Another victory for literacy.
Oh, the Humanity~
Even though the basic story is stupid generic, you can tell with the manga that the author cared about this thing, cuz the characters actually interact with each other.
Whereas with the anime, you’re basically getting two cardboard cutouts that may happen to share dialogue in the same frame.
This is the same scene as the one I posted from the manga. Lot of fucking emotion there.
And don’t expect anything like the following in the anime:
No, anything that makes the characters somewhat endearing isn’t serious enough. Christ, the director for this shit was responsible for Watamote, Negima!?, and Baka to Test. What the fuck happened?
Characterization – MC-kun
It’s funny, cuz even though the MC became this buff, standard everyhero in the anime, he still comes out the worse for it by virtue of having any character nuance stripped away.
Here’s just a bit of the background given to him in the manga:
And what does the anime give us in regards to his motivation and history?
Four seconds of nothing, translated by an idiot.
Characterization – Onee-san
The onee-san chainsmokes like a construction worker in the manga. Even though smoking sucks or whatever, you have to admit it does look cool as fuck. Manga wins.
Characterization – Stella
Honestly, couldn’t even tell you what separates anime Stella from every other red-haired mega-bitch of the past few years.
You could tell me this screenshot wasn’t from Rakudai and I’d believe you 100%.
It seems her only purpose is to serve as a tsundere checkbox on the real hero‘s to-do list.
“Welp, guess I gotta suck his dick now.”
In the manga she actually serves as a main character, with personality and more consideration given to her background than a two-line flashback.
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the manga is some literary masterpiece with great characters and a lack of paint-by-numbers Japanese sexism, but it sure as fuck is 100x better at humanity than the anime is.
Fap/Schlick Material
Fine, anime. You can have this one.
Translation
While the scanlation is as shit as most scanlations are, it should take you significantly less time to read the manga than watch the anime. So by virtue of having less contact with the cancer, the scanlations win this round.
tl;dr
This is how the manga ended the introduction arc:
And here’s how it got animated:
Fuck everyone involved with the Rakudai anime, and may their families die terrible deaths.