"Has potential" means "has not yet lived up to it". That's the lesson I hope people that were all over hyping Time Paradox Ghostwriter get out of this because that's certainly how I ended up feeling. I can't blame people for getting excited over a series like this as it seemed like this series would be Bakuman minus the stock romance + Stein;s Gate, a cool seeming idea that had some interesting questions to ask about creative writing, particularly whether or not it's truly possible for a different writer to take up someone else's beloved intellectual property without losing the intrinsic value that made the work so special in the first place. It's a question that the protagonist, the failing wannabe mangaka Teppei, finds himself having to answer with his own belabored effort when he receives a piece of the future from his microwave in the form of an issue of Weekly Shounen Jump featuring the debut of White Knight, a series set to make waves when it debuts in 10 years, but does not exist in the present. Teppei takes it upon himself to steal the manga wholesale and uses the weekly magazines he would receive henceforth as drafts for his own redrawn version to pass off to the public as an original work. Add into the equation the real creator of White Knight, a teenage girl named Itsuki Aino, has already conceptualized the story and is herself currently trying to break into the manga scene as an assistant, and you've got one spicy set up full of potentially rich and fulfilling avenues. There will be spoilers, but given how this series is set to be axed with next issues as of the time of writing, it shouldn't matter.

Of which the series takes absolutely none. It's kind of hard to say why. How much of it has to do with incompetence on the part of the writer and how much with how poorly Japan's reader base took to the idea of following the exploits of a shameless plagiarist (to the point to which all mentions of words "plagiarism, or plagiarist had to be replaced with synonyms for the first poorly-selling volume release), I can't say. But what I can tell you is that what we got as a result is confused, poorly paced mess that bulldozes all of it's oppurtunities for sudden time skips or just lazy storytelling. Did you want to see how Teppei would force himself to evolve as a writer to match the higher bar set by the Future Aino? Sorry. Were you wondering how Present Aino would approach the man profiting off of ideas so similar to hers they far exceed being called uncanny similarity? Well she befriends him immediately and shows, showing not even a hint of suspicion and even starts another smash hit manga soon after (a feat her future counterpart wouldn't accomplish until nearly a decade later).

The problem with this accelerated approach to storytelling is that it doesn't give any of the questions raised in the first chapter answers with any room to breath. What is it that makes White Knight so good to begin with? It just is. How does Teppei fill such big shoes when the issues from the future stop appearing? He just does. I brought up my positive comparison to the series Bakuman, a work that showed far more interest in showing what it truly meant to be a manga artist. The specific writing techniques Muto Ashirogi had to adopt when tackling different genres in there struggle to find something that would stick as a multi media franchise, the weekly grind to hit the top survey rankings and the resulting rivalries. It's because of our witnessing of the grueling routine of these starting artists that each of their victories and failures feel all the more uplifting and devastating respectively. TGPW beyond the first few chapters likes to tell you that all that struggle really did happen, for real just trust us, but taking shortcuts just makes everything about the story ring as empty and what's this all in service of?

Well I also did compare this series to Stein;s Gate, and while that comparison is a bit more tenuous, both works undergo a sudden shift into a "save the girl" type narrative via time travel. The shift really did feel like the manga equivalent of a "rating trap" but at this point the manga's fate was likely already sealed, and I already had checked out. Too many narrative opportunities and I could smell the axe coming a month ahead of people who are only now surprised to know this series didn't do too hot. These past few chapters feel as though they might have worked better for a final volume for a much longer series in which the relationship between Teppei and Aino would have felt far better realized, but that level of investment was left behind in one of the timeskips. So what we're left with is nothing more than the skeleton of what seemed to be a great story that died too soon and was picked to the bone before it had the chance to be told.