Review: MAYO CHIKI!

 Of course, I can't talk about shonen manga without some sort of horny nonsense, and boy does this one live up to both parts of that phrase.

MAYO CHIKI!, based on the light novels by Hajime Asano and illustrations by Seiji Kikuchi, with art by NEET.  First published in 2010 and first published in North America in 2012.

PLOT:

Sakamachi Kinjiro is a teen boy with a serious problem.  He's got a terrible fear of women which tends to manifest as sudden, involuntary nosebleeds.  Through a series of accidents, he discovers that the butler serving the resident rich girl Kanade Suzutsuki is secretly a girl.  Said butler, Subaru Konoe, is all too ready to kill Kinjiro for uncovering her secret but Kanade has a better idea.  In return for keeping Subaru's secret, Kinjiro will go on dates with Suburu to cure his gynophobia.  Misadventures ensue, and Kinjiro is going to need to man up fast if he (and his blood pressure) are going to survive.

STORY:

Mayo Chiki! is a contrived piece of crap.  I know you're terribly surprised by this statement.  There's not a single moment in the entire volume that isn't a blatant plot device and not a single character that isn't one or two quirks collected within a human shell.

Let's start with Kinjiro.  He's established as a coward...until the story needs him to muster up just enough courage to save one or more of the girls around him.  He's afraid of women to the point of involuntary nosebleeds...except that he spends plenty of time around Kanade and Subaru without so much as a drop.  They don't even seem like particularly severe nosebleeds, especially when compared to those used as gags in other shonen manga.  He's also incredibly oblivious, to the point that at one point he stumbles into Subaru in the bathroom and accidentally gets a handful of boob and doesn't connect the dots.  I'm convinced that if Kanade hadn't outright told him about Subaru's gender, Kinjiro would accuse Subaru of having a weird-looking vagina for a dude.  He shifts from idiot to perfectly normal boy as the story demands and neither version of him is convincing.

Subaru doesn't fare much better.  She alternates between her cool, tough butler mode and acting like a simpering little girl.  The story justifies this shift (as well as the whole hiding-her-gender schtick) as due to a nonsensical backstory where she's the only child in a long line of patriarchal butlers.  Mostly it's so this story can have its tsundere cake and eat it too.  One moment she could be smacking Kinjiro around, the next she's acting all feminine and submissive.  These shifts are so sudden and severe that at times they feel more like separate personalities than facets of a single person.

Subaru's mistress might be the least dimensional member of the cast.  She's painted as a sadist who gets off on seeing Kinjiro suffer, going so far as to stage fake kidnappings just to force him and Subaru together and feed off of their mutual discomfort.  The author tries to humanize her by making her our viewpoint characters as well as the giver of exposition, but she's more plot device than person.  The same is true for Kinjiro's little sister, who is there to complicate the romantic tension with her attraction to both her older brother than Subaru in her male guise.  Nothing makes a narrative worse than imouto fanservice!

So much happens within this volume and yet the only impact it leaves is mild annoyance.  Every character is going through the motions, every gag is telegraphed from miles away, and every attempt at horniness lands with a dull thud.  If it's this bad in manga form, I don't want to imagine what the original light novels were like.

ART:

NEET seems to have made something of a career out of working on light novel-related manga, considering that the last time I looked at one of his works was Reprise of the Spear Hero.  There are seven years between Mayo Chiki! and that series, and that lack of experience shows in the art.  The style here is pure moeblob, although NEET's take on the characters is even squishier and less featureless than Seiji Kikuchi's original designs.  The characters all have big, flat eyes, tiny flappy mouths, and not a single nose can be found within these pages.  NEET is also no good at selling Subaru's androgyny, which only serves to further undermine this weak premise.  He's got a rather loose grip on anatomy, as the girls' breasts expand and deflate at will and torsos have a tendency to extend in the strangest ways.  Maybe that's why there are so few explicit moments of fanservice.

PRESENTATION:

There's an "interview" with the characters where they talk inanely about things like popularity polls.  There are also a few pages of color artwork, which are softly rendered onto some of the stiffest paper I've ever seen in a manga.  I'm not joking, it's almost like cardstock.  Somehow it's stiffer than the cover!

RATING:

Mayo Chiki! is an artifact from a transitional time, one where shonen manga shifted to accommodate the growing light novel market.  It's just a shame they had to adapt this one because everything about this one is awful and forgettable.

This series is published by Seven Seas.  It is complete in Japan with 7 volumes available.  All 7 volumes have been released in both single volumes and 3 omnibuses.  The single volumes are out of print; the omnibuses are currently in print.