Tag: Manga

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Dragons, Tigers, and Isekai in FLUFFY PARADISE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

A new year means a new anime season; a fresh turn of the calendar page for a medium that, at least as far as TV anime goes, often feels defined by a chase for the next big cultural touchstone. 2024 does, in fact, have plenty of upcoming anime that look pretty promising, from the battle girl android action-yuri of Metallic Rouge to highly anticipated manga adaptations like Delicious in Dungeon, to whatever Jellyfish Don’t Swim in the Night is going to be. But today, January 1st, the very first anime to make its TV debut in 2024 is this; Fluffy Paradise. It’s an isekai, of course.

It’s hard to even feign shock at the sheer deluge of isekai series anymore, and to be honest talking about the genre’s saturation has started to feel pat. (Plus, there actually aren’t that many this season, compared to some seasons still fresh in memory where we’ve had up to ten airing at once.) So let’s just skip all that and get to the actual meat of this thing, or what meat of it there is anyway. For one thing, yes, this anime starts with the obligate scene of the protagonist dying in the ‘real world.’ I have to admit I’ve always found the fact that they seem to feel the need to show this directly kind of morbid and I’ve never totally gotten over that. For another, the protagonist, in her previous mundane life, kind of looks like Kobeni from Chainsaw Man, so hey, that’s something. (And this seems like something that would happen to Beni, given her rotten luck.)

The fact that she’s a woman in the first place shouldn’t go unnoticed, either. Isekai anime remains very lopsided in terms of protagonist gender, and it is nice to see one that’s not vaguely otome game-themed have a female lead.

Our girl is of course given the obligate talking-to by a deity who offers to compensate her for her short life by fixing things in her favor in the next. He does ask for her help with something rather specific in return, though. We’re told that in this world, humans are persecuting “non-human creatures,” complete with some silhouettes of what sure look like catgirls and doggirls and such. The show doesn’t really circle back around to this until the very end of this first episode, but it is the one point that sticks out.

I say this because much of Fluffy Paradise is frankly dull. It leaves no real impression for most of the length of its runtime. We could get into specifics about its plot and characters, but they feel so cursory in of themselves that there doesn’t seem like much a point. Our girl ends up in a very plain isekai setting, born (of course) to noble parents. There, she’s given the name Nefertima—Neema [Ai Kakuma] for short—and the show begins in earnest. The main focus here is that she wished to be able to “pet lots of fluffy things” as part of her reincarnation, so animals love her, and it’s from this that the series gets most of what flavor it does have.

Anywhere she goes, Neema is surrounded by a Disney Princess-esque parade of adorable animals. This extends even to befriending the divine “sky tiger” that she meets upon a visit to the royal palace. All of this is pretty cute, but it’s not really ever more than that, and even the few moments that seem like they’re trying to be vaguely transgressive (eg. a few mildly charged interactions between the three-year-old Neema and the teenage prince) don’t accomplish even that much. They’re too tame to even be tasteless.

Meh.

Arguably, the entire point of “cozy isekai” like this is that they never do too much. But by introducing that whole Man vs. Nature element at the start, the show inherently asks to be taken more seriously than as just another lazy Monday series. I’ll also admit, I tend to be a bit harsh on this subgenre in general. I’m a longtime iyashikei apologist, and even I tend to find that most of these “slow life” shows are boring rather than actually relaxing, usually owing to their iffy visuals and general lack of atmosphere.

The production values are decent, on that note, but come with their own set of caveats. The animation is just expressive and bouncy enough that Fluffy Paradise escapes the fate of its often-stiff isekai brethren. Even then, there are still a few spots that are disappointingly under-animated, such as a magical board game played in the episode’s middle portion. You could also be forgiven for not really noticing, because the actual art direction is very drab and generic. Pity any RinBot player with this and even just a few other isekai in their back catalogue, because they’d largely be indistinguishable. This is true of the setting as well; an ISO Standard vaguely European isekai setting with basically no characteristics to set it apart from its genre-fellows whatsoever. You can get away with this if your show is funny enough or has strong enough characterization (eg. in the case of In My Next Life as a Villainness! or such), but that’s not really the case here, and the nondescript visuals contribute to an overall feeling of interchangeability. This show could’ve aired at any point in the last decade and it wouldn’t seem out of place. That can be a good thing, but in Fluffy Paradise‘s case, it really isn’t.

But, there is a silver lining here, the one spot where the show seems willing to take a risk, and that’d be the dragon.

Bro thinks he’s Smaug.

In the episode’s closing minutes, Neema’s sister summons a dragon during a magic demonstration. We’re not told anything explicitly here but she sure seems intent on killing it, until Neema rushes out to get between her sister and the dragon. The episode ends on that note, providing a cliffhanger and a (theoretically at least) solid hook to bring people back next week. If Fluffy Paradise ever breaks out of the middling isekai box—and hey, it’s happened before—it’ll be there, with Neema as a defender of the world’s wild things against her fellow humans. Still, given everything else about the first episode, I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll actually follow through on this idea.

I could sit here and wax further about how there are just so many isekai and how it’s such an over-saturated genre and so on, but at some point you just have to let things be what they are. Fluffy Paradise seems basically fine as far as such things go, but it also seems solidly “safe.” There’s nothing in here that a hundred other anime haven’t done, and if I want to put on my Nostradamus hat and make big predictions, I kind of wonder if the lower amount of isekai this season means people aren’t maybe finally getting tired of this whole setup.* Who knows.

I won’t keep watching Fluffy Paradise, personally. But for the people who do, I legitimately hope it turns out to be better and more ambitious than I’m predicting here. In cases like this, I like to be proven wrong.

(Also, the ED is a cute thing with a lovely felt stop motion visual style. That counts for something, too.)

* A very rare after the fact edit from me, here. What was I talking about when I wrote this? This season is absolutely swamped with isekai.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Toxic Yuri, Tragedy, and Catharsis in DESTROY IT ALL AND LOVE ME IN HELL!

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains mention of physical and emotional abuse, and other sensitive subject matter. Please read with discretion.

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

If this one seems a little less coherent than usual, and more like I’m jumping from idea to idea, give me a bit of a break, I tapped this out in about a third of my usual write-time because I really, really just wanted to talk about this manga.

Let’s start with this, though. What a fucking title, fan-translated or not.

Destroy It All And Love Me in Hell! You don’t get enough like that anymore. Just chunky enough to telegraph that it’s the English name for a manga, vague enough that it could be about just about anything, but promising a unique tonal space, and that space is much of what we’re going to talk about today. But before we get to that, as is always the case, it helps to know what this thing is actually about.

In a sense, this is a dark twist on the classic “status gap” setup common to many yuri stories and, really, much romance in general. Except, instead of, say, a noble and a commoner in some fantasy setting or anything like that, we have a high school populated by an outwardly-perfect student council president overachiever who’s secretly so high-strung that you could play her like a violin (Kurumi Yoshizawa) and, in the opposite corner, an absolute scuzz-fuck dirtbag of a delinquent whose idea of a crush involves blackmail and punches to the solar plexus (Naoi). No reduction to common character tropes here, while both of our leads are loosely rooted in archetypes common to the genre, neither is what she seems, and even those foundations that exist start to crumble as the pair get into each others’ heads. A third girl, Kokoro, plays a decidedly tertiary role as Kurumi’s relatively innocent childhood friend who is also (uh-oh!) harboring a massive crush on her.

We open on Kurumi giving a perfectly fine but decidedly canned speech as the student council president. It is immediately obvious from the manga’s opening pages that, other than Kokoro, nobody really likes her. They either envy her for her achievements or resent her because they think she’s looking down her nose at them. (That latter point of view is what leads to her and Naoi’s already-uneasy first interaction.) Managing this largely-friendless existence is made even tougher by her incredibly overbearing—and we later find out, outright abusive—mother, who micromanages her schedule and insists that she excel in all things. The kind of anxiety that this sort of thing kicks up can easily lead to bad habits, and Kurumi’s, evidently, is abortive attempts at shoplifting. We see her palm an eraser from a corner shop, stick it in her bag, and then, overcome with guilt, pay for it anyway.

The usage of something as utterly minor as an eraser for this bit of tension-building feels deliberate. As it turns out, we’re not the only one who saw this little stunt. Naoi, whether coincidentally nearby or outright stalking Kurumi, films her doing it. From there, editing the video to only show the theft itself would be trivial, and it is that threat that first intertwines Kurumi and Naoi, and it doesn’t take long for their encounters to get violent. Things are fraught for a little bit, but then, in a scene where Naoi explains to Kurumi precisely why she doesn’t like her, three consecutive pages, and six words on the last of those, change the timbre of the manga forever.

“What are you laughing for? Freak.”

Like a magic spell, that single question—and Kurumi’s grin in that last panel—shifts the manga from a tragic story about one girl bullying another to something very different. I shouldn’t have to say this, but let me do so anyway just to be cautious; obviously, in reality, this is not how any part of this works. But, within the wonderful world of fiction, we can explore such problematic but compelling concepts as “what if a really hot girl at your school systematically ruined your life and you realized you kind of liked it?” Further, “what if you eventually got enough into it that it kind of became a mutual life-ruining?” Thus is perhaps the driving question of Love Me in Hell.

And on that note, I do feel the need to here go to bat for this entire subgenre. Occasionally I will see people express disbelief that anyone likes this kind of manga at all, or else they’ll assume they’re made for a gawking male audience, the alleged “male majority” that supposedly make up most yuri readers. Aside from the deep irony of how a certain kind of low-rent media criticism will claim to be feminist but center the male experience anyway, this is easily rebutted here from personal lived experience. I’m a woman, and I like this stuff. I’d describe myself as something of a novice in the ways of Toxic Yuri, but the appeal is immediate and obvious. This isn’t my first foray into the genre, but it’s a dive back in with an intentionality I didn’t have when I first discovered it.

We’re going to largely skimp on linear recapping here. The manga as it stands is just seven chapters long, and you can easily knock it out in an afternoon if you’re so inclined. The important thing to note is that as Naoi and Kurumi’s strange relationship continues, with Naoi continually threatening to expose her fake-shoplifting habit and demanding Kurumi do increasingly risky things (stealing from a teacher’s desk, carving another student’s desk up with threats and insults, etc.), they do grow closer in a twisted way. Based on that alone, you probably already know whether or not this is “for you,” I think it’s worth asking why this subgenre and particularly Love Me in Hell specifically, resonates with people.

I have one pet theory, myself. In the background of the manga, lurking but never directly mentioned, is of course the specter of homophobia. The idea of a “good girl” snapping under the weight of a deep-seated desire to do “bad things” doesn’t actually need all the character justification it gets in this series—although it does add a lot of depth to Kurumi’s self-destructive behavior—because it makes perfect sense. What is homosexuality in a straight society always painted as if not the ultimate transgression? What is anything that happens in this manga but the viscera of sexual exploration splayed out for us to see? Three chapters in, Kurumi is actively getting herself off1 while fantasizing about Naoi pinning her down and calling her a “bad girl”. She of course tries to claim to herself (and implicitly, though obviously disingenuously, to the audience) that she’s not really thinking of Naoi that way, but the panels show what they show, and it’s genuinely fascinating how Naoi seems to literally take up more and more of Kurumi’s mental real estate as the manga goes on. Love Me in Hell sometimes depicts her—or rather, Kurumi’s thoughts of her—as literal shadowy interlopers into the pages themselves, carrying clouds of inky black fog with them.2

Because we are to understand Kurumi and Naoi’s relationship as two-way if not healthy (it’s definitely not healthy, hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that), it’s important to point out that Naoi isn’t really the villain of this piece beyond maybe the first chapter or two, and by the more recent chapters it’s clear that they’re actively harming each other rather than it being as simple as X hurting Y. If there’s a real root of all evil here, it’s society itself; specifically the school system, and homophobia at large for allowing things to get this bad in the first place.

And on that note, if you’re straight and this kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, it is worth asking precisely why. Is it just that you don’t like to see cute anime girls getting hurt, or is there the lingering guilt of complicity somewhere in your noggin? I won’t judge, it’s in mine, too, despite my being queer, I let a lot of shit fly that I shouldn’t have when I was younger out of a desire to remain closeted, and I’m still not really a “visible” queer in a way that anyone would pick up on without asking. This stuff hurts, and pretending it’s not there doesn’t solve anything.

Of course, that’s not to say that Love Me in Hell is some kind of high-minded liberationist treatise, because that isn’t right either. There is a sense of reveling in the pain, here. Not as simple rubbernecking (do not let that imaginary male audience back into your head! Not for a second!) but as a fully intentional exploration of these emotions. A wading into, for lack of a better term, this uniquely fucked-up vibe. It may be offputting to put it this way so bluntly, but there is really nothing quite like watching two people collide in a way that could not possibly end well for either of them.

Kurumi, repressed to the point of her personality buckling under the pressure, finds an absolutely perfect foil in Naoi. It’s all but directly pointed out that it would have been “better” for Kurumi, if she wanted to break off contact with Naoi entirely, to just come clean about the shoplifting video and cut the problem off at the root. There are two reasons she does not do that. One; Kurumi’s very real anxiety from her mother’s outsized expectations of her, and as is later revealed, her outright abusive behavior wherein she threatens self-harm if not constantly kept up to date on Kurumi’s whereabouts, have made actual, honest communication between the two impossible. But equally important to the story itself is Two; being blackmailed by Naoi gives Kurumi permission to do bad things. Being “bad” with Naoi gives Kurumi a way of stepping outside of herself, an escape that no traditional outlet offers. It is a profoundly bad coping mechanism, but it is one nonetheless. Thus, the tragedy and the romance of Love Me in Hell stems not from the idea that there was no other way this could’ve gone, but because on some level Kurumi wants it to have gone this way. It is an absolutely sublime example of rotten romance, and a bit later in when Naoi starts to more obviously return these twisted feelings, the catharsis is very real.

At the same time, there is a festering, throbbing kind of pain to watching all this unfold, like an infected cut that got that way because you neglected to put a bandage on it. But in its own way, that kind of pain is itself fascinating and intoxicating. And this, really, is where we boil things down to “you either get it or you don’t.” Many people, I think perhaps most people, will never try to kiss this particular snake. Those that do will know better than to complain when they’re bitten. You need to know what you’re getting into if you’re going to read about a couple whose love language is beating each other up and whose grand romantic proclamations sound like this. It is fundamentally a very different thing from “vanilla” romance, and one cannot substitute the other.

I like things like this both for that reason, the emotional, elemental appreciation of watching two people make each other worse because there is no “better,” but also because unlike a good amount of “fluffier” yuri, this stuff feels immune to being stolen from us queers. Which is not to say that straight people are incapable of reading and appreciating art like this, but rather that in order to even understand what a manga like Love Me in Hell is trying to do, you have to already accept the premise that yuri actually is largely about queer romance and queer sexuality, instead of assuming it is being made for some other reason. I cannot conceive of the kind of bland, bad-faith readings that plague more mainstream yuri and yuri-undertoned works ever catching on with this kind of thing. Who could possibly actually get through it and not understand that sometimes, there is nothing more romantic than two girls just seeing how much worse they can make each other? It’s impossible to even entertain the idea.3

On a broader level, though, Love Me in Hell taps into the same rhythms of darkness that fuel all sorts of longstanding arts. Tragic theater, heavy metal, horror movies, hell, if you wanna go truly mainstream, there are tons of pop songs about specifically the idea of tainted love, bad romance, and so on. Hell, one of them is serving as the ED theme for an anime I covered on this very blog earlier this season.

Of course, hey, let’s check off the obligatory caveat. Love Me in Hell is a monthly, and as such even though it’s run for most of 2023 so far, it is still only those seven chapters in. The most recent of these is outright hopeful, in fact, ending with Kokoro admitting her crush on Kurumi. Things could, you know, theoretically, get “better” for Kurumi. But let’s just be honest with ourselves here, that’s not Love Me in Hell. I would be very, very surprised if Kokoro, the hopelessly in love, kind of bland sweetheart that she is, got the girl. I’m not even sure that either of the leads are going to get out of this thing alive! Both Kurumi and Naoi’s households are tinderboxes; emotionally unstable parents creating absolutely untenable situations for their children. The two’s only way out is through each other, and I don’t really see how Kokoro could feasibly fit in that equation.

The manga’s title, after all, is Love Me in Hell. It would hardly be the first romance manga to end in some kind of terrible tragedy, and that title sure does conjure images of going down into a burning ring of fire; a roaring inferno that takes everything, good and bad, with it.

1: If you are concerned about this kind of thing, the scene is drawn in such a way that you don’t really see anything.

2: I think I can get away with saying I find this entire habit of fantasizing and then feeling terrible about it deeply relatable as someone who was raised Catholic as long as it’s not in the main text of the article. Thank god for these footnotes that nobody reads.

3: This is yet another reason that the imaginary “male majority” isn’t worth considering when evaluating this stuff. I don’t know about y’all, but my experience with cis-hetero men in anime fandom, at least the kind who, say, insist Suletta and Miorine are just very good friends, has not painted a picture of people with the stomach for this kind of thing.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: Forging a Myth in KAGURABACHI

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

The life cycle of a meme—in the casual, internet sense of that term—is weird. Things can randomly spark some kind of cultural flame and within mere months you go from joking about, how, say, Morbius is the greatest movie of all time to it getting a second theatrical release and managing to flop twice. Simply because Shonen Jump is not as much of a presence in Anglophone pop culture as the MCU, Kagurabachi, a new title that began serializing earlier this week, is not there yet. Nor, unlike the Morbius example, is its fandom entirely ironic. But the same snowballing effect is there, if in a different way; something has a solid first chapter, maybe an exceptional one depending on your feelings on the all-sword-slashes-and-shadows school of shonen manga storytelling, and suddenly, there are lengthy copypastas calling it the greatest manga of all time, tweets about non-existent anime, game, and live-action adaptations, budget cosplays, a Discord server with some 4,000 members, and about a million jokes that all manipulate the same promo image of the protagonist drawing his sword. As of Thursday (9/21/23, for those of you reading this in the future), Shonen Jump’s English Twitter account has acknowledged the bit, so god only knows where this will eventually end.

This doesn’t need to be said, but just to get it out there; this is all pretty firmly tongue-in-cheek. I think perhaps the most telling of any of these memes that I’ve seen is the Kagurabachi bingo card, which allows for a number of standard contemporary action shonen plot beats. Plus the possibility that the series will either A) get an anime, B) flop outright, or C) get axed before either of those can happen. It also has the concession that the plot might end up being “basic.”

Nonetheless, however much or little irony any individual person making these images might have regarding their feelings for the series’ first chapter, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t something there. In comparison to its Class of ’23 contemporaries, Kagurabachi does indeed have a more immediately thrilling opening chapter than many. Time will tell if that holds up, of course—and even if it does, ongoing quality is not a guarantee of continued success. Just ask any fan of Ruri Dragon, myself included—but it’s worth at least looking at that promise, and figuring out what’s underneath all these jokes.

Kagurabachi‘s actual premise is so simple that the official summary is only a few lines long. Here it is, in its entirety:

Young Chihiro spends his days training under his famous swordsmith father. One day he hopes to become a great sword-maker himself. The goofy father and the serious son–they thought these days would last forever. But suddenly, tragedy strikes. A dark day soaked in blood. Chihiro and his blade now live only for revenge.

Kagurabachi, Manga PLUS Official Summary

True to that curt summary, what little we have of Kagurabachi so far paints it as a fairly straightforward tale of bloody revenge. There isn’t anything even remotely wrong with that of course; manga as a medium is rife with those, and some of them are very good.

We open on a bit of scene-setting, with Chihiro, as a young boy, living with his father while the latter runs a sword smithy. Chihiro’s father is eccentric, despite what one might assume from the gritty nature of his profession, and he’s introduced to us as talking with his pet goldfish. To hear him tell it, they have a lot to say.

Throughout this scene, we get little dollops of information about the world. The setting feels broadly contemporary, but Chihiro’s father’s friend, a fellow named Mr. Chiba, alludes to something called the “Seitei War” that Chihiro’s father’s swords somehow helped end. How mysterious.

For his part, Chihiro seems rather unimpressed by his old man’s reputation. In fact, as it’s nearing his fifteenth birthday it really seems like what Chihiro wants most is to follow his pa into the family business. He directly says as much, in fact, but his father is hesitant.

His father explains; swords are exemplary pieces of craftsmanship, sure. But at the end of the day, they’re weapons. Chihiro’s father believes that, whatever role they may have in ending conflict, they are also the tools used to start one, and the swordsmiths themselves are complicit in the lives lost by them. It’s a thoughtful approach. On a meta level, it’s also indicative of the many cultural differences between swords and, say, firearms, as storytelling tools. If one were to turn this guy into a dealer of almost any other kind of weapon, he’d be markedly less sympathetic than the already gray moral tone he has here.

Chihiro reassures his father that he’s willing to shoulder the burden of selling these things responsibly. Satisfied by that answer, his father brings their conversation—and this first, fairly light half of the manga—to a close by reaffirming that he believes in Chihiro.

Cue a timeskip; 38 months pass between two pages.

When we return, whatever city we’re in is not the peaceful one of the opening pages of the chapter. Wherever it may be, sword-toting yakuza rule the streets, and quash any resistance to their regime. That’s grim, if still in line with the fairly mundane world of swords and grit that the opening seemed to promise. But then, we learn that the yakuza are being bankrolled by this guy, a “sorcerer” of some description, who certainly seems to have enough magic to back that label up. In his few, gleefully villainous, pages of appearance here, he grows a black, spiky bush around a rebel’s head, leaving him to suffer until it decays on its own.

This, I think, is where Kagurabachi starts really staking out an identity. This guy’s character design alone is enough to hang a decent starter villain on, and depending on if we ever learn anything of substance about his motives, he could easily become an interesting recurring antagonist, too.

Naturally, when we next meet Chihiro he’s 3 years and change older, a fair bit taller, and a hell of a lot edgier. His face has been marked by a star-shaped scar, he’s clad in black, and toting a katana of his own. It’s honestly a little much! If you put him in tan instead of black he’d look like an Attack on Titan character. But my opinion on these things remains that it’s better to go hard on your character designs and risk overshooting than it is to play it so safe that you end up at “boring.” If there’s an artistic misstep here, it’s the former, not the latter.

Chihiro and Mr. Chiba (notably, Chihiro’s dad is nowhere to be seen) stride into the aforementioned yakuza city with, initially, plans to negotiate. Then they see a clutch of dead bodies hanging from a bridge, and at this point, the remainder of the chapter dissolves into pure action. Chihiro and Chiba can’t abide by what they’ve seen, so they bust up the yakuza controlling the city, and here, we learn just what it is that makes Chihiro’s father’s swords so special.

If you’re going to reveal that your protagonist has some kind of hidden power or technique, this is the way to do it. The sequence spans a few pages here, but it’s legitimately pretty damn cool, with Chihiro’s sword apparently possessed(?) by three inky goldfish specters which annihilate the rest of the yakuza in just a few swings.

This is not enough to pin a whole manga on, but it’s damn sure enough to pin an opening chapter on, and I think this particular trick is where Kagurabachi is getting most of its hype from right now, no matter how much ironic attachment there may or may not also be.

In general, this really is a strong first chapter, and it does a good job of providing emotional context for the burst of action that is going to be most of the reason Shonen Jump’s target audience pick this thing up. Clearly, something happened to Chihiro and his father. One does not go from a snarky but otherwise well-adjusted kid to an angel of death due to happy circumstances. Time will tell if the series can keep this momentum going, but I would say that the series’ surging popularity is, at least at this very early juncture, well-earned.

There are some weaknesses here, too, of course, very few manga absolutely nail everything right from chapter one. (The handful that do are exceptional for a reason.) The character art tends toward a bit stiff, and other than Chihiro himself and the villainous sorcerer I’d like to see the designs get a little more wild. The translation also tends toward the just slightly too-corny, with Chihiro calling the villains “slime” sticking out as a particularly bad offender. Of course, that part is not mangaka Takeru Hokazono‘s fault, and really, these are minor gripes more than serious complaints anyway. Overall, this is a very good first chapter, especially considering that it’s Hokazono’s first proper series.

At this early point, all that’s really left is to see what shape, if any, the series’ raw potential takes, not unlike the unforged swords in the chapter’s opening pages themselves. The manga’s early fan community will be a huge boon to it if it can manage to pull a good story from this setup (and if it can keep delivering on the action), and no amount of ironic distance will diminish that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: KINDERGARTEN WARS and The Struggle to be Loved

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. His codename is “Spade”, real name unknown and unknowable. He’s an assassin, a stalker in the shadows and a kiss of death to the unwary. He will kill anyone, anywhere, for the right price.

And unfortunately for him, this is not his story.

Kindergarten Wars doesn’t care much about Spade, who gets capped in the head not long after this and is not an important player in this story. The other person in that image, the woman who blocks his sniper bullet with a shovel, is our real protagonist. And I have to start this column with a confession; this was originally a completely different Manga Shelf article. I want to survey the recent rise in manga that take at least some degree of inspiration from Spy x Family and examine what they did with that influence. I still might write that column someday, but Kindergarten Wars deserves a spotlighting of its own. This is some good stuff. Of just 21 currently-available chapters, it does take a little while to find its footing, but once it does, it hits hard. This is a little surprising given its premise, which is goofy even by the standards of this emerging subgenre.

Speaking of, even though this column is no longer about the Spy x Family….Family, we should at least briefly define what “this subgenre” actually is, as there are a few common points. In particular, these manga usually juxtapose absurd, highly “genre” elements; mostly ridiculous hyperviolence, leagues of assassins, international conspiracies, a sprawling criminal underworld, etc. with down-to-earth concerns, and a particular focus on domesticity; romance, family, friendships, and finding one’s place in the world. The simple and slow things in life. Without fail, they come to the conclusion that the latter is better (and in this sense they find some common ground with the rather more out-there Chainsaw Man), and is the real thing worth fighting for. No one in any of these manga has ever truly been fulfilled by being a gun-toting killing machine. They’re fulfilled by little things; dates, shoujo manga, the laughter of children, and whatever found family they manage to rustle up along the way. Other than SpyFam itself, the most successful example is probably Sakamoto Days, which, if Kindergarten Wars isn’t also taking that series as an influence, its similarities are remarkable for being convergent evolution.

As for our actual premise? Nothing too weird for an action manga these days. Rita—that’s the lady blocking a bullet with a spade—works at the world’s safest kindergarten, Kindergarten Noir, where the children of the wealthy and influential are sent so they can receive a normal education away from the dangers of the world. The only problem is that the school is the frequent target of assassins and kidnappers, meaning that these teachers have to also be world-class bodyguards for their students. Rita is an ex-assassin herself, formerly a human swathe of destruction nicknamed the Witch. Not that you’d know it by looking at her, for most of the manga’s current run; despite her deadly skills, Rita is a gremlin obsessed with finding a hot boyfriend, and that contrast is where the manga gets most of its more comedic elements from.

To be honest, while this is hardly a bad gag, it is the primary reason that I way underestimated Kindergarten Wars when I first flipped it open. The series’ first several small mini-arcs are primarily comedic, and while they do still have the violence angle to supply some solid action, they’re more about humor and small-scale character developments. For example, Doug, Rita’s coworker and a secondary protagonist, develops a crush on her when she saves his life, despite a past as a swindler and a ladies’ man. This sort of setup is typical of this very early part of the manga, and is also the fuel for the manga’s “romantic” side, given that romcoms are a part of its DNA as well. You get a bit more of an idea as to where all of this is going when we’re introduced to Hana Bradley, the manga’s other main female character and who it hilariously tries to play as a comparative straight man despite the fact that her preferred method of attack is batting homeruns with live grenades. Still, where Kindergarten Wars goes from decent but unremarkable to actually feeling like it’s worth following is in its most recent half dozen or so chapters, where we get a peek at an inner darkness that may betray more ambition than might be expected.

Chapters 14-18 mark a turning point, and it’s here where we should consider two things. One, Rita’s old assassin nickname/persona of the Witch, a lingering phantom of her old self who threatens to come to the fore every now and again. Two, the character Natasha, a swordswoman just as deadly as Rita herself who is obsessed with The Witch, seeing her as a lone kindred soul in a world full of people who are otherwise nothing like herself.

Natasha, hired to attack the kindergarten just like any number of the scores of dead goons from earlier in the series, eventually confronts Rita directly, only to find herself absolutely perplexed that she doesn’t enjoy fighting this woman. If anything, she feels scared. All of this happens as we flash back through Natasha’s life as a prodigal killer. And all at once, like a bullet through the brain, a revelation hits Natasha; a blunt, heavy, deeply unsubtle and direct statement of what can only be the manga’s core theme.

This all manages to capture a very real desperation, from the mouth of someone who feels like she never had any other options in life. Trying to talk yourself into being satisfied with your place in the world is a rough thing even when that place is somewhere fairly innocuous. For Natasha, this revelation breaks her, and unfortunately, she doesn’t survive the arc. Chapter 18 is an entire postscript of her dying thoughts as Rita holds her in her arms. For just a little while, Kindergarten Wars transforms into something greater than the sum of its parts, and the spilled blood spells a plea for empathy.

It’s easy, and not at all wrong, to say that none of this is exactly revolutionary. God knows this isn’t the first manga to feed a character a line like “If I keep on killing, what will I find beyond it all?!”, but just dryly relaying the story in descriptive prose doesn’t capture its emotional impact and neither does chopping, cropping, and dropping select pages, even very good ones. There’s some real weight here, partly just from how much of a swerve this is from Kindergarten Wars‘ usual style, which is pretty lighthearted even as buildings and heads alike explode. Natasha seems like an early sign of things to come, and combined with more recent revelations about the actual nature of Kindergarten Noir it seems like the series is gearing up to tackle its first larger, more ambitious arc.

We should be taking all of this in context, of course. “Ambitious” is not a synonym for “good,” and there are plenty of ambitious manga and anime that have been done in by their own inability to stick to a single tone or topic. Most of what happens in Kindergarten Wars is still pretty cartoony, and its flashes of a more sincere and resonant emotional core are exactly that, flashes. We haven’t been handed a bombshell that turns this into a must-read just yet, even if some stories (like Natasha’s) are very good, they’re still playing with recognizable shapes. Time will tell what it eventually combines them into.

That’s what the cynical part of me says, anyway. The optimistic part says that the fact that something like this is being so well-received despite its obvious influences is evidence that there is an appetite for this kind of stuff, and that manga like Kindergarten Wars are rising to the occasion. Maybe it just wants to be loved, too.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: You Are Not Immune to MAID TO SKATE

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

If you’re a digital artist working through the online content grind, having some kind of identifiable thing that’s distinctly your own is a huge help. For a lot of artists, it ends up being fanart; people become known for doing art of one particular character or many characters from one particular property, and gain a fanbase from there. But there are other paths, and one of the less-traveled is to simply make gorgeous art with some kind of gimmick that serves as a draw. Enter suzushiro333, a Twitter illustrator better known as “that person who draws all those maids skateboarding.” They have been at this for years, and they have gotten very good at it. Good enough to make Maid to Skate, a manga that is undeniably one of a kind.

There is an admirable, almost battle shonen-esque laser focus on the titular subject here. We don’t really learn much about our protagonist, Benihana—whose name, by the way, is a skateboard trick—over the course of these short few pages. We don’t learn a ton about her situation either, such as why she seems to live in some kind of group home with a bunch of other maids. We do learn one very important thing though; in this world, maids skate. Maids skate a lot. Maids take skating very seriously. Maids skating is the entire point of this manga, to an even greater degree than most actual hobbyist manga I’ve seen. And if you don’t like maids that skate? Get out. There is nothing for you here.

It’s honestly not surprising that Maid to Skate is so focused on the actual action of maids skating. Most of this first chapter is a single long action sequence wherein Benihana tries to skate through town to get to a market quickly, and it is absolutely gorgeous; sleek, refined, and with a command of lines-of-movement that even the best working mangaka would have to respect. The entire debut chapter is basically a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 level, and reading it is as fun as playing through one yourself. It knows better than to stick too strictly to plausibility, too. There’s an absolutely great bit in here where Beni retrieves a crying little girl’s balloon by ramping off of a building to snatch it out of the sky.

And to provide a counterpoint to that, she also absolutely eats it while trying to jump the gap over a river (!!). This level of completely bailing is apparently unacceptable for a maid, since she ends the chapter being scolded by the presumable head of her group home.

This does lead me to wonder, though; where does Maid to Skate go from here, if anywhere? Certainly, no one would complain if every chapter was basically just a spin on this. At the same time, I wonder about this delightful little world and the people that live in it, and would be over the moon to learn more about skater maid society. Wouldn’t you?

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Unexpected Queer Romance in the B-Plot of I BELONG TO THE BADDEST GIRL AT SCHOOL

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

I should not be writing this. I am, at the moment, ill, with something that is giving me an absolute monster of a headache, stuffing up my sinuses, and just generally making me feel like a wreck. I intended to fully take this week off, both to physically recover and to recuperate from a bout of burnout. Yet, here I am, because if there’s one thing that can bring me back to life, if only for the hour or so it’s taken me to pen this, it’s lesbians. Never accuse me of being an unbiased journalist.

I Belong to The Baddest Girl at School is a fairly straightforward romcom manga. It certainly has its edges, and we’ll come to them in a moment, but for the most part you—or at least I, as a non-connoisseur of the genre—could not distinguish this from any other manga of its type at a glance. The main character is Unoki, a meek, shy boy, who falls for Toromaru, a tiny, feisty powderkeg of a boss girl who embodies every possible distinction between that term and “girlboss.” They’re pretty great together, in a tropey but pleasant sort of way. If the manga were only about them, it’d probably still be just fine. There’s a nice core thesis about not changing yourself just because society tells you to, and about finding someone who loves you for who you truly are. The sorts of things that would ring a bit hollow if the manga were solely about a single straight couple.

But this article is not about a single straight couple, as you’ve probably guessed from its title.

Yuri is having a bit of a cultural moment again, as several titles are currently airing as anime or are about to be in the near future (to say nothing of the return of the likes of, say, Birdie Wing, or the largely self-contained fanbase that “Miyazawan Yuri” has accrued in recent years) but Baddest Girl isn’t yuri. Nothing here even really speaks the same language as yuri, which has rhythms and archetypes all its own. Instead, to my pleasant surprise, I feel like I’ve discovered an example of convergent evolution.

Baddest Girl‘s obligate backup characters, of the sort who tend to stand around and comment on the A-Couple’s relationship, are Yutaka and Matsuri, respectively a serious straight-man type (ironically enough) with a chilly disposition, and a lunkheaded ruffian with a fixation on Toromaru herself and a tendency to get the wrong idea about things. We learn pretty early on that, far from simply orbiting around Unoki and Toromaru’s relationship, they have one of their own. Matsuri thinks of herself and Yutaka as best friends while nursing her sorta-crush on her boss. Yutaka, meanwhile, is a very different story, and it’s clear that she holds romantic feelings for Matsuri. There isn’t any ambiguity here, and some of the manga’s fairly rare spots of true angst come from the fact that Yutaka simply assumes that she and Matsuri aren’t compatible; less because Matsuri is straight (she’s not) and more because of her whole deal with Toromaru.

Now again, Baddest Girl is mostly not about Yutaka and Matsuri, which means that A) their side of the story progresses fairly slowly until a certain specific point, and B) it’d be easy for the cynically minded to write off their presence (and any implied feelings between them) as, basically, bait for a male audience. Baddest Girl did, after all, serialize in Young Ace UP, a seinen web-magazine, during its 2017-2021 run, and it’s hard to argue that their designs aren’t at least slightly meant to get more eyes on the manga. But this would downplay the fact that despite not being omnipresent through the manga’s 77 chapters, Yutaka and Matsuri are some of its strongest characters.

When Baddest Girl cashes in that built-up emotional connection to make it clear that it’s taking Yutaka’s feelings very seriously, it completely works, because we’ve already been following these characters for a while at that point. We know that they’ve been close for years, we know that Yutaka changed her whole sense of style because Matsuri thinks she looks “cooler” if she dresses like an old-school delinquent. So, later in the manga, when Yutaka confesses in a sudden sputtering overflow of emotion after Matsuri brings up the possibility of leaving town after she graduates, it makes a perfect sort of emotional sense. She actually steals a kiss from Matsuri, the sort of thing that is not really ever OK in real life but has a long enough heritage in romantic fiction that I’m willing to let Baddest Girl off here.

At the end of it all, the only thing Matsuri is actually at all mad about is that Yutaka didn’t tell her sooner. Yutaka pledged to always stay by Matsuri’s side several years before trying to actually date her. One can understand Matsuri’s (ultimately fairly mild) frustration at not being trusted a little more.

Even then, she gets over it pretty quick, and the two transition from friends to girlfriends with admirably little further drama; Matsuri even returns the kiss that Yutaka stole from her. Hilariously, this also means that by the manga’s end, Yutaka and Matsuri have actually gone farther, in terms of physical intimacy, than our leads. Unoki and Toramaru are still at the handholding stage as of the manga’s final chapter.

As much as I’m hyping this up as different or daring, the truth is, of course, that Baddest Girl isn’t unique in this regard at all. Even Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, probably the genre’s current gold standard in terms of intersecting popularity and quality, tosses in a bone to this effect very late in its run despite otherwise being straight as an arrow. (It’s one of that manga’s few flaws, I’d argue.) But what is rare is for the queer subtext to have that “sub” cut out entirely, and moreover, in a way that is both structurally elegant and actually reinforces the manga’s core points. Sure, you can, again, be a cynic about it and write all this off as pandering, or as the product of the author’s own interests. But that fails to account for the emotional weight it’s given (and, in fact, that the author is a woman). Plus, the very fact that these characters exist in this story, one that is not actually, really, about them, and feel so normal within it, is its own kind of victory. It’s true that we, as queer people, do need our own stories, but there’s a lot to be said about showing up in the backgrounds of others’ stories, too. In real life, few people have exclusively friends of their own sexual orientation, and it’s nice to see a manga that’s otherwise pretty heavy on tropes and archetypes reflect that. It even folds Yutaka and Matsuri’s relationship back into their usual dynamic, which takes on a flirtatious edge for the final few chapters of the manga, given that they’re now officially a couple.

As far as I can surmise, Baddest Girl was never crazy popular or anything, but mangaka Ui Kashima has kept working (currently, she’s penning the VTuber-themed romcom Liver Diver Lover, which has a beautiful tongue twister of an English title) and I hope she takes what fandom Baddest Girl did manage to pick up as a mandate to keep being herself.

As for me, well, I am going back to bed. See you next week, and hopefully no sooner. (Seriously, I need to rest.)

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: The Curious Case of SKELETON DOUBLE

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

If you’re looking to pick future stars from the current Shonen Jump lineup, Skeleton Double is probably not the smart money. (And not just because it’s running in Jump+ rather than Shonen Jump proper. Fine distinction, that.) Frankly, it just really isn’t good enough—at least not yet—to inspire that kind of confidence. It’s also pretty strange in a way totally different than that of the likes of, say, Chainsaw Man or the utterly bonkers Dandadan (which, really, I should get to writing about that at some point). Instead, it possesses an antiseptic half-surreality that places it totally perpendicular to most of what’s going on in the magazine, its direct affiliates, and, indeed, in the battle shonen genre in general right now. I wouldn’t call the manga great by any means, but it’s definitely compellingly weird. Enough so that if it can manage to hang on for a few more volumes beyond the brief 13 chapters that currently exist, we might be surprised.

The very short version of the premise is this; eight years ago, Yodomi Arakawa’s father was hoisted into the sky outside of Shinjuku Station and twisted to death. A violent and bizarre end for an ordinary businessman. Back in the present, Arakawa’s life is haunted by the tragedy, and the normalcy he’s worked hard to try to maintain regardless is shattered upon the appearance of a mysterious talking skull, Yamamoto. From here, Arakawa is sucked into a strange world of strange powers, skeletal beasts straight out of Gideon The Ninth, and a brewing war between a government agency that seeks to control both and the secret “Gyugess Society” that wants to use them to solve the world’s ills. Also, Yamamoto is responsible for Arakawa’s father’s death. Whoops!

On its surface, it’s a decent setup, but right from the jump, Skeleton Double runs into walls of clunky exposition, and much of the earliest stretch of the manga is let down by art that only sometimes rises above “functional.” This does a lot to obscure the manga’s genuine strengths, which are mostly writing-side; chiefly a very dry sense of humor and some interesting, briefly-floated ideas about class conflict. The characterization is strong, too, but only in a sidelong, obfuscated way. Arakawa himself seems almost comically devoid of any notable personality traits, but recent chapters imply that this is less his actual personality and more a façade adopted to cope with the loss of his father. Yoroibata, a member of the aforementioned government agency, is meanwhile utterly inscrutable, shuffling between weird antics like brewing coffee while teaching Arakawa how to fight in one chapter, and totally stomping the Gyugess Society folks in another. Toru Tatara, the closest thing the manga so far has to a main antagonist, is a broad-shouldered, spectacled fellow with braids with a hammy personality who is introduced doing a full bow. It’s an odd mix of total seriousness and outright camp, and Skeleton Double seems pretty happy to toggle between the two. Combine that with the aforementioned dry humor and the occasional sarcastic narration, and you have a manga that certainly has its own identity, even if it’s not a terribly flashy one.

It’s hard to tell how intentional all that is, but one has to imagine that at least part of it is on purpose. There is after all, a particularly great moment in here—perhaps the manga’s single best scene so far—where, after several chapters of being introduced to urban fantasy proper nouns, one of the Gyugess’ soldiers shouts out that a “cypress” is attacking them. As you turn the page, and have the opportunity to wonder what a “cypress” could possibly be, you see this, a beautifully-rendered tree crashing into their base. It is an almost perfect punchline, and if Skeleton Double gets axed before it can truly get off the ground, I think Tokaku Kondou may well have a future in writing comedy manga. (Don’t laugh! It worked out just fine for Aka Akasaka.)

Visually-speaking, a friend of mine correctly pointed out that the casual wear of most of Gyugess’ members gives them a sort of reverse-Jojo character feel, and really does drive home the fact that these powers have been foisted onto utterly ordinary people. They are Just Guys. Guys with superpowers now, sure, but Just Guys nonetheless.

This is perhaps most obvious with the former cab driver Kunikumo, who is Arakawa’s first major opponent fought on equal footing in the manga. Kunikumo is an old man, using his skeleton powers partly to stave off the Alzheimer’s that’d otherwise prevent him from living an ordinary life with his granddaughter. But even this isn’t cut and dry; we soon learn that Kunikumo killed his granddaughter’s parents himself, using his “Quantum” power (which sinks things into solid surfaces) to condemn them to the absolutely hellish death of falling to the center of the Earth. (Yeah, like that one Batman Beyond episode that gave us all a minor phobia of the Earth’s core as kids. Or was that just me?) The obvious sympathy angle is undercut by his brutal methods, and even when Arakawa eventually defeats him and he has his obligate realization that he’s been the bad guy, that too is shadowed. Look at the narration here, its blunt declaration of “he discarded what he wanted to protect….” Is that intended to drive the point home? If so, why does it almost feel like it’s mocking him?

What is the point of all this, anyway? Skeleton Double‘s most interesting trait is also its greatest weakness; the fact that thirteen chapters in, it’s basically still a total cipher. Not that any mangaka—any artist period—is under any obligation to explain their work in excruciating detail to their audience, but it’s a little unusual for a Shonen Jump manga, which are generally pretty straightforward. (And given the entire chapter devoted to how skeleton powers work, I get the sense that if Kondou wanted to explain things in excruciating detail, they would.) You can, from a certain angle, also read elements of it as parodic, but that doesn’t square with the honest attempt at emotional rawness in its most recent chapters. (Reasonable people will also disagree on how well that attempt actually lands. Post-hoc villain backstories aren’t exactly rare in this genre.)

It is totally possible that all of this is nothing more than the result of Skeleton Double actively finding its footing as it serializes. Its mangaka is, after all, new to the medium, with only the surreal comedy oneshot “The God Who Can’t Clean Up” previously under their belt. If so, maybe the real value of Skeleton Double doesn’t come from the story itself, so much as having the opportunity to watch a shonen mangaka work out the format’s structures in real time, seeing how they can bend them to their will and how they’re forced to compromise, where the bones of it lie.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Forget Everything Else About CHAINSAW MAN PART 2, Let’s Talk About How Cute Nayuta Is

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

This article contains spoilers for all of Part 1 of Chainsaw Man—which extends very far past what the anime covered—as well as Part 2 up to the current chapter, Chapter 120. If you are not caught up with the manga, stop reading unless you want to be spoiled.

If you wanted to, there is a lot you could discuss with regard to the second part of Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s breakout hit Chainsaw Man. You could talk about its fairly drastic scaling-back of scope compared to Part 1. You could talk about the fun but tense dynamic between Asa and Yoru, Part 2’s main protagonists, and its possible implications going forward. You could talk about the manga’s many unresolved mysteries and how they might be wrapped up before Chainsaw Man one day ends, not the least of which is that of what role, precisely, the mysterious devil hunter Yoshida plays.

You could talk about all of that. But I don’t really want to.

I want to talk about how Nayuta, the new Devil of Control, the Horseman of Conquest herself, is absolutely freaking adorable.

To be fair, we did sort of already know this. When she was introduced in the final pages of Part 1, there was a decidedly creepy undertone to her presence. She was, after all, the Devil of Control. Denji, having just defeated Makima, was understandably not eager to be involved with her reincarnation. Nonetheless, her imitation of Denji’s mannerisms (which continues here) and demand for bread painted a picture of a far less menacing character. Things have changed since then, but it’s still clear that Nayuta is no Makima.

She was, however, absent from the manga for a pretty significant length of time (not as long as still-AWOL Part 1’ers like Kobeni or Kishibe, but still quite a while), and it became clear simply from the length of that absence that her eventual return would be a big event. It has been! She’s reintroduced to the manga by Denji calling her a “problem child with an extreme personality”, and then this happening, in her first on-panel appearance since Part 1.

There’s a lot we could talk about here, even! Yoru did basically force the kiss in the immediate prior panel on Denji, so you can make a pretty decent case that Nayuta is just being protective. And hey, listen, maybe she is! That’s basically what I think. Who wouldn’t react in a pretty extreme way upon seeing some random girl frenching their older brother apparently against his will? Nayuta’s strong reactions are just more noticeable than other peoples’ because she is, of course, still the Devil of Control.

But something that’s much more important than all this is that Nayuta is extremely adorable.

I realize this is unbelievable given that it’s me saying it, but I’m not really putting forward any grand thesis here. The most recent chapter—120, which went up two days ago, on February 14th—has made it very clear that she’s an absolute chucklegremlin. Look at this.

Are you really going to try to argue with that? She looks like she just convinced her parents to buy her an expensive scooter and is dead set on immediately running over the foot of every adult in a 5 mile radius with it. She looks like she was the baby that someone stole candy from and is gloating because she stole it back and kicked the thief in the nuts while doing so. She makes the sound “Gya ha ha ha ha!” when she laughs, apparently. She’s moe, alright? You need to accept this.

Point of clarification: in this panel, “this dog” refers not to any of the literal dogs, even the one that’s actually in-frame, but to Yoru. Confusing, I know.

(And because I know some people perpetually have their minds in the gutter, I do not mean she’s cute in a leery way. She’s like twelve; be normal.)

She also thinks of “wet dog” as a pleasant odor, which is super weird, but she and Denji do keep like 40,000 dogs in their apartment, so maybe it makes a kind of sense.

Again, no grand thesis or theory here. I could spin yarns about how even Nayuta’s worst behavior in these past two chapters is way less terrible than anything Makima ever did, the already-mentioned fact that trying to pry Denji and Asa apart—especially if Nayuta knows about Denji’s ‘love life’—is entirely reasonable, that there are several points in just the few pages here where she could use her powers but doesn’t, and so on and so forth. But really, I know better than to try to pin down where a Fujimoto story is going in advance by now. And really, who cares? Funny gremlin child – look at her.

You may be asking some further questions at this point, such as “is that really it?” and “are you only writing this to paper over the fact that you didn’t get to work on commissions this week” or “are you being mind-controlled by Nayuta herself into writing this flattering but ultimately pointless puff piece?” to which the answers are, in order “yes”, “maybe”, and “well, how would I know?” respectively.

See you next Tuesday on MangaPlus, folks.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions, The Manga Shelf

New Manga First Impressions: Cracking the Code on CIPHER ACADEMY

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

“μεμέ(τρηκεν)() ἰς̣() τὸ δη(μόσιον) (πυροῦ) γενή(ματος) τοῦ διελ(θόντος) ιθ (ἔτους)
Αὐρηλίων Ἀντωνίνου καὶ Κομμόδου
Κ[α]ισάρων τῶν κυρίων (διὰ) σι(τολόγων)() λιβὸ(ς) τοπ(αρχίας) [Σ]ερύ(φεως)() τόπ(ων) Κλάρος Διδύμου ἀγορανομή(σας)
[θ]έμ(α) ἀρταβαι() ὀκτο() χ(οίνικας) δ, (γίνονται) (πυροῦ) (ἀρτάβαι) η \χ(οίνικες) δ./ Διογ(ένης) σι(τολόγος) σεσημ(είωμαι).”

Shonen Jump’s rush to find their next big hit has produced its fair share of odd little manga, most of which don’t get the chance to run very long; from the still-in-limbo draconic slice of life that was Ruri Dragon to the sweet-tooth, axed-before-its-time battle shonen Candy Flurry, the casualties are frequent and litter the magazine’s pages—and that of its affiliates—like skeletons on a battlefield. Just the other day, it was this environment that Cipher Academy strove into; confident, swaggering, and about as qualified for the job as anyone could hope to be.

Cipher Academy‘s greatest asset is not actually anything within the manga itself, at least not yet. It’s the manga’s author; NISIOISIN, one of the modern anime / manga landscape’s great eccentrics. (On art, we have Yuuji Iwasaki.) You might not know that from reading Cipher Academy itself, though. So far, it’s actually been fairly tame by Isshin’s standards. Of course, that still means that this thing is pretty weird; the premise alone—our protagonist is a new student at an academy that specializes in teaching its students high-level cryptography—is fairly novel. Add in the general state of the manga zeitgeist, and the introductory chapter drops such shamelessly silly shit as AR glasses that help our hapless femboy protagonist bluff his way to Sherlock status (complete with “elementary!” as a catchphrase), a Jojo-posing mean-girl clique who threaten to indenture him on his first day, a habit of literally censoring some of its own dialogue (mostly, though I would be willing to bet not entirely, for comedic effect), and of course, this admirably-insane single page of exposition, which is, in its entirety, most of the worldbuilding that we’ve gotten so far.

As for what this thing is actually about, well, our protagonist, Iroha, enrolls essentially out of lack of better options. The titular academy is mostly but not entirely a girls’ school, and Iroha is in fact crossdressing throughout the entire thing, almost as a matter of fact. This might conveniently dovetail into some sort of harem setup later on, but the emphasis must be on the “some sort” there, given Isshin’s history with that genre. More importantly; he’s a total airhead and doesn’t have the slightest brain for cryptography at all. Enough so that, when he’s handed his first assignment in his home room (where he sits directly behind the beautiful and brilliant Kyoha. Keep her in mind), he has no real idea what to make of it.

Things seem rather dim for Iroha until he runs into Kogoe, who is on the run from Kyoha and her girls for reasons we’re not currently privy to. Iroha hides Kogoe, aided by the fact that Kyoha is immensely dismissive of him, writing him off as a “token boy”. (A meta-joke? Maybe.) Kogoe, grateful, offers Iroha these.

Google Glass, eat your heart out.

She then lightly teases Iroha about the possibility that she might be dangerous. Is this foreshadowing? Probably, although if she actually is a war criminal that’s less foreshadowing than one or two-shadowing. What we might make of her claim that she enrolled at the academy so she can become “a hero” without “resorting to violence” is similarly fairly up in the air. None of this is that strange; first chapters are supposed to have a lot of setup. (I also feel compelled to point out the SHAFT-style head tilt here. Look at that smirk; priceless.)

The real payoff of the first chapter comes when Kyoha and her circle confront Iroha again. Kyoha, correctly, accuses Iroha of having gotten someone else to do the assignment they were handed earlier. When Iroha denies the accusation, Kyoha forces a wager on her, and it’s here where things start to really take off. (Another sidenote; look at her face in that first panel. Positively Seto Kaiba-ish.)

As mentioned, those glasses that Kogoe gives Iroha aren’t actually just for show. They are, for lack of a better way to put it, hacking glasses. An AR interface that both solves no small amount of any given puzzle on its own but also directly aids Iroha in completing the rest. It seems like quite a handy thing to have at a school full of crypto nerds!

It’s a Unix system, he knows this.

The puzzle as-given turns out to have a fairly simple lateral thinking-esque solution (the cryptogram refers to someone, as Kyoha says, “amongst us.” Thinking about this for a few seconds will tip you off that the grammar there includes Iroha as well. Iroha himself, naturally, is the solution to the puzzle).

But we’re not done yet! In a final and very Isshin-y twist to this situation, this then happens.

Note the speech bubbles; that’s not Iroha himself talking. That’s the glasses. Or rather, Kogoe talking through them. During his very first day at school, Iroha has gotten Kyoha, earlier established not only as a brilliant cryptanalyst but also the heiress to a weapons company, under his thumb, through no active will of his own. Time will tell if that actually holds.

The opening chapter’s final scene is this cut back to Kogoe, squirreled away in some lair, where she casually ropes another definition of the term “crypto” into this manga’s world.

Cryptocurrency certainly works better as the proverbial treasure chest in what promises to be a wild battle-of-wits adventure than it does here in the real world, but more than anything, this scene did make me wonder if Cipher Academy might be more ambitious than I was initially inclined to give it credit for. Certainly, the “censored” speech bubbles are a funny joke, but they too could easily point to something more substantial. This early on, it’s hard to make strong claims, so firmly within the realm of speculation is where we remain.

In terms of pure quality, I’d call Cipher Academy more solid and promising than an out-and-out show stopper, but given that NISIOISIN is involved, it seems likely that even if it totally crashes and burns, it’ll at least do so entertainingly. The fact that Iroha himself is functionally just a pawn of Kogoe at the moment points toward some interesting possible dynamics; either one where Iroha is constantly shuffled between opposing forces, like a repeatedly-captured bughouse chess piece, or one where he must learn to leverage his limited assets in the form of the glasses in order to become a proper contender in his own right. There are a lot of open questions about how the world of Cipher Academy even functions, too.

All of this and more provides a number of opportunities for the manga to open up in interesting ways. I just hope that it actually takes them. If it does, you will likely see Cipher Academy in this column again.

Cipher Academy can be read legally, for free, in English, on MangaPlus.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 62

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The Cover Issue: Ritchie the Lion leads what is now his crew to a mysterious island. I’m interested to see where this goes.

Poor Gin. The guy’s got a sense of honor and compassion, but he’s sworn his life to Don Krieg, who has neither. You do wonder how people like that get mixed up in situations like this.

But mixed up Gin very much is; Krieg is so unhappy with Gin’s recent face turn that he fires a cannonball filled with poison gas onto the ship. His pirates have masks to filter the gas out, including Gin himself. But Gin, bless the foolhardy bastard, does this.

Thus, when the gas hits, Gin scrambles to help out a few of the others onboard, willfully abandoning his own life.

Death is never a certain thing in One Piece, but Gin certainly appears to die from exposure to the toxin not long later. The chapter, and thus, the volume, end on this image. Luffy is Gum-Gum gonna kill somebody. (Specifically; Krieg.)

And that is, unfortunately, also where we leave One Piece Every Day itself, for at least a time.

I’ve really enjoyed doing these articles, but I think I overestimated my own personal ability to literally do them every day. I want to continue with them in some form or another but I’m not sure what would be appropriate and would actually keep y’all engaged. If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comments or on my Discord server. Otherwise, I am going to take some time to brainstorm and hopefully come up with a solution that is both enjoyable for all of you and practical for myself.

Until next time.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.