This episode in a nutshell.
Nanamine's newest manga is finally serialized in Jack. But after its third chapter, his series is starting to slowly drop in terms of ranking. The question is can Nanamine finally realized the error of his ways?
But before talking about Nanamine, let's talk about Nakai who is now fatter and wants revenge on what Aoki did to him last time. To be honest, I am starting to lose the admiration I had for Nakai. The reason why I like Nakai as a character is because his determination to get serialized and to not give up with his dream. But he starts to lose it when the series he and Aoki made is slowly slipping down in terms of rankings. The end result is a shell of a man he used to be. To make matters worse, he starts to think more of himself and less on the people around him, making him one despicable character in some points. Add Nanamine to the equation and we have two people with great egos working in one series.
Speaking of which, it is because of Nakai's desire to eat that he discovered Nanamine's method in making manga. As for what he did in the rest of the episode, it is just him eating or crying because he sees Aoki with some other guy. It is your darn fault on why the heck Aoki lost the trust he had on you! As for Aoki, her new series is steady in terms of rankings and that her boyfriend, Hiramaru is finally serialized. Oh well, kudos to the both of them for their hard work.
As for Nanamine in this episode, he continues to act and high and mighty in front of his editor who is supposed to act high and mighty in front of his artist. The problem with Nanamine is that he doesn't take the words of his editors too seriously and relies more on the advice of the "friends" he met online. Much to my surprise, some of them concluded that Nanamine can't fight Ashirogi in terms of story and setting and it is best not to compete with them. But nope, Nanamine's desire to defeat Ashirogi in his method based on his definition of "friendship, team work and victory" caused him to lose some reliable advisors.
Now comes the fun part in this episode, after chapter 2 of Nanamine's manga, the series starts to fall in terms of rankings until it finally hit double digits around the manga's 5th chapter. For starters, it is quite rare for a shonen gag (?) manga to end up on that rank early in its run. What's fun about it is seeing Nanamine's reaction every time the ranking of his series falls down. We slowly see him break down from that over confident author to some guy who kinda looks like he wants to kill someone for the mistake that he himself brought to himself.
To add up the depression, slowly most of his advisors left the team for reasons that they don't conform to Nanamine's wishes. Seriously, he needs a moment in this series were someone knock him out of his ego like what happened to Niizuma earlier in the series. But nope, even his competent editor can't convince him to stop doing his methods and just concentrate in writing a good story published in his own name and not focus on the ideas created by the people he met online!
At the end, the editorial department learned about Nanamine's methods and as for Nanamine, he wants to fight Ashirogi in a similar story only to receive a rejection coming from them. But because of Kosugi being reliable and competent, he was able to convince Hattori and the Chief Editor to let Nanamine with his idea just to show him the error of his ways. The question is, can he realize his errors or will Nanamine continue to run away from the facts and convince himself that it is the fault of the readers or the fault of some other guy?
