Weekly Shounen Jump is the most famous manga magazine in the world, with series like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, Yugi-Oh, Bleach and Yaiba, just to name very few. It’s a magazine that always seems to have a hit title on their sleeves, and this can give people the idea that Jump spends a lot of time curating their manga, making sure that only the best of the best are published, but this is actually far from what really happens.
On the contrary, Weekly Shounen Jump has a new batch of manga every three or so months, and each batch comes with two to four brand new manga. And every time a new manga starts, another ends. This creates a magazine where most manga that debut ends at around four or five months after they start. Only the manga that managed to create a core audience and have decent sales in their first volumes survive. It’s important for a manga to have an initial buzz.

And Time Paradox Ghostwriter had that buzz. It had the luck of starting the exact same issue that Kimetsu no Yaiba ended, so people point at it as if it was the manga that came to take the place of one of the best selling manga of recent times. And while, yes, it was the manga that came to take Yaiba’s literal spot in the magazine, it was just another one of a batch that happened to start when Yaiba ended. But that didn’t matter, people were reading the first chapter and talking about it.

The first chapter is about Teppei Sasaki, a mangaka that is trying his best to get published in Shounen Jump, but keeps getting rejected, because, despite writing decent manga, they always feel generic. The editor asked him to write a manga that only he could write, but he fails every time.
After many tries, Sasaki is ready to give up, but during that night a lightning strikes his house, burning his microwave and this somehow puts an issue of Shounen Jump inside it. Not any issue, but an issue from 2030, ten years into the future. The magazine has a lot of manga that Sasaki does not recognize, but most importantly, it features the very first chapter of White Knight, a manga that according to him is literally the best thing to ever exist ever and your favourite manga is dumb and stupid when compared to it, and you if you don’t rate it the objective 10 out a 10, I’m blocking you. When Sasaki wakes up the next day he realizes that the issue is gone, so he concludes what any sane person would, he was dreaming. But in that dream he read a fantastic manga, one that he could now put into paper. He adapts it to a one-shot and everyone in Jump loves and publishes it. But when he comes back home he has the issue of Chapter 2 of White Knight waiting in his microwave. He was not dreaming, and worse, he just stole someone’s work.

This is the premise, and it wasn’t too long for people to point out similarities to Bakuman and Steins;Gate, which I think helped getting more buzz, but the manga is incredibly unique as is. Sure there are elements, being a manga about mangaka in Jump, it would of course have some similarities with Bakuman, which talks about the exact same thing, but the story itself is very fresh. This, together with the fact that the art is incredibly solid, clean and gorgeous, making it one of the best in the magazine, made people be sure that this wasn’t just another manga to be axed soon. Time Paradox Ghostwriter had potential and it could be one of the next pillars of Shounen Jump. And as the next couple of chapters came out more people seemed to get into it. Looking at Anilist and Myanimelist rankings, TPGW was easily one of the highest ranking debuts in the magazine this year. It seemed like TPGW was set to be a success with a solid fanbase…

OR WAS IT?

Sorry… I… I like Vsauce, I wanted to do that.
But this was just the reality of the western audiences, the reality in Japan couldn’t be further apart. See, remember when I said that Sasaki just stole a work? Turns out that Japanese audiences didn’t particularly enjoy a shounen main character doing that, and they let it know.
And I understand, but I think the way the manga tackled it was interesting, the mangaka showed remorse when he realized he stole a work and, yes, he continued to do so, even after meeting the original writer of White Knight on his timeline (who eventually becomes his assistant), but he did had his reasons. The main one being that by having the one-shot be published he destroyed any chances of Itsuki Aino (the original mangaka) to write it in the future. So only he could do it in his timeline.
It doesn’t completely excuse him, but he never seems to be doing it out of spite, and the story never really tries to pretend that plagiarism is good. Over the course of the story you can catch glimpses of Sasaki slowly making White Knight his own work.

It didn’t matter though, the Japanese people, you know, the ones that actually buy the magazine and the volumes, didn’t like the premise and they made sure to let it know, especially on the internet. To the point that the first volume tried to remove any mention of plagiarism. Which… I haven’t read the volume version, just the mangaplus weekly translations, but I don’t see how you can do that on a manga where it’s part of the core premise…
Either way, even with this, the volume got bad reviews and bad sales, although, surprisingly, not the worse Jump volume of that month, because thank God that Guardian of the Witch exists, and thank God more that it’s axed already.

This pressure to appease the audiences and gain some fanbase wasn’t present just on the volume version of the manga. The chapters started suffering too. You could tell that the mangaka was trying very hard to go through the plagiarism “arc” of the story as fast as he could, so he could potentially deliver something that the audiences could relate more to, but the result was an atrocious pacing. Each chapter started to spawn months of the story’s timeline and things just happened, and then moved onto the next thing that should happen.
In one example, we are finally introduced to a chapter that Sasaki will have to write completely on his own, a chapter that he has 7 weeks left to write. It is a big deal and we spend about a chapter and a half exploring the fact that he’s going to that, just for the manga to then skip months ahead and not mention this INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT POINT TO THE STORY ever again. It seems that almost every plot point that is introduced in the middle part of the story lacked a proper build-up and a proper conclusion.

It didn’t save it, of course. The manga was scheduled to be cancelled on it’s 14th chapter, which is incredibly early, even for early cancelations and the earliest I personally remember seeing.
When a manga gets axed, I’m not expecting a perfect ending. The mangaka was not able to tell the story he wanted to tell and they probably set up plot point that will not be resolved. They can either go for an open ending or a rushed one… but TPGW’s ending… it was good. It was really fucking good.

Maybe because the manga was rushed in the middle, when the fourth to last chapter starts to wrap-up the things, it doesn’t feel like it came out of nowhere, and maybe because the mangaka has nothing else to lose, the pacing goes back to normal, and you feel like the story can breathe again. The following chapter is probably my favourite and the mangaka even manages to throw a small remark at the fact that he didn’t had the time to tell the story he wanted to. It was probably the best ending he could go for, it was a fantastic read, it was emotional and it was more than I could ask for.

I did want to give this manga a better rating. Or rather, I’d like this manga to have had the time it needed to tell the story it wanted the way it wanted. There’s a lot of axed manga in Jump that are cancelled because they are too generic, or have too many flaws, and sometimes because they are too niche. But Time Paradox Ghostwriter was rejected because people didn’t want to accept it’s slightly morally grey character, even though they will openly accept Light’s murdering ways in Death Note. It was never that TPGW couldn’t tell a good story, Hell, I think the last four chapters show a capability to do just that, but it never was given that chance, and that is sad. The start and the ending are solid, but sadly the middle has too many problems for me to raise the score higher than the one I’m giving it.