Blog Archive

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Omoi, Omaware, Furi, Furare:

A new manga has entered my top 100 manga rankings.  It's the newest work by Io Sakisaka, my favorite shoujo manga-ka.  It feels like anything she writes will be great.  One of my favorite aspects of this manga is that the characters actually have noses.  That's kinda refreshing, given the conspiracy anime has with replacing all noses with tiny dots.  There isn't a single other body part that anime has decided to just 'leave off' so it's really disconcerting.  What if an entire art style swore off arms?  Legs?  Ribs?  Necks?  It's just so awkward searching for non-existent noses.  Where are their noses?  Why don't they exist?  The mystery of the missing noses is more concerning than the actual plot unfolding on the screens these days.

As for other reasons I like the manga, it has a cool step-sibling incest subplot, and an honest representation of the travails of liking an already popular boy who only goes for the good looking girls.

The plot will surely thicken with time, as all shoujo romances do.  But you can just tell it's going to be great.  Io Sakisaka never lets her audience down.

Meanwhile, the 2nd blu-ray disk box of Fate/Stay UBW is out, so everyone should take the opportunity to grab it.  UBW was so good and so gorgeous, anything but the bluray of such a high quality series is unacceptable.

Aside from Jojo's, Assassination Classroom and Sailor Moon, which I'm confident will eventually see a fully released anime version, I've read the manga of all my featured manga rankings (wherever the anime didn't overlap said manga, in which case any sane person would just watch the anime).  When the manga isn't translated there's nothing to be done, but where it is I've read everything in full, including even the Tales of Destiny and Tales of Innocence mangas.

Reading Index is another story.  I've made a little progress on volume 8 of New Testament, but like usual it's a horrible slog.  Why did this author have to write so very many volumes to his series?  Couldn't he wrap it up already and be done with it all?  I just want to know if Touma ends up with Misaka Mikoto or not.  That's all I actually care about.  But instead it's just fight fight fight fight fight.  Bleh.

Index is still better than Majikoi though, which I haven't touched in ages.  The visual novel is way too long and repetitive, the jokes are just annoying rather than funny at this point.  The anime is infinitely better.  The adaption took all the best parts of the visual novel and cut all the annoying junk, and ended up being much better than the original.  Reminds me of how Kobato's adaption was actually better than the manga it was based off of.  It doesn't happen often, but sometimes the anime crew really knows what it's about.

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