Review: GAKUEN PRINCE

So to finish out the month, we take another look at reverse harems.  Today's review is a shining example of how NOT to make a reverse harem manga.

GAKUEN PRINCE (Gakuen Oji), by Jun Yuzuki.  First published in 2006, and first published in North America in 2009.

PLOT:
Jyo-Shioka High School is a prestigious all-girls school that has recently gone co-ed.  In spite of this, the male student population remains low.  What this means for said male students is that they are surrounded by severely horny young women, all of whom would happily and literally gang rape them unless they choose one of three things:

     1.  Set oneself up as an innocent idol to be coddled.
     2.  Become a giant man-whore, so he can at least deal with the girls one at a time
     3.  Pledge his devotion to a single girl and become her boyfriend.

Such is the social structure for the S class (made up of most of the boys and the academically superior students) and the A class (everyone else).  Azuza Mizutani is the latest addition to the school's male harem, and he soon finds himself adrift in a raging sea of estrogen.  In a panic, he grabs the nearest girl to him and declares her to be his girlfriend.  Too bad that the girl he chose, Risa Okitsu, wants nothing to do with him.  She's a nerdy girl from the A class who already has enough trouble with bullying, and all she wants to do is get through each day unnoticed.  Now all eyes are on her and Azuza, and she even gets bumped up to the S class through student council machinations.  Will Risa be able to get along in her new class?  Will she at least learn to get along with her new boyfriend?

STORY:
Oh man.  Someone clearly still has lingering issues with high school, and that person's name is Jun Yuzuki.  I had initially picked this up because I had heard it was a subversive take on reverse harems, but not only does it fail as a reverse harem, but it fails in subversion and even just as a decent story.

To be subversive means that work needs to twist clichés in a way that is not only unexpected or ironic, but mocks the cliché as well.  Well, there's certainly no humor to be found here, and the only unexpected thing is just how misogynistic it is.  Every girl who is not Risa is a man-hungry, bullying rapist - it's a whole school full of Mean Girls.  Honestly, if the sexes had been reversed on this situation, it would have been condemned and protested instead of licensed.

Mind you, the guys don't look much better in comparison.  We get a group shot of the boys, and we see there's a short, cute one, a dark-haired devious one with glasses, a pretty blond...wait a minute, is anyone else getting Ouran High School Host Club flashbacks?  Don't worry about it too hard, because we spend pretty much no time getting to know them, or getting to know Azuza for that matter.

The only character who gets anything resembling development is Risa.  She looks nerdy, but she doesn't act the part.  Instead she is mostly defined by her massive amounts of pent-up rage at her tormentors.  This is a perfectly understandable reaction, and it might even be a bit disturbing if she ever expressed it outside of her daydreams. Instead she ends up getting cornered so that she can be saved by Azuza,  There's a lot more to be said about this, but it's more appropriate for the Art section.

Gakuen Prince wants to be a dark and subversive take on reverse harems, but instead it's shallow, misogynistic, and loathable from cover to cover.

ART:
The artstyle is pretty typical for shoujo, with the characters' dark doll-like eyes and thickly drawn hair.  The panels tend to be large, the backgrounds vague, and the composition average.  It's far from perfect, though, and the cover is a sterling example.  Look at Azuza up there on the left, his torso specifically.  He either has a freakishly long, Michael Phelps-esque abdomen or he's rocking those pants spectacularly low and simply has no penis.  You can pick whichever explanation amuses you most. 

As you can imagine, after that my expectations for the art were pretty low.  I admit that I did like the weird, exaggerated grimaces Risa makes in her daydreams, complete with dramatic lighting, simply because it's so rare that a shoujo lead is allowed to be portrayed in such an ugly manner.  Too bad that whenever she needs to be rescued, her pigtails magically undo themselves, her thick glasses fall off, and a few buttons on her shirt pop open to reveal some cleavage.  Oh yes, we have ourselves a classic case of Hollywood Nerd, where an unflattering hairstyle and glasses are all it takes to define a girl as unpopular, and removing them are all it takes to make her beautiful.  To add to the terrible subtext, she only becomes this way when she's in peril, implying that she's at her most beautiful when she is at her weakest.  This was the final straw for me in regards to this manga.  At this point, I was DONE with this manga, and was ready to launch it towards the wall at Mach speed. 

PRESENTATION:
As typical for a Del Ray work, there's an honorifics guide in the front, translation notes and an untranslated preview of Volume 2 in the back.  There are also some author's notes.

RATING:
This is yet another of the worst manga I've read since starting this site.  There may be stranger, more offensive, and more sexist pieces of crap out there, but they're often more honest in their intention to titillate and offend.  Gakuen Prince instead tries to play off its sick ideals as humor, but those attempts only highlight their awfulness.

This series was published by Del Ray.  This series is complete in 12 volumes.  3 volumes were published, and all are out of print.

You can purchase manga like this and much more through RightStuf.com!

Review: ITAZURA NA KISS

Last time we looked at a couple of supernatural romances.  This time I want to look at something simple, just some classic, girl-meets-boy sort of stories.  Today's review certainly fits that description, and its age would define it as a classic, but has it aged gracefully?

ITAZURA NA KISS (Playful Kiss), by Kaoru Tada.  First published in 1991, and first published in North America in 2009.

PLOT:
Kotoko is a sweet young high school girl, if not something of a ditz.  That doesn't stop her from crushing on Naoki Irie, the star student of Class A.  She confesses her feelings, and he turns her down flat.  Her classmates rally around Kotoko to support her, but her troubles are only beginning.

Her father's new home is damaged in an earthquake, and now their only option until the new house is built is to stay with her father's oldest friend.  Said friend also happens to be Naoki's father.  Now Kotoko is stuck in the same house as the boy she both loves and hates, all while her father and Naoki's mother conspire to bring their children together in love.  Will Kotoko and Naoki learn to like one another, and will Naoki ever begin to return Kotoko's feelings?

STORY:
The set-up should sound familiar: a spunky girl loves a distant, dickish guy, and bit by bit the latter learns to like (and eventually love) the former.  Does Itazura na Kiss do anything different with this well-worn plotline?  Nope!  If anything, it takes too long to get to the point and does far too good of a job of making its leads total opposites.

Kotoko may be good-natured and spirited, but the story (not to mention many side characters) make no bones about her being rather oblivious, a poor student, and a terrible cook.  It gets to the point where it goes far beyond rehashing lame jokes and well into mean-spirited territory.  It's only pride and determination that keep Kotoko from feeling dejected, and it's only those feelings that keep this story from getting too depressing.  It does help that her classmates are rather sweet in their support of her and her relationship, despite being a lot of dummies and thugs.  The only downside to that is that their leader, Kin-chan, is very possessive and pushy when it comes to his own crush on Kotoko.  Still, I would just as soon have him over Kotoko's actual love interest.

Naoki is nothing but a horrible, arrogant jackass.  He's the sort who is perfect at pretty much everything he tries, and because of it he never has to exert himself at anything and sees everyone not as his level as not worth his time or notice, including Kotoko.  Worse still, he has a little brother who is just like him, with the addition of a small child's willfulness.  I wish I could say that Naoki gets any better by volume's end, but truthfully he does not - sure, he may come around a little bit to Kotoko, but his few kind words always come with backhanded compliments, so the progress is half-hearted in a 'one step forward, two steps back' sort of way.  I feel like Tada forgot that the romantic leads in a story like this need to be both realistically flawed AND sympathetic.  You can't lay all the faults on one for a joke and make the other so perfect and distant as to be a douchebag.

ART:
The story may be clichéd, but it's nowhere near as dated as the art.  Characters are delicately drawn, with huge eyes, big dated hairstyles, flat simple round faces and equally big, round chins.  Expressions are simple and big, to the point of being wonky on some of the supporting cast.  There's a similar sort of simplicity to the backgrounds, which alternate between blankness and simple overlays of screentone.  The panels are relatively spacious, and this space combined with the delicacy of the linework keeps the artwork relatively pleasant to look at.

PRESENTATION:
The only extra is a single, black-and-white splash page.

RATING:

This so-called love story is too mean and too slow for my taste.  I can't say that shoujo as a whole has necessarily gotten any better since this story was released, but I can say with certainty that there are better, kinder, and more equal love stories in the genre than this one.

This series was published by Digital Manga Press.  The series is complete in 12 omnibus editions, and all are currently in print.

You can purchase this volume and many more like it through RightStuf.com!

Review: BLACK BIRD

I've made no secret of my fondness for shoujo manga, and equally so I've made no secret of my despair over how some shoujo series revel in the very worst of the genre: insipid heroines, abusive love interests, shallow relationships, lackluster art, and so forth.  So this month I'm doing a sort of compare and contrast of selected shoujo works, reviewing two works with a similar theme that show how said theme can be done right and how it can be done wrong.

I'll get things going with an extremely popular shoujo series - indeed, until Kodansha started rereleasing Sailor Moon, it was one of the best selling shoujo series on the market.  It's also one of the worst things I've read since starting this project.

BLACK BIRD (Burakku Baado), by Kanoko Sakurakoji.  First published in 2007, and first published in North America in 2009.

PLOT:
Misao Harada has been able to see spirits and demons all her life, and sadly all it's done for her is make her appear spacey and clumsy to normal people since they can't see the spirit world tormenting her.  Her only consolation comes from the fond but vague memories of Kyo, a young boy who could also see the spirits and promised to come back to Misao someday.

It turns out Kyo is true to his word and then some.  It also turns out he's a demon, a tengyu to be specific.  He has returned because for reasons unknown, Misao is a particularly tasty morsel to the denizens of the spirit world, the kind that only comes once a century.  To drink her blood will grant long life; to eat her flesh will bestow eternal youth; her hand in marriage will bring great prosperity to any demon clan that claims her.  Now that she is 16, it's open season on Misao, and Kyo is determined to make Misao his at any cost.  Even if it means following her every move, posing as one of Misao's teachers, and fighting off every creature that comes for her, Kyo will have his prize.

STORY:
I was perfectly willing to give this story a chance, even if the "ordinary kid is tormented by various spirits" has been done before by better and more interesting manga.  Then Kyo showed up and I spent the rest of the volume wavering somewhere between revulsion and rage.

I thought I had seen hopeless, hapless shoujo heroines before, but Misao truly takes the cake.  She is never at any point proactive in this story.  Once the demons start showing up, all she does is cry, cower, and bleed, always waiting for someone else to save her.  I'm not saying that she should be able to kick loads of demon butt, but would it honestly hurt the story if she at least ATTEMPTED to defend herself?  Could she have just enough brain cells to rub together to know that maybe she shouldn't follow strangers lest they turn out to be demons out to eat/screw/do god knows what to her?  If she were carried off any more often, she might as well have a handle on her back to better facilitate her frequent kidnappings.  Personality-wise she's not much better, because Misao spends the majority of her time vacillating between two moods: hating Kyo for being so controlling and (OF COURSE) falling in love with him because he's hot and he saves her all the time.

Misao is only half of the problem I had with Black Bird.  The other half is Kyo, or as I had mentally dubbed him halfway though, "Professor Bad Touch."  He's like a walking checklist of cheesy shoujo fetishes.  Don't believe me?  Let me count the ways.  He's a dark, tall and handsome (1) supernatural being (2) with wings (3).  He's an older man (4) who sometimes wears glasses (5) to better play the role of Misao's teacher (6).  He's a white knight (7), always rescuing her and whisking her away to his large mansion, complete with servant (8), and he heals her injuries by suggestively licking her body (9).  There's probably more I could think of with time, but I suspect you all get the idea.  He's also quite the stalker, which for some might count as #10.   From the moment he reintroduces himself into Misao's life, Kyo is determined that no one but him will possess Misao, and that she WILL marry him.  This is not phrased as a question, but as a command or at least as a certainty that Misao is stupid for fighting against.  Then, to make doubly sure that Misao is never too far away, Kyo installs himself at her school as a teacher, so now he is literally an authority figure to whom Misao has to obey.  At no point could I discern Kyo having any real affection for Misao - all he feels for her is possessiveness, and frankly that makes him no different that the demons he fights.  But we the readers aren't supposed to think that.  We're supposed to swoon over him, because he's just so handsome  and so wonderful and so caring and how romantic it is that his every consuming thought is about this girl who is totally unworthy of him!

Why do I get the feeling that Twilight fans would love the hell out of this manga?

Speaking of Twilight, there's a frequent focus on bloodsucking and bloodplay between our two leads, whether it's a classic vampire-style feeding or licking injuries on various parts of Misao's body.  These acts are always staged like sex acts, which adds enough weird subtext on its own.  It only gets  worse when you consider that Misao is not always conscious for these acts, and it was at these points that I longed to find and press the BAD TOUCH WE NEED AN ADULT button.  It's weird how much emphasis is placed on this considering that Kyo is NOT a vampire and tengyu are not generally known for eating people or blood, which leads me to think that this is something of a favored kink for Sakurakoji.  .Unlike her, I don't get off on the combination of blood and sex, and this meant that a lot of the so-called 'sexy times' in this manga left me feeling rather disturbed, and it's just as much because of the "TMI, Sakurakoji-san" element as it is about the blood itself.

What can I say for Black Bird?  Well, I am genuinely surprised that it's such a popular series because it's built around two utterly vacuous characters, one being weak and helpless, the other less a character and more a mass of clichés.  It expects us to cheer on what is in truth a possessive and one-sided relationship and to thrill at a very literal combination of sex and violence.  Mostly what I wanted to do with Black Bird was to throw it at the wall as hard as possible and try to scrub the taint of its creepiness off of my flesh.

ART:
The artwork as a whole is terribly unremarkable.  The character designs are extremely generic, to the point where Sakurakoji seems to be able to draw only one sort of male face (generic bishonen) and one female face (simpering moeblob, so simplified that they often appear to have no noses).  They're not terribly expressive, either.  For example, Kyo only seems to have two emotions: Mildly Pissed and Creepy Leering.  There's a nice variety in panel shape and size, but they're assembled in a rather messy manner and it detracts from the big splash panels of Kyo which I presume were meant to be the highlight.  She's not much better with action, as she tends to just break out the speed lines and call it a day.  Even the backgrounds are rather plain.

I've already gone over the squickiness of Sakurakoji's blood fetish, but there's something else in the art that rather disturbs me.  There's a lot of imagery, from the cover to the last splash pages, that puts emphasis on Misao being restrained, unconscious, or is visibly upset.  Such imagery only emphasizes Misao's helplessness and the inequality of her relationship with Kyo, and when combined with the story and the bloodplay, the whole thing comes off as rather sleezy and exploitative, like an old-fashioned bodice-ripper.  It would be one thing if all of this was done so on purpose and the reader was supposed to be conscious of the innate wrongness and messed-up quality of the romance, but this is played perfectly straight, and that's what makes this work so utterly offensive to me.

PRESENTATION:
Nothing to see here.

RATING:
Avoid this one like the plague.  Black Bird's notions of romance are creepy, sleezy, and despicable, and visually it's dull as dishwater.  Leave this one to the Twihards and find yourself some GOOD shoujo to read.

This series is published by Viz.  The series is complete with 18 volumes in Japan.  16 volumes have been published so far, and all are currently in print.

You can purchase this volume and many more like it through RightStuf.com!