Oshi No Ko: A Short Review (2/17/2025)

 I think I'm a sucker for these kind of slightly trashy manga stories.

Oshi No Ko starts off extremely weird, with a doctor that's obssessed with an idol who dies and then is reincarnated as the idol's child, and then in comes a huge plot twist that leads to the story becoming about the mc and his twin sister trying to make it big in the entertainment industry in order to find revenge, and then eventually the story starts to go off the rails and while it is not a masterpiece, per say, I still thought that this was extremely entertaining. Sue me.

I want to talk about the good first. I thought learning about how the entertainment industry works was pretty entertaining, and seeing how the author decided to concoct the plot, as well as seeing how each of the characters grew and interacted around each other was super interesting. I liked how the author would say when each arc began and ended, with the names of each arc in the chapter itself. I liked how the translators would put little notes after each chapter that actually added a lot of good context. As a lover of cameos, I liked how Kaguya showed up for one panel in a bonus page.

But there is also a lot of bad. The plot really does sort of lose itself and get super confusing towards the end. It was obvious that this series wanted to have some super weird hook to get readers interested, but to be honest I think the series would've been much better off without it. Because of the hook, the author had to still spend some time making up some random explainations for the supernatural shit. I think what happened was Aka had a lot of material that he wanted to include about the entertainment industry and maybe about the characters, but he also had this whole revenge plot going on and some supernatural reincarnation bullshit that he included, and he really just could not have it all in the story meaningfully. So it ended up being sort of a mess and there is a decent amount of plot inconsistencies (like, why is everyone so ok with the twins basically having the minds of adults when they are babies?). Also, the incest shit sucks.

I think to enjoy this series, you have to approach this like you would something like Domestic Girlfriend. Don't take it seriously. I think the series shines best when you are just learning about acting and then also seeing how each of these aspiring teenagers want to work hard to achieve their dreams.  That's entertaining, and I'm also a sucker for a little murder mystery.

I don't think I can recommend this series to many people, as it's kind of weird and all over the place, but I do think that if you already like reading manga, then this will probably be entertaining for you. Reading the reddit comments in each chapter discussion was also super fun for me, and honestly elevated the series a lot.

I give this a 7/10. It surely is not a great series (something that I would put 8 or above), but it was super fun