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tutufansI suffer from a disease which affects approximately 65% of bloggers worldwide. The condition has yet to be named, but its symptoms include an uncontrollable desire to experience potentially terrible media. We go into this painful experience knowing full well that it can only end in angry tears, willingly ingesting the kind of mind-poison that so many people discover purely by accident and are made more miserable for it. Really, I can't say with total certainty why I do this. For the lolz? Perhaps.
I am a biased bastard. Tread carefully, beware of foul language, and try not to think too much.
The first thing you need to know before going into this quasi-review is that, in the case of this series, the anime preceded the manga. This proves more and more difficult to convince people of every single time I encounter someone who thinks otherwise, and it's driving me closer and closer to committing murder.
The second thing you need to know is that the cover of the book tells lies. What it says is that director and creator of the series were responsible for the manga's story, and that Shinonome Mizuo is responsible only for the art. This was heartening to me as I waited for the mailman to bring me my comic book, but my optimism was soundly shattered when I verified online that Shinonome had been gifted with a creative learner's permit. This is what we in the business of reviewing bad comic books call, "a terrible mistake." I did not allow myself to read any more about the manga until it arrived, even going so far as to forbid friends from telling me about it.
The third thing you need to know is about Shinonome himself, and it will make a lot of the review make a lot more sense. I feel it's necessary that you know of his other work - his only other work. I have nothing personally against hiring an (at the time) unknown artist to do an adaptation. I have no problem with girls' love manga. What I do have issues with is the fact that so much of what seemed weird about the manga makes much more sense when one possesses this knowledge.
That said, the manga makes its first impression by showing us Ahiru and Mytho dancing together in the same weird quasi-super deformed style that crops out throughout the entire book. This would have been adorable if I hadn't realized seconds later that Ahiru's skirt, long though it was in her dream sequence, was completely transparent. This is not the first time that her panties make an appearance, nor is it the first original costume design that Shinonome inflicts upon the reader. Yes, inflicts, as one would inflict a wound. The dream sequence ends when Ahiru's disgustingly cute alarm clock beeps, and she narrates to us that her name is Arima as she dashes to class. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that such a grievous typographical error made its way through to final production. All I can hope to theorize is that every proofreader rejected it as a hallucination and passed it along.
Mytho and Fakir are introduced a couple pages later, and Ahiru seems to ping-pong between knowing who Mytho is and having never seen him before. His introduction is where my issues with the character design first began, as well as my gripes about how poorly motion is conveyed in this comic. After we've established that Mytho can't talk and that Fakir is a dickhead, Shinonome's inexplicable replacements for Ahiru's unhelpful friends show up. The tomboy character is somewhat unremarkable, but the character design of Lillie's replacement makes it plainly clear that Shinonome dearly wanted to have a catgirl character, but everyone just kept saying 'no.' And they were right to do so. One thing that the two wildly different designs have in common is that they are crafted with more love and attention to detail than both of the currently introduced male characters combined. I asked myself at this point, "Why do two periphery characters get more love than two of the most central characters in the series?" Then I got online and learned about Shinonome's other work, and it made more sense.
Edelvira also makes more sense once you put the comic into the context of its writer's mind. I honestly thought that she was a third invented character until she was called Edel; she bears that little resemblance to the original design. All right, I says, fine. Maybe she'd be really sexy if she weren't a puppet. Maybe. I dunno. I'm uncomfortable thinking about it. So, she gives Ahiru/Arima a cute little winged-egg-googaw as a replacement for her red shiny googaw that got left in anime land.
She then uses this new googaw to save Mytho from... wait for it.
Wait.
A giant, saw-toothed monster fish. I honestly cannot make this shit up, but Shinonome can. After a page of build-up, she O-face Henshins and... makes some... gestures... at the fish. These gestures cause the fish to shrink and cough up delicious MacGuffins. After Ahiru retruns the MacGuffins to their owner and they have a poorly-foreshortened tender moment, Fakir emerges from a nearby shrub (this is honest to god what it looks like), wearing a bowling shirt. This actually made me laugh harder than the giant fish.
And that's chapter one. Now that I've walked you through part of the book, have some extra tidbits and sweeping generalizations.
I swear to God that I am trying not to be a terrible geek and go on about technical things, but the comic is so far so utterly unremarkable otherwise that I have to concentrate on things like Shinonome's preference for designing and drawing cute female characters. Somehow, it's not even the recurring sight of Ahiru's panties that make this preference so obvious and annoying, but the little things. No, it is not acceptable for the throwaway pseudo-catgirl to have a cute and lovingly crafted design when two of the central characters who are unfortunate enough not to be in the possession of sweater puppies have hair that changes size and shape between pages. Further, it is really weird that Edel is Miss Fanservice when she was formerly a goddamn wooden doll. It is equally weird but not as disagreeable that Kraehe's evil outfit has been reduced to a skirt and two stripes of black latex body paint to help cover up her nips. The sudden fanservice upgrade is even more apparent when you realize that the female characters are the only ones receiving the makeover. It's difficult to call Mytho the prince of pantslessness in this canon, since in the one scene he spends in his distinctive oversized shirt, the garment is very firmly tied around him at the waist and hips by some weird obi sash thing so as to eliminate even the perceived possibility of anything but his mid-thigh being shown.
...the fact that that bothers me, bothers me.
The story doesn't make up for the shamelessness, either. The chapters are, until the very final one, almost entirely episodic. They also usually involve gigantic weirdo monsters, for whatever reason. This would be acceptable if defeating the giant monsters involved actually fighting them, but all Ahiru really does is just dance at them. It's boring enough to watch her dance with things, but to watch her dance at them is painful. The chapters can be summed up in three statements at first, and four after Kraehe arrives on the scene:
Man, I sure am lame. > Mytho needs saving from something. > Fakir is such a douche.
And later:
Man, I sure am lame. > Mytho needs saving from something. > Kraehe is such a bitch. > Fakir is such a douche.
The art doesn't even really make up for any of this. I had gone into this hoping for at least something worth scanning for key panels, but no. There are countless perspective problems, characters' proportions change at random (Mytho is, on some occasions, over a full head shorter than Fakir, for instance), and the art randomly swaps between full-scale and SD.
I'm going to end this on a high note: At one point, Ahiru actually dances with an honest to God human being in order to get a heart shard.
She extracts the shard by gently cupping the ecstatic lass's breasts.
Good night.
I am a biased bastard. Tread carefully, beware of foul language, and try not to think too much.
The first thing you need to know before going into this quasi-review is that, in the case of this series, the anime preceded the manga. This proves more and more difficult to convince people of every single time I encounter someone who thinks otherwise, and it's driving me closer and closer to committing murder.
The second thing you need to know is that the cover of the book tells lies. What it says is that director and creator of the series were responsible for the manga's story, and that Shinonome Mizuo is responsible only for the art. This was heartening to me as I waited for the mailman to bring me my comic book, but my optimism was soundly shattered when I verified online that Shinonome had been gifted with a creative learner's permit. This is what we in the business of reviewing bad comic books call, "a terrible mistake." I did not allow myself to read any more about the manga until it arrived, even going so far as to forbid friends from telling me about it.
The third thing you need to know is about Shinonome himself, and it will make a lot of the review make a lot more sense. I feel it's necessary that you know of his other work - his only other work. I have nothing personally against hiring an (at the time) unknown artist to do an adaptation. I have no problem with girls' love manga. What I do have issues with is the fact that so much of what seemed weird about the manga makes much more sense when one possesses this knowledge.
That said, the manga makes its first impression by showing us Ahiru and Mytho dancing together in the same weird quasi-super deformed style that crops out throughout the entire book. This would have been adorable if I hadn't realized seconds later that Ahiru's skirt, long though it was in her dream sequence, was completely transparent. This is not the first time that her panties make an appearance, nor is it the first original costume design that Shinonome inflicts upon the reader. Yes, inflicts, as one would inflict a wound. The dream sequence ends when Ahiru's disgustingly cute alarm clock beeps, and she narrates to us that her name is Arima as she dashes to class. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that such a grievous typographical error made its way through to final production. All I can hope to theorize is that every proofreader rejected it as a hallucination and passed it along.
Mytho and Fakir are introduced a couple pages later, and Ahiru seems to ping-pong between knowing who Mytho is and having never seen him before. His introduction is where my issues with the character design first began, as well as my gripes about how poorly motion is conveyed in this comic. After we've established that Mytho can't talk and that Fakir is a dickhead, Shinonome's inexplicable replacements for Ahiru's unhelpful friends show up. The tomboy character is somewhat unremarkable, but the character design of Lillie's replacement makes it plainly clear that Shinonome dearly wanted to have a catgirl character, but everyone just kept saying 'no.' And they were right to do so. One thing that the two wildly different designs have in common is that they are crafted with more love and attention to detail than both of the currently introduced male characters combined. I asked myself at this point, "Why do two periphery characters get more love than two of the most central characters in the series?" Then I got online and learned about Shinonome's other work, and it made more sense.
Edelvira also makes more sense once you put the comic into the context of its writer's mind. I honestly thought that she was a third invented character until she was called Edel; she bears that little resemblance to the original design. All right, I says, fine. Maybe she'd be really sexy if she weren't a puppet. Maybe. I dunno. I'm uncomfortable thinking about it. So, she gives Ahiru/Arima a cute little winged-egg-googaw as a replacement for her red shiny googaw that got left in anime land.
She then uses this new googaw to save Mytho from... wait for it.
Wait.
A giant, saw-toothed monster fish. I honestly cannot make this shit up, but Shinonome can. After a page of build-up, she O-face Henshins and... makes some... gestures... at the fish. These gestures cause the fish to shrink and cough up delicious MacGuffins. After Ahiru retruns the MacGuffins to their owner and they have a poorly-foreshortened tender moment, Fakir emerges from a nearby shrub (this is honest to god what it looks like), wearing a bowling shirt. This actually made me laugh harder than the giant fish.
And that's chapter one. Now that I've walked you through part of the book, have some extra tidbits and sweeping generalizations.
I swear to God that I am trying not to be a terrible geek and go on about technical things, but the comic is so far so utterly unremarkable otherwise that I have to concentrate on things like Shinonome's preference for designing and drawing cute female characters. Somehow, it's not even the recurring sight of Ahiru's panties that make this preference so obvious and annoying, but the little things. No, it is not acceptable for the throwaway pseudo-catgirl to have a cute and lovingly crafted design when two of the central characters who are unfortunate enough not to be in the possession of sweater puppies have hair that changes size and shape between pages. Further, it is really weird that Edel is Miss Fanservice when she was formerly a goddamn wooden doll. It is equally weird but not as disagreeable that Kraehe's evil outfit has been reduced to a skirt and two stripes of black latex body paint to help cover up her nips. The sudden fanservice upgrade is even more apparent when you realize that the female characters are the only ones receiving the makeover. It's difficult to call Mytho the prince of pantslessness in this canon, since in the one scene he spends in his distinctive oversized shirt, the garment is very firmly tied around him at the waist and hips by some weird obi sash thing so as to eliminate even the perceived possibility of anything but his mid-thigh being shown.
...the fact that that bothers me, bothers me.
The story doesn't make up for the shamelessness, either. The chapters are, until the very final one, almost entirely episodic. They also usually involve gigantic weirdo monsters, for whatever reason. This would be acceptable if defeating the giant monsters involved actually fighting them, but all Ahiru really does is just dance at them. It's boring enough to watch her dance with things, but to watch her dance at them is painful. The chapters can be summed up in three statements at first, and four after Kraehe arrives on the scene:
Man, I sure am lame. > Mytho needs saving from something. > Fakir is such a douche.
And later:
Man, I sure am lame. > Mytho needs saving from something. > Kraehe is such a bitch. > Fakir is such a douche.
The art doesn't even really make up for any of this. I had gone into this hoping for at least something worth scanning for key panels, but no. There are countless perspective problems, characters' proportions change at random (Mytho is, on some occasions, over a full head shorter than Fakir, for instance), and the art randomly swaps between full-scale and SD.
I'm going to end this on a high note: At one point, Ahiru actually dances with an honest to God human being in order to get a heart shard.
She extracts the shard by gently cupping the ecstatic lass's breasts.
Good night.