I've been reading Skip Beat since 2009, and it remains one of my very favorite manga of all time. I love Kyoko as a main character, I love Ren as the love interest - I love every character to be honest. I love how they grow. I love the way we get backstories, with hints of things dropped early on that build slowly to a big reveal. I (desperately) want answers, but I don't mind waiting because I know eventually I will get them - and, whenever it happens, it will be at the right time and it will be worth it because it'll be done so well.
I love the plot; I love how a job Kyoko starts for pretty terrible reasons slowly morphs into something she loves for herself, something that defines her. I love how Kyoko's progression in the field seems believable, how she has to slowly work her way up from a talent where she is literally just a character in a costume with no lines, to a real actress with important roles that she learns to understand. So often showbiz manga end up being completely about the characters and them being famous and not really about the industry at all, and that is definitely not the case here.
My only real complaint is how hard it is to read as an ongoing series. It only releases one chapter a month, and while at least it is 30 pages instead of, say, 15, if you aren't at a point where the plot is moving quickly, it's easy to forget exactly what is going on. (Or if a big event is in progress, each chapter inevitably ends on a cliffhanger that makes waiting a month for the continuation feel impossible.) If I had any strength of will, I would hold off for several months and try to read whole arcs at a time. I HAVE gone back and re-read the whole series five or six times, and every time I love it more - it's so much more enjoyable in binge form, when you can really see the whole story.
tl;dr: Great character development, awesome plot, agonizing updates. Read it. Then watch the anime. Then read it again. 😀
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