Do the petty bickering and shoddy attempts at "comedy" in Skip Beat annoy you? Does the angular, ugly art annoy you? Well, here is a much more coherent, fun to look at alternative!

So what exactly does this manga offer? In terms of story, it offers something fairly unique in terms of a manga about actors and actresses, which is a fairly complete walkthrough of several stories. Others all offer summaries, or perhaps a bit more, but nothing like this. This is bad in one way, which is that the story drags on forever (decades, in this case!), but is great in that you get to live through several stories within the guise of the greater story. Some of these stories definitely have touching moments too, so it is not just some bunch of text thrown at you.

The art has that real old school feel of goofiness and skinny, "inadequate" art that is, despite its lacking a perfectly human realism, is so fun to look at (ch. 26 p. 12). The biggest artistic flaw was flowers being randomly thrown in several pages. Granted, I do not get what purpose it is for (to remind us of "purple rose"?), but it unnecessarily wastes space regardless.

Now some spoilers, so stop reading if it will bother you. I want to point out what I thought were weak versus strong storylines or aspects.

The storyline of her friends thinking she abandoned them is utterly unbelievable...no one is that willing to believe a BEST FRIEND abandoned you; it has to be bludgeoned into you! She even came to make up, which should have resolved it, or at least allowed a chance for explanation with a simple phone call.

The storyline where Maya is drugged makes the least sense of the whole manga - how would letting the public know she was forcibly attacked make matters WORSE instead of better? instead she was blamed for partying with them and getting drugged up! I guess the author thought it was more dramatic to have her lose everything, but the author was dead wrong; everyone turning on her to such a degree is ridiculous, literally impossible in real life short of being involved in a rape/murder/pedophilia scandal or something of that high level (ch 74-80ish)

She became a superstar...and got NOTHING out of it? no savings? really?! (ch 80). She becomes destitute repeatedly in this manga, and it makes no sense, kind of like how Tsukikage being destitute also makes no sense. Again, perhaps it is supposed to be dramatic and develop Maya's character, but it really just is senseless and dead wrong.

Now besides just the interesting play stories alone, examples of really nice storylines are like:

The duality of Ayumi being genuinely blessed (and having such a ridiculous amount of advantages over Maya, least of all having started acting 10 years earlier), yet also also genuinely despising being rewarded for her parents' status rather than her merit does make Ayumi more interesting, especially that it is the specific reason given that she wants to play the crimson goddess so badly.

Ayumi taking revenge specifically for Maya was kind of interesting, for the time she became blacklisted by illicit means. It gave a new level of depth to the rivalry, although it took it pretty much inexorably into perhaps too friendly a rivalry from that point onward.

It gets to being a bit nauseating how often it is referenced, but the purple rose storyline was genuinely sweet and meaningful for a long while. I think this was diluted more due to the author stretching the manga on too long; when that happens, an author usually loses a bit of the original dedication to creativity and meaningful dialogue, and it seems to be what is happening here.

Anyway this was not really a conventional review, sorry; I just wrote a bunch of stuff as I read it, and decided to quickly try to make it more coherent and see if anyone would like it. It is not the greatest manga ever, but even someone who pretty strictly enjoys shounen/seinen can enjoy this shoujo/josei, so I felt I should express something!