Scientia

nathandouglasdavis Sep 21, 2021

4

I quickly grew uncomfortable with how prominent the work-hard propaganda was throughout this series. Every single chapter involves some level of glorifying hard work and treating strenuous and lengthy work conditions as normal and even as something to be sought after. The summation in the final panels of this collection says "To be happy, you have to work hard somewhere." Chapter two includes the idea that work will consume your life, regardless of where you work, "if you do it properly." Chapter three refers to coming in early and leaving late as working "normally." Chapter six has someone smiling fondly at the memory of an old boss berating fem and pushing fem to work harder. Parents neglecting their children is also a recurring topic, with mothers "bringing men home" or otherwise not doing enough (not working hard enough) to care for their children. I appreciated some of the ways things were depicted--like how they showed Endo acclimating to Kaori's body--and I probably would've enjoyed this collection a lot more if it wasn't so steeped in the "hard work" shit. The majority of the stories are about drugs or therapies that alter people's perception of the world around them--there's a drug that induces limerance (ch. 2), a therapy that allows someone to work "normally"/harder (ch. 4), a drug that helps neglected children feel loved (ch. 5), and a therapy that allows someone to pull out their full potential (ch. 7). We also get a story about someone lending control of feir body to someone else's consciousness (ch. 1), a story about a mother raising a clone of feir dead daughter (ch. 3), and a story about a dying man who has a robot caretaker (ch. 6). Each story ends in a way that is clearly intended to be inspiring or uplifting, often with a bittersweet feel. Many of the female characters have a similar face, with a bob haircut. In fact, quite a few of the faces feel interchangeable. If they didn't have different names, I easily could've assumed that all these various characters were intended to be the same people. They have flat faces, with features looking tacked on rather than cohesive. I don't care for the thin, lengthy blushmarks. And I think the way the lips glisten when a guy finds a girl attractive to be somewhat silly. The kisses aren't sensual. The people are generally stiff or awkwardly drawn, but the non-people aspects of the manga are a lot more pleasant to look at.

YuiYui Nov 23, 2016

5

Warning this Review May Contain Spoilers - So another android slice of life to add to may read list and honestly it wasn't the best...some may know that I am not a big fan of collections even though I have read quite a few. But here we have a collection that follows a world that has extended their technology to embrace the sci-fi genre, with androids and other things.  STORY So the one problem I had with this collection is that I only liked a couple of the stories out of the 7 that there was plus most of the stories were quite forgettable sadly, hence why my score for this section is quite low. In addition to these aspects there were a couple of pacing issues with some of the stories and some of the stories appeared to be quite similar to one another (some were unique but not many). The thing I liked about this collection is that the tower became the center for everything that happens, a reoccuring aspect and I thought that was quite sweet honestly. ART It was decent... I don't have much to say it other than it did pull the series from going below average as it fitted the style of the story quite well and it was neat overall. No complaints really, just that the art really pulled it from getting a 4/10 from me. CHARACTERS The major problem I had with the characters is that as the stories were extremely short there was close to no development in a lot of them, obviously there were exceptions to this but most of it followed this problem. This then caused some of the stories to create this drama surrounding the character without knowing why it is happening. In conclusion for a slice of life android collection it was pretty average but read it if you want to... -AngelBeatsYui- PS: This Review is for DMMC November 2016

FullmetalDragon Nov 28, 2016

6

This collection of short stories is alright. Not unenjoyable, but certainly not the best thing I've read. The story is set far in the future (or maybe the close future. With the way technology's developing, I wouldn't be surprised), and tells 7 seperate stories of how technology may be used in the future. The setting itself is fairly standard, as is most of the content. None of the stories particularly stood out to me as being great, although they were all still enjoyable. Certainly a couple of them were pretty interesting, and the others kept me entertained well enough. The problem with this, as with most collections, is that there is nowhere near enough time to build any kind of attachment to the characters. I actually thought quite a few of the characters in this were very interesting, but there was not enough time to develop them. Scientia is certainly not a bad read, especially if you like android slice of life, although if you're not very interested in this sort of series, then this is very likely not for you. Review for November 2016 DMMC