Jul 28, 2021
A couple things I guess. The thing I'll caveat this whole thing is, it's pretty hard to make me laugh when I read things, and I'm fairly critical of "meta" especially when I think it's poorly applied. So don't take it personally and be proud of what you wrote.
The first thing is I'd tone down how many 8man references you use. Not just for any trademark/copyright reason, but because you will invariably run into the problem that the references become so numerous that one wonders if you're really writing anything new or unique or if you're just writing an 8man clone. The obsession both in narration and in the voices of others is a bit too overbearing and seems more like just an act of a fan gushing about the light novel as opposed to mediating its usage and using it as a springboard for new ideas.
The narrative voice has its perks, some of the dialogue is cheeky and there's some internal parts of the journal that could be interesting on its own. There are some issues with the inconsistency in setting, since you're writing a Japanese romcom, but you use some idioms that mostly fans of Western television might know. "Girls are made of sugar/spice" as an example. I know there's a PPG in Japan, and maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems largely an American TV phenomenon, so hearing a Japanese narrator write that in his diary is strange. There are other instances, but this stood out the most.
The main thing is I guess I just don't appreciate all the meta/self-aware humor you've applied. Frankly, I think it's too transparent and sign posted, bits like the boke/tsukommi about copyright infringement just after a chapter where you joke about how Oregairu is intellectual property, the whole self-aware protagonist gag. Everything is deconstructed into pure trope-isms, another thing blatantly discussed, and archetypal characteristics and I just feel the narrative as a result is just very puffed up and perfunctory, it lacks character and only has meta materials to fall back on as substance; when a scene plays out, it always needs to be contrasted with some law of anime-ism, and it just extends the length of narration without adding to why we care about why the scene that you wrote, as opposed to what traditionally happens in anime, is important.
I'd be a bit more forgiving in this regard if some other parts were a bit more subtle to provide contrast between what was superficially explicated and what was hinted, but they aren't. It's like how you open with In medias res to tell the reader where we are chronologically in the story, or later when the narrator compliments someone on their usage of a gerund. There's a lot of miscellaneous literary terms spliced here and there, and I don't feel their importance, it just feels like they're added in to provide some legitimacy to the narrative, which I don't feel is what actually happens.
