This manga did not live up to the one shot. Just read the one shot and be done with it.
Granted, it's hard to live up to perfection, but still.
Actually it fell way short.
Koe no Katachi squandered such incredible potential that I can't help but get mad at it far more than any mediocre, or even bad, series. It could have been amazing, but in the end it was just infuriating.
But the beginning was just so damn good.
*SPOILERS AHEAD* (not like they matter when nothing comes of it)
Lets forget about how annoying Tomohiro is. Let's forget about how boring making a movie is. Lets forget about how one note all of the friends are.
Lets talk about the defining moment of the series. When Shouko confesses. Holy shit, a confession this early, out of nowhere as well. Shouko gives no signs beforehand, as we're mostly from the perspective of Shouya. And then? Literally nothing. No fucking change. NOT EVEN A CHANGE WITHIN HER CHARACTER! You'd this would advance the story, you'd think this would reveal more about the characters, YOU'D THINK THAT THE FUCKING CHARACTER WHO JUST FUCKING CONFESSED WOULD ACT A LITTLE FUCKING DIFFERENTLY AFTER FALLING IN LOVE!!! But no, we get one scene in next chapter that aknowledges that it even happened and then literally it's never brought up again. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK! I can't even contain how mad I am about this. This moment sets the pace for the rest of the entire series! God damn, I am so mad. I am SO MAD! HOW CAN YOU DO THIS? There is no character progression. There is no relationship progression. There is no more reveals about the characters.
I don't think this needed to be a romance, I would have preferred it to be a plot point which shows how Ishida can't forgive himself enough to have a relationship with the girl he antagonized, but something, anything, would be infinitely better than what we got. Constant teasing of the ship with no progression. NO FUCKING PROGRESSION! The most interesting part of this manga, the reason why everyone is reading it, is Shouko and Shouya. Their relationship, their struggles. Shouko's guilt and his redemption through suffering. Shouya's hardships and her misguided self hatred.
These were the things that were intriguing. These were the good parts of the manga. This is what everybody came here for. What did we get? A bunch of bullshit about their self righteous friends. After shorty comes in, the manga hardly spends any time with our two main leads. HOW CAN YOU MISS THE MARK THIS BADLY AFTER CREATING SOMETHING SO GOOD? Fuck.
Everything stays in a stagnated place while boring bullshit and meaningless drama happens between the friends. The whole point of things happening is that they change something. Nothing changes.
There's no point to having drama if, after it's resolved, nothing is different! And the one shot was so god damn amazing in this too. We're narrative creatures. Things in stories must happen to produce a result. There's no point in watching if nothing changes. It's like watching a video of someone lighting a fuse on dynamite and then the video ends before it even gets halfway to the charge!
None of the issues with their friends are resolved, they are all still the way they were before, except they get along better for no decernable reason at the end. Not that I ever cared about their friends. But even still, since they were introduced, I wanted them to complete their arcs. I wanted resolutions. They each brought up a problem, but there was no solution. They were all wrong in some way, but none of them went anywhere in any direction.
Instead of the nature of the characters, or the relationship between the two, the biggest mystery/driving force of the latter half is what the function was of the gift she gave him. Are you kidding me?
She literally tries to kill herself and nothing changes. SHE TRIES TO KILL HERSELF AND THE STORY MARCHES ON EXACTLY THE SAME AND THE MAIN CHARACTERS DON'T GROW CLOSER TOGETHER. It's like they're puppets with defined traits and shit is just being thrown at them, but they can't move because that's not how they function. Oh sure, there's drama, but do any of them actually evolve? Do any of them change? None of them learn anything.
All the friends do is get in the way of the story progressing. Any action that might inform who the main characters are, or their relationship to each other is blocked by their presence.
Glasses girl is a delusional maniac who is in denial, and NEVER REALIZES IT. She ends up being portrayed like a good fucking person by the end, despite not changing at all.
Kuroneko is a violent bitch who constantly excuses her actions, as if that actually changes anything, and then acts like she's the victim for having reasons.
Tall girl is a gutless, no impact, zero note character who has no reason to exist.
Angry guy doesn't know how to use words to fix problems and throws tantrums that change literally nothing while acting like a good guy despite ignoring when his friends are being bullied.
Shorty is annoying. That's all there is to him. He's clingy, and never says anything important, and just gets in other people's business. This manga would be significantly better if he weren't in it.
Aside from Shorty, none of them are even his friends anyway. They act like they're his friends, but they do nothing friendly with each other. Basically they're just aquantences who would never speak if it weren't for the movie Shorty wants to make. None of them ever talk about anything other than the movie or Shouko. That's not a friend, that's a co-worker.
When he feels like he's isolated from the group, its because he is. He was kind of just there.
These characters might have been interesting had the writer realized that they were wrong. That they were bad people. But apparently because none of them ever finish their arcs, the writer thinks they're all fine the way they are.
I tolerated the making of the movie in Haruhi Suzumiya because the character interactions were the meat of the show, so it didn't matter what they did, despite the movie clearly being awful and the setup being boring.
Here, the gathering of supplies was boring, and the movie completely stalled the plot. It didn't even put the main pair together in roles that might advance their characterization or relationship, which was the whole point of the "making a movie" plot point to begin with.
In the end, that's what plagued this manga. Boring stuff in the way of actual progression. I just don't get it, you write a story to get something across, right? To send a message? To convey a feeling? The one shot certainly did. Don't you want to get there as fast as you can? I guess not.
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