagonist's circumstances and other characters' perceptions of the protagonist and situation change at a continued pace. Komi-san is a rom-com and can lay some narrative tension there, but otherwise continuously expands its world to explore new comedic situations.
Sotomura feels like those series on training wheels which never get removed. There are multiple opportunities for it to grow as well. New characters flow in, they get some new insights on Sotomura, but things always must return to the same state. Relationships are not developed into more nuanced, informed ones, and because of that the comedic set pieces can never mature into more robust, interesting ones. Reading any random sample of pages from Sotomura is just as rewarding as any other. The only really enjoyable expansion of the series is learning that Sotomura's mother was a delinquent and her retained attitudes have inadvertently affected her daughter. What a rich vein to mine if it really wanted to.
Maybe this static narrative is completely intentional and criticizing it for it is a touch misguided. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to put it along side something like Garfield where you are supposed to read one strip a day and think, 'ho-ho-ho, oh that Sotomura.' Perhaps. But even then, every Garfield strip isn't Garfield eating Jon's lasagna.
(-29)
