Teppei Sasaki has long dreamed of being a serialized mangaka in Weekly Shonen Jump, but by the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, he has repeatedly failed to produce a oneshot his editor feels worthy of submission, much less getting selected for publication. In the depths of debt and despair, he is one breath short of giving up when lightning strikes—literally. A bolt of lightning fuses together his microwave and a toy robot, and out comes an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump from ten years in the future featuring the beginning of White Knight. Inspired, he quickly adapts it into the his own material in time to submit to Shonen Jump, successfully getting his goal.
Shortly after, he is confronted by the actual creator of White Knight, Isuki Aino. Despite his plagiarism, the two find they aren't so different and form a somewhat rivalry towards manga, and Isuki decides to join his team to help serialize it while she works on making something that can surpass it.
Provides examples of:
- Alternate Timeline: While copies of the White Knight manga by Aino appear from the future, the story makes clear from chapter 2 that the development of Teppei's White Knight won't affect the original timeline at all. There are other alternate timelines, but they only get brief mentions as Mirai explains why saving Aino is a difficult endeavor.
- Armor-Piercing Question: When rejecting Teppei's second manuscript in the first chapter, the Jump editor asks him "Is there anything only you can draw?". Itsuki asks him the exact same thing again when she confronts him about White Knight. Teppei doesn't have an answer because his only real motivation is making people happy with his manga; he's been trying to draw something unique for years and still gets the same tepid reactions to his work anyway.
- Be Yourself: In a way, Teppei learns to take more pride in his work and start publishing things that show off his real skills. He eventually learns that in the original timeline, a oneshot he made after quitting Jump and entering the work force was what made Aino start drawing in the first place. He also begins writing off the wall, crazy stories after White Knight ended that never lasted more than a year at best in Weekly Jump—but he's never been happier regardless, as the manga he makes is his and his alone.
- Cassandra Truth: Teppei tries to explain how he actually wrote White Knight, but Itsuki doesn’t believe him when he says it came from the future out of his microwave.
- Cliché Storm: Played With. White Knight is described as a bog standard action manga and nothing in the story is particularly innovative, but it's executed well enough for people to enjoy it.
- Cut Short: The series was ultimately ended rather quickly after only a few months.
- Death of the Author: Itsuki’s writing philosophy is that the author’s intent doesn’t matter compared to the reader’s experience.You know how on the web page for manga contest submissions, they always say “draw something only you can draw”? And “put your message to the reader in it”? What’s up with that? Who cares, as long as it’s good! The readers just want to enjoy the manga, they don’t care about the artist!
- Delayed Ripple Effect: Teppei publishes his own version of White Knight, but the future version, still created by Itsuki, keeps coming in a chapter a week.
- Establishing Character Moment: Teppei is introduced getting a kid’s balloon out of a tree, falling to the ground, and saying his experience would make a great manga. It shows that he’s a relentless people-pleaser, often at the cost of his own wellbeing.
- For Happiness: Both Itsuki and Teppei create manga because they want people to be entertained, and thus go for a broad appeal. However, while Teppei’s works are considered insincere and uninspired, Itsuki is so talented, no one minds that her writing is (by her own admission) completely impersonal.
- From Bad to Worse: The microwave doesn’t release an issue one week, worrying Teppei that they weren’t coming at all anymore. Another week later, a new issue arrives, but there’s no White Knight—just a note informing readers that Itsuki Aino has died.
- Ghostwriter: If you want to spin it, the microwave (Mirai) produces the manga for Teppei Sasaki, and he just needs to redraw it. But overall Teppei effectively steals Isuki Aino's work without her knowing and publishes it under his name.
- Honor Before Reason: Offered future lottery numbers to finance future development of White Knight, Teppei refuses on the grounds that it’s his responsibility, so he’ll have to pay for everything.
- I've Come Too Far: It’s not until Teppei’s White Knight oneshot is published that he discovers the future manga he based it on was real, not a hallucination. Despite his misgiving about continuing his plagiarism, he’s already ensured Itsuki could never publish her own version of White Knight in this timeline, and so serializes his version so the world at least gets his imitation.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Teppei gets hit with this hard in the epilogue. After White Knight ends, Teppei's next three manga are all cancelled in short succession, as he no longer has a better writer's work to keep him afloat.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The epilogue does have a heavy dose of reality subtext to it. Teppei's ultimate fate, to have three of his manga cancelled after relatively short runs, is similar to series artist Tsunehiro's track record in Shueisha including the end of this series.
- Ominous Message from the Future: Once Teppei receives the future issue that informs him Itsuki dies in the middle of publishing White Knight at the age of 28, lightning from the microwave pulverizing part of the fridge into iron sand, which moves to form messages to him. It warns that even without writing her version of White Knight, Itsuki will still die unless Teppei’s manga outperforms her upcoming series.
- Most Writers Are Writers: Both of the main characters are manga authors, and much of the series focuses on their struggles and motivations. Both are also the artists of their respective manga, though artwork is a secondary focus.
- Next Sunday A.D.: The manga begins in the time it was released (May 2020), but a series of Time Skips move things into the next year after only a few months of publication.
- Oblivious Guilt Slinging: The constant praise for a work he plagiarized burns Teppei up inside, especially when it’s coming from the manga’s actual creator.
- The Perfectionist: Both Teppei and Itsuki want to create the "ultimate manga" that can be enjoyed by everyone in the whole world, and would dedicate almost their entire lives working on their creation to take it to newer heights. Itsuki, in particular, is such a Control Freak over her work that she dismissed all her assistants because she felt that her result is much better when she's the only one in charge. The exhaustion from overwork leads to her death.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: A time portal gives Teppei a series of Weekly Shonen Jump copies from ten years further in a (now alternate) timeline, and he recreates its newest series, White Knight, under his own name. While there are factors giving Teppei sympathy even besides his career riding on it (he thought the book was a hallucination until after publishing the one-shot, by which point giving up would simply ensure no version of the story is ever finished), he still utterly hates himself for it.
- Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: A variant. When Itsuki publicly confronts Teppei about publishing the White Knight oneshot, he believes she’s trying to kill him in retribution. Teppei implies that, if she wants him dead, he’ll kill himself to spare her the burden of being a murderer.If you want me to die, I can die on my own! I don’t want to rob you of your future any more than I already have!
- San Dimas Time: Every manga issue that comes out of the time machine was published the same time in the future as the previous one (i.e. Teppei gets them on a weekly basis just like the magazine in the present). If they’re not necessarily being sent back the same amount of time, they’re likely being made to seem that way.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The last future issue of Jump informs us that Itsuki Aino dies in ten years, and the following message strongly implies the whole ordeal was a way to prevent her premature death.
- Show Within a Show: Several in-series manga are shown. The largest focus is on White Knight, a manga Itsuki Aino wrote ten years in the future (and has planned since high school), a Dark Fantasy Fighting Series about a knight fighting to restore the day during an eternal night.
- Stolen Credit Backfire: After convincing Itsuki not to overwork herself, Teppei ends White Knight and tries to make more series that are truly his own—none of which last more than a year, and one ends in a single volume. In a subversion, Teppei is much happier failing with his own stories than succeeding with someone else's, and the epilogue ends with still trying to make more.
- Take Our Word for It: For obvious reasons, we see very little of White Knight, and its quality is mostly portrayed by characters reacting after reading it.
- That Was Not a Dream: After reading the first chapter of White Knight, Teppei steps outside, and can’t find the book when he comes back in. He concludes the story from the time machine microwave was just a hallucination, and therefore fair game to make his own. In truth, Teppei exhaustedly misplaced it amongst a pile of previous issues. Since he ends up temporarily moving back with his parents to make the full oneshot, weeks pass before he realizes this.
- Time Stands Still: In the last few chapters, Teppei asks Mirai to stop time for him so he can find a way to save Aino. He spends decades inside that small pocket of time not eating, sleeping, or feeling fatigue as he burned his way through multiple manga series.
