Kageki Shojo volume 4 (manga review)

    I want to love this series, but "Kageki Shojo" volume 4 (by Kumiko Saiki, published by Seven Seas) just spins it's wheels and keeps us at arm's length from our lead character.

    "Kageki Shojo" is the story of an all-girls performing arts school where the goal is to enter the adult all-female performance troupes upon graduation. Watanabe Sarasa is the tall, goofy, high-energy, raw talented, odd-ball who is also positioned, maybe destined, to be a great and unique talent. Should be an amazing series, right? Sadly, this volume doesn't do anything meaningful and in four volumes, I'm not getting a good feeling for this series living up to it's early promise.

    Volume 4 focuses on a once-a-decade school sports festival where the main competitors are the adults from the performance troupes. It is set up as a type of fan service to the fans of the performance troupes. By various circumstances, Watanabe Sarasa has to fill in for one of the adult performers. Of course, her elevation to this position should be a source of great drama amongst the other students, but by and large, that just doesn't come to fruition. While some grumbling is hinted at, four volumes in, everyone seems to have more or less accepted our odd-ball with the high-ceiling untapped talent. Which makes it pretty drama free. 

    In addition to there being no real inter-personal conflict, there is no intra-personal conflict either. Yes, you might say that the whole end of volume 3 (she must find who she is as an actress instead of perfectly mirroring other's great performances) has it's fulfillment in this volume. But it wasn't enough. There is no interiority which how Watanabe is written. We don't really know what she's thinking or feeling or struggling with, not in any depth. (If you read this with any regularity, you know I like my characters with angst) The story is told too much from a third person perspective without enough internal insight. And with little meaningful plot or inter-personal conflict instead, there just isn't much actually happening. Hence my "spinning it's wheels" comment earlier. 

    What continues to be most sad for me as I read this series, is that the prequel volume "Kageki Shojo: The Curtain Rises" focused on Watanabe's roommate, Narata Ai, who is much more interesting and is given much more internal conflict. She's beautiful, somewhat famous already, but an outcast in many ways, with complex internal emotions, she holds others at a distance, and her outcome and destiny are not as clearly fixed as Watanabe's. 

    In fact, I always read Narata's arc with the potential to be very open ended and potentially sad. She was a teen idol in an idol group, who was the outcast of that group. Her move to the Kouka school almost has the feel of going into exile, almost like Maria in "Sound of Music" going back to the nunnery. So what will this hold for her? Will she continue on to join Kouka's troupe? Will that make her happy? Does she long for something else? Is that something else in entertainment, or is it something totally different? There's so much to explore with her character. I so wish that we got more of Narata in the main series. I really wish she was the main character in the main series. She is simply more interesting.

    So "Kageki Shojo" volume 4 is fine. The art is somewhat simple, but still engaging. What little conflict there is is fairly superficial, the plot itself isn't that interesting, and we don't really get any insight into the lead character. I just don't know where this series is going, or what it's trying to say or be. Or maybe, I do, and it's too simple an outcome and I'm looking for something more that will never be there. (shrug). Ah well, it's not bad, I'll keep reading it, but it isn't great either. It's just sort of fluff.

BTW, this is the 300th post on this blog!

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Missed It Monday: Someday's Dreamers - complete series (Manga Review)

Missed it Monday is the regular column where I review manga/anime that I didn't get to read/watch when they first came out.

Someday's Dreamers volumes 1 and 2 (complete series) - 5.5/10 (*see below for full scoring rubric)

Someday's Dreamers is a two volume manga that was originally published by Tokyopop in English in 2006. I've watched the anime based on it as well as the "sequel" anime "Someday's Dreamers II: Sora" (which was the far better anime, and definitely worth checking out). So I was glad to finally get my hands on the manga it was based on.

Someday's Dreamers takes place in our world, but with one difference: some people can use magic. There is a formal government agency which regulates those who use magic in adulthood and the magic users (mages in the anime) are public servants who work to help others on a contract basis. Someday's Dreamer's follows Yume, a senior in high school, as she goes off to Tokyo to study with a professional and take her final exam to become a licensed magic user.

Convenience Store Woman - liberating views of what is and is not valued by society (book Review)

Convenience Store Woman - 8/10

I finally got a chance to read Sayaka Murata's "Convenience Store Woman," a quick and quirky novella about a 36 year old woman who has worked in a convenience store in Japan ever since she graduated high school. This book is by turns charming and revealing and was a very fast read.

Keiko, now 36, recounts how she never understood why people thought she was strange. Her actions always seemed logical to her, even in childhood. One amazing example was from elementary school. Two boys were fighting and everyone else was screaming "stop them stop them." So she does the logical thing, gets  a shovel, and beats one on the head. That got him to stop instantly. Problems solved. She can't understand why she was the one in trouble afterwards. So quickly enough she learns that the easiest way to get through the day was to mimic the social conventions of other people even if she didn't understand or care about the conventions (or the people) at all. As a result, she graduated high-school quietly and went on to start university.

Blank Canvas volume 4 - now we know the heartbreak (Manga Review)

Blank Canvas vol. 4 - 8/10 (*see full scoring rubric below)

Blank Canvas volume 4 (Seven Seas) continues the memoir of mangaka Akiko Higashimura as her career begins taking off. I love her work and it is amazing to read her manga memoir. All the subtle regret and fear that's been behind the scenes comes to the fore in this volume at its final page cliffhanger. Knowing that this is her real life makes it all the more poignant. I'm hooked, and sad, and sympathetic, and it's totally got me emotionally invested.

My only minor complaint with this volume, is that it did a lot more telling than showing. That's been a structure for the whole series, but it seemed a bit more prevalent in this volume. It's still well worth reading though.

Carole & Tuesday Part 1 - a surprisingly bland story and characters with uneven racial and LGBTQ+ representation (Anime Review)

3/28/20 *after a series of comments/discussion at the bottom of this post, I wanted to make revisions in my review of Part 1 of Carole & Tuesday to clarify my concerns with some racial and LGBTQ+ stereotypes that bothered me. The commenter helped me to better understand the full context of the show (since I had only watched part 1 to this point) as well as the content creation process and representation in the show. I was still bothered and pulled out of the narrative by some choices that were made, but my original review likely took a heavy handed approach in highlighting these issues. I hope this revision is a more balanced and nuanced appraisal of the effort put into this show as well as the feelings I experienced watching it. As always, this is just my experience and others will have very different ones and thus different opinions, that's what makes art art. I will try and mark my edits as I go through and revise this review with brackets and asterisks [*].

Carole & Tuesday Part 1 - [*5/10] (see below for full scoring rubric)

I had really taken my time even starting Carole & Tuesday (something about it had me skeptical - maybe that it was on Netflix) and then it took me a really long time to watch the first 13 episodes that comprise "part 1" because while I sort of enjoyed each episode in the moment, I didn't feel compelled to whip through it like other series.

But finally, amid too much time on my hands during this work closure, I finally finished part 1. I decided to review the series in two parts rather than as a single series, since it was labeled part 1 and 2 (for some reason). I haven't seen part 2 yet [*so there may be aspects of part 2 that put things in part 1 in a different perspective.]  I also found that writing this review was very tough, because there was a lot to wade through with this show. It ended up being a very long review, so I've put BOLD headings along the way if that helps.

Missed it Monday - Love at Fourteen vol 4 (Manga Review)

Missed it Monday is the ongoing column where I review anime/manga that I didn't watch/read when they first came out.

Love at Fourteen vol. 4 - 5/10

It really really hurt me to rate this volume so low. In many ways, Love at Fourteen vol. 4 (Yen Press) was just as cute, sweet, and uplifting as the prior volumes. But in other ways, I've really had to rethink the series in light of a side couple's story.

Love at Fourteen follows long-time friends Kazuki and Kanata, who are seen as more mature than the rest of their third-year middle-school peers, and who begin secretly dating. They are incredibly sweet and kind to each other and model students. Theirs is a simple and cute story but that has some surprising emotional resonance. Their story in volume 4 is just as wonderful as in the prior volumes.

It's uniform changing time and Kazuki and Kanata can't get on the same page. They both want to wear the same uniforms as the other, but they keep getting it reversed. The other part of their story focuses on preparations for the school athletic festival where their time is split away from each other but the ways they find to connect anyway. Cute!

Our Dreams at Dusk volume 4 makes me wish it was a longer series (Manga Review)

Our Dreams at Dusk vol. 4 - 8/10

I really, really wished I could give this final volume of Our Dreams at Dusk (Seven Seas) a higher rating. But unfortunately, it ends too quickly. So much is jammed into this volume, so much is left unresolved, and so many things happen so quickly that the emotional impact is somewhat diminished.

That being said, it's still a wonderful volume for an incredible series. Our Dreams at Dusk dared to be open and honest about a range of LGBTQ issues in an incredibly realistic fashion. Volume 4 certainly upholds this important value, but doesn't rise to the heights I wish it had simply due to how much happens so quickly.

Volume 4 picks up with the Triangle House near completion. It is decided that it will be inaugurated with the wedding of Saki and Haru. It is also Christmas time, and we get deep insight into Tchaiko's personal life. We meet his partner (who is dying int he hospital) and learn about his partner's son and the intentional distance Tchaiko keeps from him.

Blank Canvas volume 3 in which Akiko makes her debut (Manga Review)

Blank Canvas: My so-called artist's journey Volume 3 - 7.5/10

In Blank Canvas volume 3 (Seven Seas), our author and auto-biographer, finally bridges the gap between her schooling in painting and drawing and her work as a mangaka. However, the foreboding foreshadowing of the prior volumes (in which I think something bad eventually happens to her high-school drawing instructor) are mostly missing from this volume. Instead, it concentrates on her life after graduation and first steps towards getting published.

After graduation, Akiko is forced to move back with her parents and leave her boyfriend to finish his studies. While with her parents, she gets a job working in her sensei's art studio where she displays a natural talent for pushing the promising students even further along. The two make a formidable teaching pair, but ultimately it won't pay the bills and her family insists she get a "real" job. But somehow she manages to still go to sensei's studio and also finally submits her first manga one-shot.

Missed It Monday - Iroduku: The world in colors (anime review)

Missed it Monday is the ongoing column where I review anime and manga that I missed when they first came out.

Iroduku: The world in colors - 5.5/10

Let me be blunt. "Iroduku: The world in colors" was an overwrought, under developed, and exceedingly boring anime. I also think it served mostly as a vehicle for male fantasy. In short. I didn't really like it.

Hitomi lives in 2078. She is a high-school student in a world where some people can use magic and that is a normal part of society (in some ways, like a huge rip off of the Someday's Dreamers series of manga and anime - a far far better series). For whatever reason, and we'll come back to this later, she cannot see colors. She is also sad (oh so sad) and her grandmother decides to send her back in time 60 years without warning.

Missed It Monday - O Maidens in Your Savage Season Volume 3 (Manga Review)

Missed It Monday is an ongoing series where I review manga and anime I missed when they first came out in search of great series to keep reading.

O Maidens in Your Savage Season Vol. 3 - 9/10

Volume 3 cemented it. O Maidens in Your Savage Season is simply amazing. It so perfectly captures the mix of pubescent sexuality, naivete, lust, fear, anxiety, confusion, and passion with a mix of realism, drama, and comedy. And the art continues to be extraordinary. Basically, I loved this volume and I love this series. I don't say that lightly, I'm pretty "meh" on most series, hate a bunch of others, and only seldom rave.

O Maidens follows the exploits of the literature club, five high-school girls who read well-regarded literature and dissect it with a heavy focus on analyzing the sex scenes. In volume 2, they escaped being shut down when the got a faculty adviser. In addition, each girl is beginning to explore her own sexuality as well as open up (at least to the reader) about their own pasts.

O Maidens in Your Savage Season Volume 1 - a careful balance of comedy, sex talk, and high-school (Manga Review)

O Maidens in Your Savage Season Vol. 1 - 8/10

I knew nothing about O Maidens in Your Savage Season Vol. 1 (Kodansha Comics) when I bought it. Somehow it made it to my wishlist on Amazon where I keep track of manga to read. When it arrived, I noticed that it had been written by the creator of the Anohana anime, one of my favorites for its tough balance of grieving and loss, love, comedy, and melancholy. Would this be more of the same? Well, yes actually, although with perhaps an even tougher topic than childhood death - childhood sexuality! Yikes!

O Maidens in Your Savage Season is set in high-school, where the five female members of the literature club seem hell-bent on reading novels that, for whatever reason, have a fair amount of sex in them. We're told, and through a host of literary references throughout, that these are well respected pieces of literature, and that the girls interest is purely literary. After all, how can one eventually write classic novels, if one does not know and understand the world of adults?

Futaribeya - A Room For Two - Volume 1 (manga review)

Futaribeya Vol. 1 - 6.5/10 or 9/10 YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This will be a simple review for a simple story. If you love comedy moe 4-koma manga, then Futaribeya (Tokyo Pop) is likely to top your list of best series this year. If you tend to like deeper stories and more complex emotional ranges, then you might find this lacking in depth (as in totally). For what it is, it is well done.

Volume 1 is the story of two high-school 1st years, Sakurako Kawawa and Kasumi Yamabuki, who share a room in the local boarding house near their school. Sakurako is very good at school without trying, loves to cook, is dependable, but easygoing. Kasumi is drop-dead gorgeous but doesn't care at all, bad at school, always cold, and always hungry. The volume covers much of their first year, what they eat, where they shop, how they sleep, and many other random assorted moments. 

As is the norm for most 4-koma, this is a gag manga. Each "strip" ends with some sort of humorous moment, mostly silly, sweet, cute, or goofy. But all very very light. There is no service to speak of (which is great). It's basically two nice teens going about their day, but doing so in a cutely funny way. Like I said, if this is your thing, then this is really well done!

I tend to want more depth in my manga, even in comedy ones, and so I don't typically read 4-koma which by its very structure doesn't lead to much depth. I had similar feelings reading Futaribeya as I did reading Tomo-chan Is a Girl! It was cute, but not really my thing. 

However, I did find myself still interested in these two girls' lives even though it isn't the style I most enjoy. Those who know me well know that I LOVE the Sakura Trick anime (even though I don't normally like moe and it has WAYYYYY too much and totally unnecessary service). I haven't read the manga its based on, so I wonder if Futaribeya would similarly benefit from the expanded storytelling power of anime? (Yes, I am a feminist and yes I still love Sakura Trick, it's called cognitive dissonance folks! But I also think it would be defensible if anyone wanted to talk about it.)

The art in Futaribeya is well done for this style, with more attention to detail and shading than is typical of many 4-koma. A bit too much of the time, the characters are drawn superdeformed for emotional (read: "silly") emphasis. But when Yukiko-sensei goes into normal (but still moe) mode, they really show their artistic ability. It may be moe, but it's well done. 

Now, for the big question. Is this a yuri manga? Wikipedia says it is. But I'm thinking, not really. At least for volume 1, we only get the very slightest moments of possibly maybe hints that something might somewhere in the distant future become maybe yuri-ish. But the truth is, any yuri that exists, exists only in your mind (or some of the extra images between chapters) because there isn't anything textual to suggest it (except maybe there is...like when Sakurako gets a bit jealous of her younger sister's attention on Kasumi). There certainly isn't even the slightest bit of overt relationship beyond normal friendship though. But we'll have to see. It certainly could go the yuri direction or it might just stay where it is and let people read into it or "ship" the characters if they want.

Do you like moe teen girl light comedy with no service (sort of like K-On! but without that anime's TOTAL AMAZINGNESS)? If so, this is well done, a strong 9/10. If you like shoujo/josei manga with any substance, nuance, emotional depth, or realism then you'll find this wanting (it's also considered a seinen manga). However there is something to the characters that might make you come back for more, so it gets a 6.5/10 for fans of more intricate stories. You make up your own mind, you know yourself better than I do! As for me, I will probably keep buying it, but it won't be first on my limited expense list each week.

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Tomo-chan is a Girl! volume 1 won me over (Manga Review)

I started reading "Tomo-chan is a Girl!" volume 1 (Seven Seas) on a whim. I had no idea it was a 4-koma series when I started. I have never really liked 4-koma, even though two of my favorite anime are based on ones in that format (Sakura Trick and One Week Friends). I kept thinking I was going to stop reading volume 1, and certainly not buy the next volumes, but something strange happened, and I actually found myself really liking the series and will probably buy at least the next one to see if I keep liking it. Pleasant surprise.

Tomo-chan is a Girl! is the story of Tomo, a rough and tumble girl who has been best friends with Jun since they were little. At first, before going to school, Jun assumed Tomo was another boy his age. Over the years, from elementary, though to high-school, they have stayed close. Throughout, Tomo continues to beat people up (her family runs a dojo) and otherwise not act the part of a traditional girl. But as Tomo got older, she realized she loves Jun. Upon confessing to him, he was utterly oblivious to what she meant by it, thinking it was a total brotherly love. That opens up the comedy of Tomo and Jun, destined to be together, if they can only get out of their own way.

I suppose there is some plot, but being a 4-koma, it's more like reading the sunday comics, each page has it's punch-line, and they mostly consist of Jun not getting that Tomo is a girl and how his interactions make her feel or how clueless Tomo is about all the "boyish" things she does that keep Jun from realizing his own feelings for her.

Both leads are likable, but the star is Tomo's friend Gundou. She's the straightman that every good comedy series needs. But she's also a jerk in the most likable of ways. She antagonizes Jun, teases Tomo lovingly, and sets them both up for great punchlines. It is also clear that she does want the two of them to end up together in the end.

The art is okay. Sometimes it's clean and clear, but other times the lines seem a bit heavy (almost as if it was drawn smaller and enlarged) - some of this may be the reproduction and not the original art. Overall the art is pretty basic, and that may be due to the constraints of a 4-koma layout. It's nothing special, but the character Tomo is drawn with such great expressions and body language that it ends up working. The characters are all discernible from each other which is helpful, some series I can't keep track of people or they aren't unique enough to tell apart, so that much is good. Overall the art is nothing special, but it's decent.

If you like broad comedy, and you like high-school romance, then you'll probably really like this volume. It ended up endearing itself to me enough that I'm going to try volume 2. I'm going to give this volume a 7/10 due to being surprisingly, and unexpectedly, good - somehow, Tomo (the character) endeared herself to me that I'm curious where it will go from here.

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Asobi Asobase is NOT your typical middle-school slice of life, thank god! (Anime Review)

If done well, I'm a fan of the cute girls-doing cute things-cutely genre of anime. If done poorly, I stop watching after 2 episodes. Which would Asobi Asobase be? Turns out, neither! 

If judging from the opening theme song, one would assume that it features three middle-school girls who form a club to explore different hobbies and "pastimes" as they call them. In that opening theme song they look angelic, dressed in white, blushing at each other in a meadow of flowers before falling asleep on each others shoulders under a chalk board. Ah, the innocence of youth...

WRONG! Middle school girls are gross, scary, insane, occasionally mean, weird, and a whole host of other things (mine just started 9th grade thankfully!). Asobi Asobase gets that - boy howdy does it get that. It is a show about what it is really like to be in a middle-school girl's head. In some senses, you could call this a comedy horror series rather than a slice-of-life. 

It is definitely one of the funniest anime shows I have ever seen, ever. I would routinely be laughing out loud (while wearing headphones naturally) so my family was constantly turning to me and asking "what?" I rarely laugh out loud, so that's a big win for this show. 

By way of "plot," the show centers around Olivia, who looks foreign but was born in Japan, speaks Japanese natively, but pretends to speak English as her primary language (which she can't actually speak at all). Hanako is her first friend and the ultimate ring leader of their strange club. She's also certifiably insane in true middle-school fashion. Kasumi looks like she'd be the brains of the bunch, but actually isn't a great student and is more interested in writing BL stories while also being completely terrified of real men. 

As a result of various things of no real significance (other than that they aren't really very popular in school), they form the "pastimers" club which they think focuses on playing various games and traditional hobbies and which others think is a club to study old men who gawk at women (I think). Each episode consists of a few short segments of them engaging in some game or hobby that goes horribly awry due to their own insanity, weirdness, or cruelty as the case requires.

They are mean to each other, pranking each other constantly, vengeful and boastful, gross, and naive. Some of the funniest moments come from their misunderstandings about sex and how it works, especially Hanako. Hanako is fascinating as she comes from a rich family, is somewhat naive, but a hard worker, infatuated with her own perceived amazingness but also completely unpopular in actuality, dependent on her butler/nanny Maeda while also torturing him. She's the pulse that drives the show.

This is what the show is really like!

And let me be clear, this is a show that in several episodes references that fact that Maeda (the butler/nanny) was at some point abducted by aliens and had an alien laser implanted in his ass hole and that when he isn't careful, he accidentally shoots laser beams out his butt. And the show pulls that off effortlessly (Laser Shogi anyone?).

I think the other recurring element that really worked for me was the constant references to how Olivia's armpits smell. This comes up at several points and what's awesome about it is that Olivia has the classic blond hair, blue eyed perfect looks of a western-style anime heroine...but her armpits smell! Just like every other middle-schooler in the world. And the show spends time on it, in varying ways across the series. It does the same gentle humor with all sorts of other things that actually are on middle-schooler's minds. 

I won't bother to get into any details from the individual episodes, as they are short and funny and all over the place. But if you like absurdist comedy based in a slice of life format, then this is your show. 

My only real reservation about the show comes from a side character who is believed to be a boy dressing as a girl attending their all girl's school. She's in several episodes and isn't presented as trans, but instead really given a "wolf in sheeps clothing" cross-dresser persona. There's a trickster/malevolence to her role which comes across as transphobic. This is made more so by the girls' attempts to see whether she has a penis, as well as the character's own scheming around the school. It was just one step too far, as the rest of the show gained its humor from absurdity by the main characters, or harmlessly silly side characters, but this is the one character where the humor actually perpetuated harmful stereotypes about a classically marginalized group.

Contrast that with a scene between the student-council vice president and her boyfriend. In the wrong hands, this scene could perpetuate terrible stereotypes about girls being required to wear makeup and look nice for boys, but here its carried so far as to actually demythify that (as does another episode where Hanako tries makeup with Olivia). In the scene, the student council vice-president doesn't have all her elaborate makeup on. She is seen with only one side done by her boyfriend who shrieks in horror. The vice president then knees him so hard others think he's a corpse for the rest of the episode and plot how to dispose of his body. The whole thing is so perfectly delicately balanced because her makeup is so overdone, no one would believe it is something to aim for, and the boy's shock so overplayed as to be clearly satire. In fact, the show is probably targeted towards an adult demographic who will really appreciate the humor now that they're safely removed from that age.

The art goes between traditional anime to horribly deformed frightful images of the girls faces and is not afraid to show the girls as a lot less cute than other shows might. The art perfectly supports the insanity and the reality of middle school girls' both feeling like, and being, outcasts from the world, their own bodies, and their own minds. 

Had the show not had the transphobic moments with the side character, it would have been rated higher by me. But even with that big caveat, it was so genuinely funny throughout, I'm giving it a 7/10. It was a great change of pace to see middle-school girls presented as the little freaks we know they all are and not as lolitas to be sexualized or as angelically cute bon-bons of perfection.

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