Nana's Everyday Life/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

 * Upon first reading Nana's Everyday Life, I found it well-written, if rather indecisively plotted, but horribly depressing. The major thrust of the plotline is that a quadriplegic girl is trying to find a figurative place in the sun, a life where she is happy and loved. But every time it looks like she's found it the cruel vagaries of fate dash it all by killing or tearing away from her every shred of happiness she'd accumulated. It is heartbreaking and devastating and put me in a funk for literally something like two days. I was convinced that the author had a sadomasochistic relationship with his readers, and I still am. However, one day some time later when I was in a gloomy mood and reflecting on the comic, it struck me that this cycle of joy and pain works both ways. To use an old expression, Nana is "riding the wheel"; just as every moment of hope sets up the eventual cruel dashing of said hope, every crash into despair sets up a rise out of said despair. The story, in other words, can be seen either as most people first perceive it -- a gut-wrenching story of a cruel, unfair world -- or as the opposite -- a uplifting story about eternal hope and the triumph, brief though it may be, of joy in our lives -- or, with a bit of perspective, as both at once -- an extreme to the point of absurdity expression of life's give-and-take. Awesome. -- Bellos The Mighty
 * I tried reading Nana's Everyday Life a few years ago, and couldn't get into it, because it was obviously a fancomic of something that I wasn't familiar with (obvious from lack of character introduction). Then I read Elfen Lied... -- Kintatsu