not one chapter goes by without plot armour.

I admit. I totally underestimated this series. After watching 4 episodes of the anime, I was surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. I had expected it to be your average series that relied on that twist at the end of episode/chapter 1 and then went downhill after that without the element of surprise. I'd even admit I had thought the author was for sure riding on MHA's popularity by introducing a setting that's so similar to MHA and a "main male lead" who's basically Izuku born with a quirk. So when I decided to check out the manga, I was ready to just skim through and drop it after having seen what it has to offer. To my surprise, it has everything it needs to make me enjoy it. The best way to summarize it is Death Note meets My Hero Academia meets Among Us: The Animation.

Story: 8/10
It relies on a simple concept: a talentless protagonist is sent undercover to a school full of talented kids to slaughter them from the inside. For the first few chapters, I thought it was going to be a monster (murder) of the day type of story. Nana finds a new target, gets close to them, finds out their talent, kills them, Kyoya suspects her but can’t find any evidence to support his claim. But then I was proven wrong when these first few murders actually have foreshadowings for later twists that I never saw coming (and they totally make sense when you think about them), and the causation of the events are all connected and make sense. Nothing just happens for no reasons. The methods used to kill the characters aren’t asspulls and can be logically foreseen with all the pieces presented to us. It’s like a mystery game of solving the murder except we’re the killer and we’re trying to use the information available to us to kill these OP characters.

The author isn’t afraid to push Nana into a corner that seems like there’s no way out, and then come up with a brilliant way to get her out of it. It’s like Death Note where Light and L’s cat and mouse games often ended up with Light in a pinch and it seemed like it’s game over, only for him to come up with a way out that’s so simple and effective yet we didn’t foresee that. I also like how the author isn’t afraid to change settings to further the worldbuilding and raise the stakes. There are still many things that haven’t been explained yet about this world and how it works, which is why I merely gave the story an 8/10.

Art: 8/10
It’s a simple art style that fits the type of story it’s telling. It can be cutesy and bubbly when Nana is blending in, and can also be horrifying and chilling when Nana’s being murderous and savage. It reminds me a lot of Kaguya-sama: Love is War, where the art is good and cute most of the time, but can also make the manga seem like a horror manga whenever Kaguya’s been all yandere-like.

Character: 8/10
The characters started out as your usual tropey characters. We have the cute pink-haired girl who’s secretly a psycho, a kind, naive girl who always puts others before herself no matter how much they bullied her, we have a playboy with long hair, a violent guy with a fire power, a boy with ‘no power’ who’s bullied by others… (now how many times have we seen these before?) I expected these characters to be like MHA’s Class-1A where they all have one or two personality traits unique to them and get no development afterwards (except a few key characters). This is not the case with Talentless Nana. Characters are affected by their situations, and their goals, motivations, and personalities also change accordingly.

Nana, surprisingly, got the most character development. What I thought was plot holes (how many of the estimated kill counts don’t make sense, yet Nana believed them) were brought up later on. She went from your typical pink-haired psycho killer to a girl who gradually began to suspect her orders and superiors after being touched by the kindness of others and drowned in guilt after seeing the sacrifices others are willing to make for her. The changes weren’t instant. Nana went through denial, hesitation, acceptance, and finally rebellion. Her development made her more realistic, and also more likeable. I found myself rooting for her more later on than I had in the beginning. She’s not just a mindless puppet. She’s her own person and has her own view of the world. And even if it contradicts what she was told, she was willing to put her bet on her own judgement and take control of her own life.

Aside from our protagonist, some of the side characters also received developments of their own. I can’t explain in detail without spoiling, but just know that a certain character actually defied their cliche personality traits after being affected by certain events (people change, what a surprise) which led to them taking a darker route and playing a completely different role than I had expected from them.

Also, there are nearly no fanservice so that’s a plus. And the tiiiiny bits of fanservice (literally just Nana and Kyoya taking off their shirt, and a few others) all make sense. They’re not your typical “ahh i tripped and face-planted in your boobs”. They all happen for a reason and are integral to the plot.

Enjoyment: 10/10
Let’s just say… I expected nothing and got everything.

Overall: 8.5/10
This story has MHA’s setting and characters but with actual development, Death Note’s cat and mouse game between characters who are more relatable than the #1 detective in the world and a sociopathic straight-A student with a God complex, and Among Us’s “there’s an imposter among us!” concept. I caught up with it in a day after watching episode 4 of the anime. The last time I was this into a manga was when I read “My Home Hero”, which is honestly a masterpiece imo.

Don’t judge this manga by just the first few chapters, or by the cover and synopsis alone. You will find yourself enjoying more than you expected, and you will also grow to love the characters (Nana especially). The twists are unexpected but if you piece together what’s been shown to you, you can foresee the twists 90% of the time. They’re not asspulls, or too difficult to understand. They’re the perfect amount of difficulty for the readers. You’re not going to see intricate plans like most of Yagami Light’s plans, but that doesn’t make Nana’s plans here any less entertaining to watch. They’re more...suited for average people like you and me who don’t have an IQ of 150+.

Nana also isn’t a sociopath like Light. She’s just a normal girl brainwashed into seeing the talented kids as the enemy. Deep down, she still cares and can sympathize with others, though she would even fool herself into believing she doesn’t.

And lastly, I ship Kyoya x Nana to hell and back! Though there hasn’t been any romantic developments between them, you can’t stop me from liking their rivalry. So if nothing else, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ shippers should check out this manga so you have one more ship to ship.

PS: those of you who contributed to this manga getting such a low score needs to reevaluate your decision because this manga deserves at the very least a 7/10.

... Last updated on October 28th, 2020, 12:36am

I can accept a few breaks in storytelling to allow the protagonist to do the things he/she has to do to succeed but this is seriously pushing it. There are so many plot holes, contrivances and idiocy abound per chapter that you can't help but wonder whether the author is making fun of the reader. This is a manga where you have to shut down your brain and not think about it because the moment you do, everything falls apart.

... Last updated on July 30th, 2020, 4:56am

At first, the manga seems to be just about a serial killer manipulating her victims and trying (and succeeding) to cover up her crimes, but if you're familiar with Loose Boy's earlier stuff (Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo and G-senjou no Maou) you'd know this is not his usual style. In fact, starting from the twenty-something chapters, it's obvious that the manga is going in a similar direction as his two other famous works, except the drama sets in much later. SnK, G-sen and this work all feature an MC who, after a traumatic past where they lost most of their family, was taken by a strong but (at least borderline) evil father figure who treats them as his own child, and for whom they have to perform tasks that are not necessarily morally good. Then



I'm not saying you'll necessarily love this development - if you hated both SnK and G-sen, then you probably shouldn't continue - but please don't base your judgement of whether you should read this series purely on the other reviews on the Internet, since most of them were written before the plot turned in the author's usual direction.

... Last updated on November 21st, 2018, 6:58am

The series can be summed up with unfortunate accuracy as being set in a serial-numbers-filed-off Bad Future of the X-Men where the kill-all-mutants faction has mostly won, with the main character being their assassin...and the narrative is unquestioning about the need and virtue of killing people merely for being 'not normal.'

The whole "MC's victims as future criminals" thing--that she nearly unquestioningly accepts--is the major problem here. It's explicit that Nana's bosses won't allow any of the Talented to live. That pretty much excludes the only possible source for these numbers that isn't some form of 'their rear ends'--especially when the example we get of their claims coming true is a death toll that's primarily the result of their efforts to kill a Talented individual.

Oh, and Nana--with all her vaunted deductive skills--isn't asking the obvious question of where her bosses are getting these numbers. As far as I was able to tolerate this series, she only had a faint glimmer of critical thinking applied to her info.

If they'd not mixed all of these elements in, this might not actually have been quite so bad for the story--it'd have been easy enough to just have becoming one of the 'enemies of humanity' be not the consequence of bigotry on the side of the normals but just the unfortunate, unavoidable ultimate destiny of the Talented to eventually go berserk. Or Nana could be a bit less oblivious to the fishy smell of the claims of her bosses--a moment of brief questioning of how a healer could use her powers for mass murder doesn't count, that's absurdly little given the obvious questions here and her supposed skills.

So, as a result, we get a story that is convinced of the goodness of genocide and bigotry, and killing people before they kill you...in an attempt to save themselves from your bigoted ass. About the only thing that could save this story is Kyouya winning.

Reverse mystery where the villain does the explaining of how they outwitted the superpowered.
I suggest reading chapters 1-3 to fully understand the concept of the series, though chapter 1 is the formula that the rest of the series follows over more chapters. Chapter 3 fully introduces Kyouya as the detective, strong point in the series is when he shows up and flustered the cute murderer.

Everyone's not perfect in the series, lots of showing the MC's victims as future criminals to lessen the blow that she's about to murder them by showing a large number of predicted deaths shown on her cell phone from letting her targets live. Mangaka is constantly giving the MC moral superiority when she really shouldn't have any by doing this. The MC Nana slips from lie to lie so fast that it's hard to root for her in any sense. I think the major problem with the story is that the mangaka decided to make her likable and committed to justice but also heartless. This is slightly balanced by Nana doing little prayers for victims in an attempt to salvage her moral pride. If the reader buys her character, even if only because her character design is pretty, then I imagine they'll enjoy the manga. If the reader doesn't like her, then the whole story becomes painful to read as she gets a lot of lucky breaks.
The focus is on how the MC is going to get out of the situation, but the way it's told made it hard to follow so I had to test my willing suspension of disbelief and go along with whatever was happening at the time.

The strongest part is the relationship with Kyouya, the resident detective who has eternal skepticism for the MC. This is kind of weak because it's hard to understand the story from Kyouya's viewpoint since it's so incredibly obvious to the reader that the MC is super guilty. This problem doesn't seem like it's going to get solved either.

This was written as of chapter 16. The polarized reviews of the series are well-deserved, there's a lot of writing in the manga that made me despise it a little bit, but ultimately I managed to enjoy it because the of the premise and Nana's twisted justice.
I doubt it'll last much longer, but I'm glad it exists.

It's kind of a poor man's fusion of detective conan and Mx0.