Shift! The Side-Character Heroine

The scenes in the manga world in which Zhao Youyue appeared were rather jumpy. For example, “Xu Jing” might be having dinner with her mother moments ago, but for the next moment she might be sitting in the classroom silently studying. Days may have passed in between the manga scenes, but the actual time in real life is still linear.

For Zhao Youyue, the jumping of the scenes did not greatly affect her. After all, her learning content is pretty much continuous. The mangaka only bothered to draw her studying and would never go into details with what she actually learned. These are all decided by Zhao Youyue herself.

She could even be memorizing vocabularies while performing house chores. Would she stoop low to compensated dating some day, perhaps she could even bring along her reference books and complete the practice questions while making love…

Or perhaps she got involved in an accident and broke her leg. Well, she could still complete her homework while waiting for the traffic police to mediate the incidence.

All in all, not even the apocalypse shall hinder Xu Jing’s passion for learning.

However, Xu Jing was not the main character after all. She was merely a supporting role. The “good-hearted” Su Li has delved deep enough to uncover the character backgrounds for Xu Jing in order to develop a new branch of plot line for her roles. Some may not comprehend the making behind Xu Jing’s misery as this is actually an attempt to pave a way for the manga’s hero, Yang Ming to pursue Xu Jing.

The hero of “Pure Romance”, Yang Ming is quite a gentle Yesman. It is impossible for him to turn down the requests coming from beautiful girls. Besides, there are three of them who have the closest relationships with him, the first being his sister with whom he shared no blood ties. She is very dependent on this brother of hers and has the typical brother complex. The second one is Li Xiaotong, his vigorous but cunningly scheming childhood friend. Perhaps she is not really in love with the hero, but she is used to dominating him and treating him as her own possession. The third girl is the missy Liu Sha whom he met only after the story has begun. She has an IQ of 250, an arrogant disposition, many talents, but zero ability to take care of herself in daily life. After escaping from home she was somehow taken in by the hero. In the process of being taken cared of, her affections gradually grew towards him. Despite this, her difficult personality prevented her from speaking of her likings for the hero. Her actions, though, betrayed the façade she had put up with. She decisively transferred from an elite private school to the school where the hero pursue his studies, and gained an additional attribute of being a “transfer student”.

Apart from these three female leads who enjoyed a great amount of scenes, there were a few other girls in the supporting roles who also have their own subplots. One of them is the hero’s senior who is a young artistic female scholar. As the hero is a loyal fan of her writings, he discovered the hidden loneliness within herself from reading her books. He went on to console her and treated her with gentle care. Ever since then, the female senior had fallen head over heels for the hero…

As a summary, all pretty girls who appeared in the manga are either fond of the hero or still in the process of mellowing affections towards him.

The hero even had a gay friend who is a super hot hunk. Of course, this character was put in place to please the Fujoshi-s. There is in fact one female character in the manga who has the “Fujoshi” attribute and had always enjoyed teasing the hero and his gay friend. She even used the two boys as source materials for drawing several Boys’ Love books.

The main storyline of the manga was put on the jolly school routines of the hero and the girls. The girls often have awful encounters such as having their breasts touched or face-planted into, or being kissed by the hero who accidentally tripped. Sometimes the girls will accidentally sit on the hero’s face while wearing short skirts, with only a thin layer of panties separating their butts from his face. At this point, the hero would be slapped as their hearts rushed and their faces would blush with embarrassment. The hero was seemingly helpless as incidents like this happened to be the wills of the great macrocosm, but truth is he could not be happier than ever.

As the number of female characters increase, same goes to the story of the girls fighting fiercely over the hero. However, as the hero was rather slow, he treated all girls equally in status and remained a cherry boy. Hence, there was never a conclusion or a clear winner to the girls’ fights. In accordance to the typical harem manga storylines, this kind of messy relationships between the boy and the girls will often persist until the very end. Alternatively, the hero will choose to be with one of the harem girls in order to rid himself off his useless boy characteristic and of course to show how sincere he was towards love. The mangaka, however, will soon have to embrace criticisms in all kinds of manners by the readers. After all, there were so many female characters, surely there will be readers rooting for these characters too. How can the hero reject the rest of the girls just to be with the one he has chosen?

Some readers might even complain and ask why the hero could not just accept everyone. There seemed never to be a harem manga that dared to feature an actual harem and promote all of the girls. Indeed, the mangaka is quite lousy.

The reason why mangaka Su Li made “Xu Jing” undergo such a tragic background, is because she felt that with the kind of personality that Xu Jing had, it will be impossible to expect her to pro-actively pursue the hero. After all, the one thing that Xu Jing treasured the most is none other than studying!

Furthermore she was the best friend of Yang Xixi. She will surely not develop affection for the hero since she knew that Yang Xixi harbored more than just familial love towards him. But if her misery was found out by the hero himself, the excessively-kind hero will certainly be unable to ignore her plight. She will then be indebted to the hero for his kindness and will slowly accept the hero’s gentle pursue. Isn’t this to be logically expected?

In the recent issues of the manga, Su Li has featured many direct appearances for Xu Jing. Indeed it was like what her apprentice Zhang Ziqiang had mentioned, more and more readers were finding the character of Xu Jing interesting. Perhaps many of them were advocators for the hero to “accept everyone”. After seeing Xu Jing’s beauty, the readers insisted that the mangaka should allow the hero to take her in.

There were also some readers who genuinely thought Xu Jing was interesting, like the following scene –

Once again the hero bowed to the will of the great macrocosm and was about to use his godly tripping technique to assault “Xu Jing’s” breasts. Unexpectedly, “Xu Jing” just leisurely got out of the way. As a result, the hero fell down painfully. He then happened to be in position to sneek up “Xu Jing’s” skirt. What he initially thought was going to be either blue-white stripes, little strawberry panty, teddy bear panty or even the very seductive cameltoe. But, it turned out to be the very conservative safety pants. Yes, the safety pants that every man hated with a burning passion!

Upon seeing this, many readers felt a sense of misfortune. This “Xu Jing” character is really toxic, not only did she avoided his “Rito’s[1] fall”, she even wore safety pants! How can a girl like her ever appear in a harem manga?

Even though the readers complained about this, they realized moments later that she is indeed the most conservative girl in the manga who showed the greatest passion towards studying and has the highest resemblance to a good student. Her appearance in the manga has thoroughly broken each and every harem manga stereotypes.

Zhang Ziqiang the assistant was full of praises with the ways Su Li handled the storyline. He felt that the mangaka has managed to transform Xu Jing into a “very interesting” status from her initial “meh” status. The more conservative a girl acted, the more the male readers wanted to see the other side of her personality.

Hearing Zhang Ziqiang’s praises, Su Li crossed her arms in front of her chest and said softly, “You might not believe me when I tell you this, but she actually avoided the godly tripping technique and wore the safety pants herself. I initially wanted to draw the blue white stripes instead…”

“Master Su Li, are you kidding me?” Zhang Ziqiang looked a little confused.

“Perhaps it was in a moment of sudden inspiration that I felt such counter-routine would be more interesting, and I drew it as such.” Su Li was only able to say this while forcing a smile.

She only decided to set Xu Jing’s background as it is now right after the character started receiving more and more attention. She will start drawing the storyline of her being pursued when there are enough readers pledging their loyalties to Xu Jing…

For some unknown reasons, the mangaka had a bad hunch when she made these decisions. She felt as though there is still going to be an unexpected turn of events.

Translation note:

[1] Rito’s fall (梨斗摔) is a reference to the character of Yuuki Rito in “To Love-Ru Darkness”. It is a fanservice trope in manga where the male character trips and falls accidentally only to end up buried in a female character’s breasts.