Talentless Nana: Ch. 1

[mastermahan]

At first glance, Talentless Nana looks very familiar. You've got a school for kids with superpowers, you've got the boy with no apparent powers getting bullied, you've got the bubbly new girl determined to bring him out of his shell, etc.

It's not what you think.



































And as a bonus, let's take a look at the cover of the first volume:

Comments

[violetclm]

This was a really fun series, much less repetitive than The Executioner and Her Way of Life despite similarities. Wish the detective guy weren't so useless though.

[janegray]

Honestly, not trying to be a negative nancy or anything here, but this looks pretty standard fare... I could see that ending coming. I can't predict whether the guy is really dead because I've seen other manga where he was the victim/enemy of the week, and others where it was just their rocky enemies-to-lovers first meeting.

Plus, it's pretty hard to root for a protagonist who murders children who might one day potentially become a threat. Feels like an X-Men comic where the protagonist is a Sentinel.

[brerrabbit]

Spoilers he isn't dead but he's evil now in no small part thanks to Nana betraying him, the once harmless and kindly Nanao becomes the exact kind of villain she originally set out to terminate, so she actively made things WORSE!

[deh_tommy]

Please cover your spoilers in the future, I didn’t know this and wanted to go into the book blind as I could. I feel like going “spoilers” at the start of your post isn’t really enough when those words are so close to each other in the sentence.

[zachbeacon]

Between the title, the color page, and the bloodsplattered cover, I don't think the end is meant to be a surprise.

I think the appeal is watching her manipulate super people into vulnerable situations.

Of course for me to enjoy a villain protagonist, they really have to be either sympathetic or competent and she doesn't strike me as either since the comments mention her victim is still alive and she turned him into the threat she feared he'd be.

I guess it could always go for a Psycho-Pass "are we the baddies?" twist but she seems less brainwashed by society and more like a murderer looking for an excuse.

[janegray]

Depends on what cover you go with. First one up above looked pretty inoffensive. But this still gave Gunslinger Girl vibes from early on.

I tend to have a very, very low tolerance for flatout villain protagonists, but I LOVE anti-villains. That's why I was always on board with Red Hood from the very beginning. But killing children is one of those things that rockets you straight into pure villainy.

[mastermahan]

She starts out looking like a straight villain, but that doesn't last very long. You can already tell someone is manipulating her by the cell-phone messages. Someone took a child and spent years brainwashing and training her.

She'll shift into anti-villain mode soon enough (naq bhgevtug tbbq riraghnyyl). This isn't Light Yagami versus superhumans. Which is too bad, because I'd read that.

[arilou_skiff]

One of the things I liked about it was actually that she was competent but not omnicompetent. She makes mistakes and has to cover for them, and some of her antagonists trip her up.

It felt like she was fucking up in believable ways, rather than due to deus ex-machina.

[redmagpie]

This looks fun! Is it finished?

[mastermahan]

No, still ongoing. Up to 9 volumes last time I checked.