Karmaburn.com » Archive » I should like mono more than I do

I don’t know if you’re really a self-insert character, but you seem like a self-insert character.

Mono (stylized in all lowercase letters as mono for some reason) is ostensibly about a school photography club that narrowly averts being shut down, but really the show is a series of commercials promoting anime tourism. The anime is based on a 4-koma manga by Afro, who also created Yuru Camp△, so there are a lot of cameos and other bits reinforcing the connection. Nevertheless, I don’t like mono nearly as much, even though I can’t point to any particular failings. There’s nothing wrong with it, at least, and it does share some of the charm, but I mostly just regard it as merely fine.

These are some eyebrows.

Notably, I generally like the Yuru Camp△ characters more than the mono characters. (Well, the gothic lolita mangaka from mono amuses me more than the drunk teacher from Yuru Camp△, so it’s not a perfect sweep.) Maybe it’s because the mono anime seems to focus so much on locations and activities while emphatically reminding viewers that they could go to these places and do all these things too. (Perhaps not the high-velocity skateboarding.) Yuru Camp△ also devoted a lot of attention to its real-life settings, but I feel as though the first season spent significantly more time letting us get to know Rin herself and what she was like. It didn’t matter where she was camping. I can’t say the same about the mono characters and their allegedly photography-based activities.

Permanent link to this post. 2025 June 10, 13:37 | mono | Tags: Anime Tourism, Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, Initial impressions, Season Introduction, Spring 2025, Ueda Reina

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