SPoT = Bad!AU!canon
After chibikaoruchan 's resignation from PoT fandom, I've been wondering about this. Exactly why did Konomi decided to make SPoT? It's an unnecessary sequel. I remembered reading that he said PoT is just a prequel thing. A prequel story that last 30+ volumes. Prequels aren't supposed to be that long, Konomi. That's a main story on its own.
Plot-wise -let's be honest, a sport manga doesn't have much plot at all. They're all just about an athlete who wants to have acknowledgment from people around him. The only twist possible in such stories are about the winners in matches and most of the time, when it came to the final match, we all know who's gonna win. Slam Dunk (tm) had a nice, realistic twist to this but in general, the main character's team always win. Kinda makes me wonder why I bother being so worked up over sport mangas. PoT is a little different because there are at least four matches, three of which they have to win in order to advance. There are more possibilities there but it ends there. Seigaku won the nationals. Shocker.
What surprise can SPoT offer? We all know how it's going to end. Echizen is going to be a bigger douche bag of a tennis player. It's a part of his character. He's not going to suddenly turn into a nice, quiet kid who patiently teaches tennis to random people all of a sudden.
That also means that there's very little character development. If anything, the characters are being OOC. That's not a good development. If a character took a sudden turn in personality, I'd suggest giving a good psychological explanation for it. So far, there's none. One can only hope that the change was a part of some kind of secret ploy to kill Echizen. Again, so far the evidence showed that the only thing Konomi managed to kill was his own fandom. I understand that character development is difficult when there are so many characters which barely has any significance to the general plot-line (if there's any at all) but I don't think it's too much to ask for that in main characters. Also, if Konomi has realized the difficulty, he should consider stopping to add more characters into the story. If he can't do anything about the current situation, what makes him think he can do better with more?
I guess the only acceptable reason is capital reasons. PoT is a huge fandom that makes huge amount of money. Pardon my ignorance but does anyone know any other manga which is not related to tennis that Konomi made? There's no sense in taking a risk when there's still a chance to rake in more money via lack of creativity.
Another possibility, if you're a fan of conspiracy theory, is that the supposedly-shounen-manga publisher is getting disturbed by the amount of fanservice and Ho-Yay moments in PoT and demanded a change. It means returning to the shounen genre and lessening the fan service. I wonder if there's any statistic showing whether there's any increase of reader of SPoT (differentiated by gender if possible) to back up this theory.
Any opinion?