After being attacked at a handshake event, Nina has left the world of idols behind for a regular high school life, although it’s certainly not the way she ever wished to say goodbye to her miniskirt. She’s trying to keep a low profile, especially since her stalker is still out there, but that doesn’t mean she won’t speak up when she sees the people around her also dealing with sexist, violent acts.
The first volume of Not Your Idol was an unexpectedly forceful and thoughtful look on the societal pressures that all women, not just idols, have to live with and it was really interesting to see a story engage with the nuisance behind how and why Nina and her classmates handle the same situations in different ways. While sometimes infuriating to read, the way that some of Nina’s classmates failed to understand things like groping and clothing choices by teenage girls felt very true to life. I felt like the series did a good job not blaming the individual girls for handling these stressful situations differently.
By comparison, volume 2 feels much more muddled and like Aoi Makino was struggling to try and work out the next steps in Nina’s story, especially with the reveal that the multiple hints of her new classmate Hikaru being her stalker were revealed to all be red herrings. With that in mind, it’s less surprising that this series has been on hiatus in Japan ever since this second volume was published in 2018 but it is a shame that it hasn’t resumed yet.
Speaking of Hikaru and red herrings, I found myself rather annoyed that after the first volume’s cliffhanger, where it looked like he was abducting Nina, that no, he just has incredibly similar mannerisms and a similar appearance to Nina’s attacker but he’s not it after all! This reveal was probably the plan from the beginning but I just don’t feel like it was executed well, since, like many other parts of this volume, it just feels like Aoi Makino has gotten stuck. In some ways this is best shown in just how messy Nina’s feelings are, like her continued and mixed feelings towards being an idol.
Nina continues to love how idols persist with a smile no matter the situation and wishes she could continue to inspire that same feeling in fans. However, she has a hard time reconciling this with the idea that, in some ways, her fans only care about parts of her, not all of her, and those locked-away feelings were already in her mind before the attack. At the same time, in other scenes Nina talks about how much she received from her fans and how she doesn’t feel like she “gave” enough in return, and how she wants another chance to be a “true idol.” It’s a reasonable mixture of feelings — I can certainly imagine them all existing in one person — but all of these moments happen so close together that it doesn’t feel like Nina is truly making progress in understanding herself.
Quite honestly, my first thought when reading these scenes was “is Aoi Makino trying to convince themselves that it’s alright to like idols?” because this swing was so extreme. And it’s immediately followed up with another character saying, “Why does a Halloween costume contest turn into a beauty pageant? Why do high school sports teams for boys have managers that are girls? Why do female idols disappear before they turn 30?” Again, all perfectly fine and realistic feelings, but I just don’t know if Aoi Makino really thought everything all out before starting a series that intends to tackle some of the most insidious sexism that pervades society.
The interactions between Nina and Hikaru in this volume are also a messier and weaker spot in the story; since Hikaru still feels ashamed for not helping his younger sister when she was abused by a teacher, he has a real martyr complex and it makes some of his interactions with Nina come off strangely. “I’m nothing like those men. I don’t want that kind of trust. I want you to doubt me as long as you need to until you’re not scared of me anymore!” he says, after Nina has already said that she’s sure he isn’t the guy who attacked her, and heavily implies that, while she’s still scared of men she doesn’t know very well, that this is something she’s working through.
The entire scene, which leads off volume 2, feels much more melodramatic than the story before and it feels off for it. Of course, Nina’s stalker is still out there and it seems like Not Your Idol intends to get “darker” before it gets better; personally I would be fine if the story wrapped up the part with Nina’s stalker quickly and became a more introspective work than a thriller. But, with no more chapters or volumes on the horizon indefinitely, I truly have no guess how this series will progress.
Sadly this volume doesn’t end in a satisfying place for a conclusion, and at this point I wouldn’t avoid recommending Not Your Idol to interested readers but without any kind of stopping point I would certainly hesitate in doing so.