My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong As I Expected, Vol. 4

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By Wataru Watari and Ponkan 8. Released in Japan as “Yahari Ore no Seishun Rabukome wa Machigatte Iru” by Shogakukan. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jennifer Ward.

I think I have to come to terms with the fact that the pacing of this series is going to be glacial at best. Much as I have been clamoring for a bit less isekai and a bit more real world in my light novels, I’m pretty sure that other slice of life books must have plots that move faster than the main one in OreGairu. That said, the author is clearly settling in for the long haul, and I’m not sure if I’m just used to him or if he was less appalling, but Hachiman was not nearly as punchable this time around. He’s still a cynic and misanthrope of the worst order, but his analysis of group dynamics, once unpacked from his own mindset, is very clever and not entirely wrong. He works best when paired off with Yukino, who is very similar to him though I think they’d both rather not admit that. As for Yui… I want to give her a hug and send her to a different series.

Despite Komachi starring on the cover, she’s more of a supporting character this time around. The premise, which is actually quite a good one, is that over summer break the teacher gets the Service Club and its auxiliaries, as well as the Cool Kids group, to help supervise an elementary school camping trip. While they’re there, they notice, as often happens with a class of students, that one girl is being shunned by all the others. Hachiman sees her attempts to power through it and be cool and uncaring as Yukino; Yukino sees her desire to be one of the gang but awkward failures as Yui; Yui just sees a sad young girl she wants to help. That said, the attempts to try to fix the group dynamics are somewhat terrible, and it’s only after Hachiman comes up with a clever but incredibly cruel plan that things are even vaguely helped. And even then you aren’t sure if it did any good.

We get a bit more development of Hayama and his group here, and see he has a past with Yukino that I think makes him a bit jealous of Hachiman. And yes, Saika is here as well and we get endless accounts of how attracted to him Hachiman is, which I’ve come to accept is simply never going to go away. But as always, the best reasons to read the book are the prose, particularly Hachiman’s twisted narration, which can be utterly hilarious, brutally on point, or just plain pathetic – sometimes all three at once. In particular, his strange desire to tell stories of his incredibly pathetic childhood, with only the occasional “this happened to someone else” attempt at a cover up, borders on the needy. But it’s what makes this series compulsively readable, and it’s another good, solid volume for this series. That said, the only major plot development happens on the last two pages. Perhaps that bodes well for the next book.

Made in Abyss, Vol. 1

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By Akihito Tsukushi. Released in Japan by Takeshobo, serialized in the online magazine Manga Life Win +. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Beni Axia Conrad. Adapted by Jake Jung.

The idea of doing serious and sometimes dark and deadly plotlines with adorably cute characters is not new to manga – in fact, one might argue it’s been around since manga first began. The last few years, though, particularly since the advent of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, we’ve seen a number of series that deliberately want the dissonance to be part of the point, showing us young happy people and then having very bad things happen to them. In general in some prior reviews I’ve tended to be more annoyed at the plotline than the art style; I tend to like happy endings, as people know, and don’t like characters put through the ringer just for the sake of being mean. Fortunately, Made in Abyss is not that series. You can tell there’s a lot of care put into the basic concept of the world, and the darkness of the first volume is balanced out by the cheerfulness of the heroine.

We are in a fantasy world that exists on the edge of a giant pit, wherein are treasures beyond compare but which is also super lethal, especially as you get further down. Our heroine is Riko, who delves to the shallowest depths of the pit with her fellow orphan children in order to be trained to be an actual adventurer and go deeper. She’s an orphan as both of her parents went into the pit and haven’t returned… that is, until the city gets a message from Riko’s mother. Most of the city chooses to treat this as confirmation of her death, since she was clearly in the “if you go to this level you will die” area. Riko, though, takes it as a sign that she needs to disregard the slow, filled-with-rules training and go down the pit to find her mother, accompanied by Reg, an amnesiac robot boy who wants to find out who he really is. The volume ends with their illegal descent.

Riko and Reg are the best reason to read the series. Riko is a great heroine, being impulsive and bratty but without tipping over into obnoxious, and she’s balanced well by the thoughtful, withdrawn Reg. You sense that her descent is clearly a bad idea and I have no doubt things will get much worse, but she’s the heroine and I want to root for her anyway. Also, the concept of the pit and the levels therein is quite well drawn, being overly complex without requiring the reader to actually remember all of it. If there’s one big drawback, it’s that this time around I *am* more annoyed at the art style than the plotline. I think the series might have worked better for me if the cast looked a bit more realistic and a bit less, well, Madoka Magica. It does not help that the artist at one point as a gag shows us Riko naked and strung up as “punishment” for rule breaking; it’s not as explicit as I feared, but please, do not show naked children in your fantasy adventures, PLEASE. Especially for the lulz.

Despite that, I will be trying another volume of this, mostly as I am very curious to see what happens next, and I hope Riko succeeds.

RWBY

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By Shirow Miwa, based on the series created by Monty Oum. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialized in the magazine Ultra Jump. Released in North America by Viz Media. Translated by Joe Yamazaki. Adapted by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley.

I have never actually seen the RWBY series, though I know of it via Tumblr osmosis. What I know can be summed up as a) there’s a team of fighting girls; b) two of them are super gay; c) OK probably not canonically but fandom thinks they’re super gay. That’s about it. So I was looking forward to seeing this series. It’s always interesting when Japan does a manga of a Western property, though in this case obviously RWBY has a certain anime style to begin with. The manga serves as a prequel to the series, showing off the four main characters, as well as another team that also works with them, as they protect the world from enemies while also attending what seems to be superhero school. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I suspect that this may be more a book for newbies than the hardcore RWBY fan.

The girl on the cover is Ruby Rose, the R of the group, and she gets the first of what turns out to be an introductory story for each of the team. She’s essentially the standard Shonen Jump hero, only female. I like her, she’s very straightforward. Less straightforward are Weiss, who is fighting with the team despite the objections of her rich, upper-class family, who have other plans for her; Blake, who is a faunus, aka a catgirl, and who has a dark past and seems to have once been a terrorist; and Yang, Ruby’s sister, who likes to be a big sister type, punching things, and Blake, not necessarily in that order. The stories are not particularly deep – Weiss and Blake’s, being more serious, had greater impact for me – but they sketch out the personalities of the team pretty well.

The ending story tries to focus on one of the other teams in the series, Team JNPR, whose leader seems to have a crush on Weiss, and also an extreme case of self-doubt. Unfortunately, this is a one-volume title, so we don’t really get to know the rest of his team that well, but that’s what the series is for. Again, there’s nothing particularly surprising here – Jaune’s team leaves early to battle a monster so that he can prove how awesome he is, only to run into trouble and need to get bailed out by our heroines. We get a few cameos from people who are clearly also regular cast members (I liked the flying robot girl), as well as a hint of GREAT EVIL afoot that no doubt also will appear in the show rather than this manga.

As I said, this seems to serve more as an introduction to RWBY for those who haven’t seen it – fans may want to wait for the anthology series that Viz just licensed. It’s not great, but I felt it had a lot of style, just like the team it’s trying to show us. It made me curious about the series, which is probably all it was designed to do. Definitely worth a shot.