Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends, Vol. 7

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By Yomi Hirasaka and Itachi. Released in Japan as “Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai” by Media Factory, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Alive. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Much as I try to tell my readers whether or not they will enjoy a particular volume or series, in the end this is still my review blog where I mostly review to my tastes. I tend to like most of what I review. And my taste can be unpredictable from series to series. I do sometimes wonder about it. Why am I OK with fanservice in Cage of Eden or Negima when it drives me nuts in Food Wars or Monster Musume? Sometimes predicting what I like doesn’t really work. Usually a series I think I’ll dislike or drop early turns out to have some hidden depth or plotline or characterization that I latch on to, and suddenly it’s on my ‘surprisingly good’ list.

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No series typifies this more than Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends. I decided to review this new volume, the 7th in the series, mostly as I saw that the ALA convention had a Best/Worst manga of the last three years panel. This is thankfully mostly dedicated to spectacular manga that the panelgoers may not have seen, but there is a section devoted to, shall we say, the bottom feeders. The results were both surprising and non. The surprising was Bakuman, which I knew had a healthy crowd that disliked its ongoing issues with sexism (including me – I dropped it early), but I wasn’t aware it was that healthy. The other two titles, Haganai and High School DxD, were firmly in the otaku harem grenre.

I get this. The harem genre is far more popular in Japan than it is in the US, and has large inherent sexism issues, just like Bakuman. It tends towards blatant fanservice, generic ‘nice’ heroes, and heroines who tend to fall into very obvious types. And no argument about High School DxD, whose first volume I was sort of lukewarm to but additional research has shown I’ll likely be dumping it pretty soon. That said… c’mon, voters, Haganai over Mayo Chiki? Over Triage X? Over I Don’t Like You At All, Big Brother!!? Is it just Haganai’s increased visibility?

I have perhaps chosen a non-typical volume with which I defend my enjoyment of Haganai. This particular volume does not have Kodaka’s gothloli younger sister in it at all, and the other resident loli, Maria, makes only a token appearance (though a cliffhanger implies Vol. 8 may be quite different). And Sena does not run through the pages naked with her breasts bouncing up and down in a grotesque parody. Instead, for the most part, this deals with the aftermath of Yozora cutting her hair, and subsequent jogging of Kodaka’s memories.

There’s still plenty of humor here, which is (more than the harem possibilities) the main reason to read Haganai. Yozora’s becoming a “pretty boy” to troll Maria is wonderful, Yozora and Rika trolling an oblivious Sena into a truly ridiculous hairstyle is magnificently over the top, and the entire parody of yaoi manga artwork is worth the price of the book alone. That said, the best parts of this volume are showing off how close the “not friends” have become, or seeing their vulnerability.

Yozora gets the bulk of the pages here, and it’s sweet yet also depressing seeing her inability to socialize, which is far more crippling than Kodaka and Sena’s simple mild personality quirks. A bonus chapter shows is the events of the start of the series from her POV, and her frustration is palpable. I also liked Sena’s immediate acceptance of Yozora’s new hair, and though she attempts to bully her about it it’s really a token attempt – these two are actually getting along quite well now. And Rika with her glasses off is actually briefly vulnerable, before the front comes slamming back up.

I get why folks would dislike Haganai, and admit it’s not for everyone. But there’s a lot of depth, humor and heart here, and compared to some of the other titles we’ve seen lately in the same genre, I can’t agree it’s among the worst. I’ve come to greatly enjoy this series. Now we’ll see if I can still say the same after what promises to be a loli-nun heavy Vol. 8.

Sword Art Online: Fairy Dance, Vol. 1

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By Reki Kawahara, abec, and Tsubasa Haduki. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks, serialized in the magazine Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen Press.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, after my highly positive reviews of the first Sword Art Online manga, several people told me that the series took a big nosedive with the next arc. I was therefore quite interested to see what happened here, and how exactly the series lost all of the goodwill it gained. I initially though I might have to wait until the arc finished to get the full story, but no, that’s not the issue here. Everything that I suspect people hated about this arc is laid out right at the beginning of the story, to the point where I wonder if the author did this deliberately to tweak fans a little bit. After all, he is having to come up with a way to continue what was a fairly self-contained story.

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Let’s run through the basic problems, which I think fall into three big categories. First, there is the introduction of Suguha, the younger sister of Kazuto/Kirito, our hero. As we hear from her angsty narration, she was told that she and Kirito were not really siblings, but cousins, while he was trapped in SAO. This allows her to have ‘legal in Japan’ feelings for Kazuto, which given that the reader spent the last two volumes marveling at Kirito and Asuna’s relatively quick and happy relationship can be a bit grating. Moreover, we discover she’s also playing an MMO to see what Kazuto found so amazing about them, and is now teaming up with him – without either one knowing that they’re really teaming up with their real-life sibling. Wackiness, as they say, ensues. (Oh yes, and there’s fanservice of Suguha’s naked, buxom form in the shower.)

Secondly we get introduced to the villain of the piece, Sugou, aka Oberon. I feel that it’s OK to spoil that he is the villain given that the story does so immediately after his first appearance. His entire personality is designed to be evil, which means he gets all the usual evil attributes, including gloating about his evil plans (which he explains in great detail to both Kazuto and Asuna), and openly discussing sexually assaulting a girl who openly hates him without her content. He’s a loathsome prick, and one wishes he had a bit of the subtlety of SAO’s first villain, who at least had better justification in his head for mass murder.

Lastly, after expecting a tearful reunion of Kirito and Asuna in the real world, we find that not only has Asuna not woken up, not only is she trapped in another MMO designed by her evil fiancee, but she is literally being kept in a BIRDCAGE and tormented by Sugou/Oberon, unable to even escape (though she may be trying to change that at the end of this volume). Seeing our favorite action girl as a prize to be won, passive and caged, is possibly the one thing that grated on me the most here, if only as her role is then handed over to Leafa/Suguha.

That said, there are things I did greatly enjoy here. The basic premise is still solid, if ridiculous. (The fact that these VR MMOs weren’t banned after SAO’s mass deaths came out is totally ludicrous.) Kirito is a very likeable hero, and I admired his resolve and willingness to use his cheat skills to get ahead in order to save the one he loves. The reunion with Yui was too short for my liking, but still very heartwarming, and I’d love to see her reunite with her mother as well. The narrative flows smoothly, with the battles being interesting and not taking over the entire book. The new game is sufficiently different from the first to add new depth. We have a new artist here, who seems to mostly be an artist-for-hire on light novels, and the artwork is pretty decent. And I did enjoy the brief glimpses we got to see of the real world – I wish we’d seen a bit more. (I wonder if the novel, due out in December, has some of the missing depth here.)

So overall, no, I didn’t loe this as much as the first series, for the reasons I mentioned above. It’s clearly retooling itself to attract new readers, and in order to do that burning a few of its bridges. That said, it’s still a lot of fun, and I would really like to see what happens next, so I’d call it a success overall. Let’s not lock up our heroines for the entire story in the future, though.

The Hentai Prince and the Stony Cat, Vol. 2

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By Sou Sagara and Okomeken. Released in Japan as “Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko” by Media Factory, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Alive. Released in North America by Digital Manga Publishing.

I was a bit ‘meh’ about the first volume of Stony Cat, which I felt showed promise but also had several flaws. The second volume is for the most part better, even though it has many of the same flaws, because the flaws are starting to look like they’re built into the work as a whole. This is not a manga about easy fixes – its very premise shows off the dangers of trying to fix your personality quirks with mere wishes – and we delve deeper into that here, as Yoto’s attempt to cheer Azusa up fail on a spectacular level, partly due to his being unable to avoid telling the truth but mostly due to his misconception about how deep her issues run.

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There is a certain awkwardness that permeates the entire volume – indeed, the adaptation helps it along with some translation quirks that I’m not certain are deliberate. Azusa’s two old ‘friends’ from middle school, in the aftermath of the botched ‘date’, speak in a sort of stilted robotic tone, ending everything in ‘I did’ or ‘we did’. Indeed, everyone seems to talk a bit more formally in this series. It’s likely just a case of ‘how can I deal with this regional dialect’, but it helps to add an additional disconnect to what’s going on in the series.

Azusa is merely the most obvious example of someone whose ruined self-image is causing great pain in her life (even her mother, who seems to be one of those standard ditzy anime moms, is not really helping her). Tsukiko is pretty unhappy with Yuto’s plan, but of course can barely express it thanks to her wished-for stoicism (unlike Yuto, who is able to get his wish reversed halfway through this book, she’s still stuck with her face being the way it is.) Yuto himself is the typical well-meaning but overzealous teen guy, deciding that he knows how to fix things without really thinking about how they’ll affect the person he’s trying to fix. Getting his ability to lie back allows him to defuse things with Tsukiko’s sister (who turns out to be the “Iron King” track star we saw in Vol. 1), but I suspect his basic personality flaws will continue to plague him.

Aside from that, this series has most of what you’d expect from a harem romance based on a light novel that runs in Comic Alive. There’s lots of comedic violence, misunderstandings, some blatant nudity at the end of the book. The aforementioned Iron King gets to show off her physical prowess, but also shows off how little she understands the human brain (similar to the rest of the cast) when she accepts Yoto’s ‘that was my evil twin brother’ story at face value. Despite the added depth revealed in this volume, it’s still filled with flaws, and I wouldn’t recommend it except to those who like its genre to begin with. But for those people, there’s things to like here, or at least things to muse upon in the hope that future volumes will run with them further.