Five Star Stories Complete Volume 14 scans

I saw the movie for FSS a year ago and found it interesting but very rushed. So I thought the manga would be a more fulfilling experience. I expected it to expand on the story of the film and explain things more clearly.

How wrong I was. To put it bluntly, this is one of the ugliest, trashiest manga I have ever read. The movie was somehow able to polish up this turd of a series into something meaningful compared to what I had to go through. How should I go about explaining this?

Let's start with the one saving grace of the entire work: the mecha designs. They are indeed beautiful, if a bit ostentatious. When they're standing still, it's a feast for the eyes.

Now as for the other aspects... oh boy.

The author, Mamoru Nagano, cannot draw people, backgrounds, and other aspects that are crucial to make a manga flow. He also does not understand story structure or tone. And from the content he presents in each volume, he is a depraved sexual deviant and probably has some form of Alzheimer's.

I wish I were joking.

To begin with, let's talk about the story- for something that rates itself "Five Stars", I wouldn't even give it such a rank on a ten-star scale. It is that bad.

>>15714017
Remember when I said the film was rushed, and I expected the manga to expand upon it? It doesn't, and it's just as rushed. Everything that takes place in the first film happens in the first volume. From then one, it jumps into this bizarre mess of short flashbacks and flash-forward sequences, some of which take place in alternate dimensions (no exaggeration), and none of which have any serious bearing or drive the story in any direction. They're all a series of meaningless vignettes filled with disjointed ideas that have nothing to do with one another. You will go from one scene involving a battalion of WWI soldiers fighting a trench battle with hovertanks, to another with some dumb cardboard cutout shounen brat and his mother fighting leotard+fishnet stocking and stiletto wearing Ninjas, to another with half-naked gods and goddesses speculating about the fate of mankind... you get the idea. Random characters pop up only to disappear and be forgotten, until they come back as completely different characters with the same name. The main character himself, Ladios Sopp has around 5 different names and bodies. There is even a pathetic attempt by the author to one-up Tolkien when it comes to making up meaningless dictionaries of terminology that do more to confuse rather than worldbuild. Maybe some people like this kind of "storytelling", but from what I see there's little originality to be had when all these short vignettes are just bland copies of vastly superior works that already exist out there. The funniest aspect of this is that there is even a timeline in the back of each volume that spans THOUSANDS of years, filled with important historic events in the story, none of which we actually get to fully see in the manga. So why was it even included? It doesn't help that most of the setting is just Star Wars with super fetishistic elements added in (which we will get to later, because it is the truly worst aspect of this dung pile).

>>15714018
The art? Like I said before, the standing robots are nice. Everything else? Not so nice.

Mamoru Nagano CANNOT draw people. Every single character is a stick figure a-la CLAMP, drawn in the same bizarre ostentatious style of the mecha design (works for robot but NOT people), made worse by the fact that they suffer from serious sameface and often go off-model, making them utterly indistinguishable from one another in certain scenes. Think of it like the worst parts of the early chapters of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, only amplified by ten. They also all seem to change outfits every five panels, because Nagano is a fashion designer and he wants the audience to know it, so you can never tell if one character is the same character as the one on the previous page. And since none of the characters have any real depth or personality as mentioned before, you'll soon find yourself seeing nothing more than a handful of fetish fuel talking heads from panel to panel. Speaking of panels- the panelling is awful. Scrunched. No clear transitions. Backgrounds range from blank to ugly dusty wind for no reason, with little variation in between, and with nothing to really look at. And the mecha? Beautiful standing, but the moment they start "moving" it looks so utterly unconvincing. Mind you, there's only so many ways you can move a robot with stupidly high stilettos and an antenna longer than its own head height, but even in that regard Nagano still somehow disappoints. I guess that's why none of the model kits are poseable?

>>15714019
Now, bad story and bad art would constitute a merely bad manga. But what puts FSS into the very bottom of the barrel is the extreme, uncompromising fetishism of the author. Fanservice is one thing, but FSS can be classified as "masturbatory"- meaning it will please only the author to have these extreme elements in there. This is a rather depraved manga, filled with strange fetishes and sex and violence and drugs- which is to be expected from an 80s work like this. But Nagano takes it even further, and is somehow able to churn out 13 volumes of his personal masturbation material, and who knows for how much longer.

>>15714020
How bad is it you ask? Let's start with the obvious. The main character is a trap. Which itself is nothing radical or new, but Nagano takes it even further by violating him in the strangest ways. In one chapter, he's eaten alive by dinosaurs (don't worry, he's a god so he's immortal), and you are given the pleasure of seeing his half-eaten corpse and all the blood and guts to make even Kentauro Miura blush. Then there's the Fatimas, which as described in the movie, are literal sex slave robots with no free will. If such an idea already sounds bad on paper, wait until you get to see them get raped. In one of the chapters, a very feminine man (of the many feminine men in FSS) come in and gives a handjob to a shota Fatima in a brothel- right before he tears his head off. Even in comedic moments, the author can't resist putting in strange parts, such as when a mom kicks her 12-year-old son in the balls while showing off her VERY provocative underwear/garterbelt/stockings, and then steps on his testicles with her enormous six-inch stilettos, drawn in great detail. Oh yes, almost EVERY female character in this manga wears six-inch high heels, even some of the men! Nagano cares more about drawing high heels properly than he does his people. Halfway through the manga Nagano realized that this wasn't enough, so in addition to the six-inch high heels, he gives the Fatimas new shiny latex super skintight outfits in the vein of the Eva plugsuits, showing off their full anorexic glory so you can see their pelvic bones and ribcages and flat titties, all the while they strut around in those monster heels and get raped. All of this is done with zero sense of irony, and you can feel every ink stroke in the manga as a stroke the author does on his privates. It is the worst, most self-indulgent form of trash. It should be no surprise that this all literally came from the hand of a failed fashion designer.

>>15714021
When all is said and done, this is basically a doujinshi-level work made for people who have certain sexual tastes, just like the work of Raita and "oil n' horses" Masamune Shirow. I didn't find any of it particularly attractive, but since it's been going on for 30 years and continues to this day, with many artbooks released filled with anorexic Fatimas and other characters and their fetish outfits, I'm sure at least some of you may get something out of it.

Why did I not drop it earlier if I hated this so much you ask? Because I wanted to see how far this train of depravity would go. It did not disappoint. And it continues to this day, with no finish in sight.

And to think some had the audacity to compare this low-level smut to truly great manga works like Akira- what a laugh!

Then there is the recent retcon. As of volume 13 all the old designs and a good chunk of the story had been completely retconned. The new mecha designs a hilarious skeleton/Bayformer parody of the originals. The art remains as ugly as ever, and the characters are still personality-free walking fetish objects. If the author was so bored of his own work from the past 30 years that he would wipe it out of existence, why should you be interested in something that even the author doesn't care for?

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>>15714017
>>15714018
>>15714019
>>15714020
>>15714021
>>15714023

This is the longest copypaste I have ever seen on 4chan.

Good job, Anon, this is your life now.

>>15714017
>>15714018
>>15714019
>>15714020
>>15714021
>>15714023
Have you ever read ALL of the FSS volumes and watched L-Gaim, another Nagano work? Or are you a somewhat retard regarding that and Nagano, himself? And you call one of the best manga series b*******?!
Besides, FSS is an anthology-eque work that, in each arc, happens in various times and there was the fictional timeline in that story. Not to mention some of which contain flashbacks, past or future.
Also, that was serialized in Newtype magazine years ago.

(Personally, despite its whatever innuendo is within it and GTM retcons, it is more worth of a manga than Akira, which I have reasons why I presumably despise it so much.

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>>15714087
Also, Nagano's artworks are just as good or average

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>>15714017
So let me summarize your review.

>>15714018
>I was too dumb to understand the story structure or why the timeline was included
>>15714019
>I cannot differentiate between stylistic art choices and actual bad art
>>15714021
>I am a triggered SJW
>>15714023
>I-I didn't finish it because I liked it, b-baka!

There, I summed up your entire review (most likely a copypasta) in about 1/10 of the words.

>being this mad at a comic
hahaha holy shit

>>15713669
Thanks OP. Thank you so much.

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>>15714021
>this much lust for a Fatima

>>15714087
>>15714090
>>15715157
It's fine to like garbage, just know what it is.

Every mecha series is garbage.
Anything with a mecha in it is garbage
prove me wrong.

>>15715945
There's not liking something, then there's typing 10 paragraphs that can be summed up in 10 words.

>>15715970
Not all mecha are garbage you know

>>15715984
10 more paragraphs than you'll ever find in a single FSS thread, if it even gets to 10 people to begin with.

>>15713669
Hello, I'm the chap that put up part of vol 11 a few years back. GO went down, so I never got around to finishing the volume but I still have a draft on my computer if I can fish it up.

>>15716950
Thanks anon, would love to see it.

>>15716950
Were you the guy who translated it or was it someone else?

reply to this post if you saw gothicmade in theatres

shame it will never be released on disc

>>15713669
Cool

One thing people always seems to forget is that FSS has never been intended as a commercial success - thing of it in terms of LSD: Dream Emulator. Nagano does not really care about the enjoyment of his reader. It has always about realizing the fictional world he dreams about.

Some have called him out for it years ago, like this dissertation:

http://ghostlightning.tumblr.com/post/134679312/brought-to-you-by-we-remember-love-young

>>15724788
The article mainly talks about FFS's position in and towards japanese media market strategies. Nagano's personal views on his product aren't eludicated on beyond his insistancy that the franchise's unrelated to the L-Gaim franchise. They assume that the artbooks are about control over fan-theories, but Bandai releases a shitton of similar products without giving two shits - it's basically just products the people who're into the genre will buy and it happily grants him an outlet for his passion for fashion design.

>>15716137
But this thread alone already has 12 people?

Sorry nobody wants to read your autistic wall of text.

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>>15724788
>>15724846
Nagano treats FSS as an extension of himself. I don't know if it's really about "fully realizing his fictional world", since he's rewritten it multiple times, rather it feels like he's doing his best to incorporate new trends into his work in his own language, like a fashion designer. And he would gladly bend the base of FSS over in order to express his ideas. He can add anything from Gyarus to Dragons with no qualms about continuity.

His attitude with his fans seems to be "Follow me if you want, I don't care. But I'm not listening to a single word from any of you." It's the biggest appeal and detractor of FSS.