Kigurumi Guardians Review

Hi, everyone.

I know that it seems odd, me doing so many blog posts all at once after being absent for so long.  But this year I have at least a vague list of series that I want to review, and I have just been buzzing along through my To Do Lists of everything else in my life, so why not?

Anyway, this series is yet another one that I first saw at the bookstore but never picked up, only to pick it up once it was available at my local library.

(What can I tell you?)

Anyway, after a long day of being ga-ga over dreamy Student Body President Kagami Chigaya, student Hakka Sasakura comes home to find a strange panda-duck-like kigurumi sitting in her living room.  (A kigurumi, for those who don't know, literally means "wearable sewing", so basically a wearable stuffed animal.)  He says his name is Ginger and Hakka's mom says he's there for something like a foreign exchange program.

The next day, Hakka is called to a meeting, where she discovers not only President Chigaya, but also two other students, each with their own kigurumi.  Chigaya then explains that the three of them (the kigurumi owners) must now partner up with their kigurumi in order to repel an invasion of criminals from another world known as The Puppet Guild.  (Criminals, really?  Not a military force or an army of monsters or something?)

These two students are Nobara Miyamori, the school idol/princess type, and Satsuki Nasu, the straight man who has very few lines in Volume One.

As it turns out, these kigurumi also came from another dimension, and are trapped in those silly forms while in ours.  The only way to change them into three magical bishonen is by kissing them.  (This mechanic, when combined with the male Satsuki Nasu, leads to a bit more BL-like stuff than one would usually see in a magical girl manga, which is one of the series' few legitimately interesting/innovative choices.)

The Puppet Guild's mission is to collect human hearts, which they consider to be priceless treasures.  Once a human's heart has been harvested, they become known as "Shells", a pre-stage between being human and becoming "Puppets" like their masters.  Ordinary people can fight Shells and kigurumi can fight Puppets, but not vice-versa.

(Why they added that particular wrinkle, I have no idea.  It only serves to complicate things.  On the plus side, when someone's heart is taken, it leaves behind a cartoony heart-shaped hole that oozes with a dark substance, which is presumably blood.  That's some good Surprise Creepy right there.)

At one point, Hakka takes a bath with Ginger in his kigurumi form after they both get soaked in the rain, so that makes for a bit of sexy fanservice that we don't usually get from a magical girl manga.

All of that being said, this series is pretty much a storm of classic cliches being fired at us like bullets from a gun, with only a few non-lethal rubber ones (i.e. new and different ideas) thrown in to keep us on our toes.  (Oh, let me guess: Is Ginger going to be a smart-mouthed yet hot Jerkass that Hakka will gradually thaw out and fall in love with?  Duh-derr!)

If you're really a fan of magical girl manga (and not even one with a vaguely new take on it like Puella Magi Madoka Magica or Magical Girl Site), then I guess you can pick this up.

Just don't be surprised if I don't.

Just As Evil As It's Name

Well, friends and neighbors, the manga version of "The Saga of Tanya the Evil" came out in stores yesterday, and so I was all over that.

I had read a basic synopsis on Amazon.  Apparently, a cold and twisted businessman in modern-era Japan is killed by someone he hurt and meets up with what is basically God.  After challenging him and declaring a lack of faith in magic and miracles, God decides to reincarnate him as a girl in the middle of a magic war.

Now, this all sounds well and good.  The man is deliciously evil, God seems tough but fair, and who doesn't love a magic war?  But the premise and the art style are the only things that wind up saving it.

I read through the basic premise (i.e. the first few pages of the manga) and I was cool with it.  But then everyone was jumping around and driving tanks and firing their guns and shit.  And the talking, my God, the talking!

With all of that happening on basically every page, almost non-stop, it was entirely too much information to take in all at once.

This series was based on a series of light novels and it shows.  Things like Haganai were also based on light novels, but much less action and shit happens in series like that, so you have plenty of empty space to admire the simpler artwork and really pay attention to the things that people say (which, by the way, aren't all "Unit X has moved to Point Y, begin Operation Z and fire your guns at so-and-so angle).

Tanya the Evil, however, has everyone making big speeches and talking military hoop-de-doo on practically every page.  I just didn't have the time for it.

Again, the very premise of this manga went some way toward saving it from being a complete waste of time for me.  Tuxedo Gin, Please Save My Earth, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and I'm a Spider So What have shown us that a reincarnation story can work well, or at the very least be funny.  Tanya the Evil squanders this by focusing more on the magic war and a lot of twisted philosophizing than on our hero's reactions to being in and growing up in a female body.

There's not even any fanservice.  Even that might have made this series slightly bearable.  But, since he's instantly reborn as a baby and spends the story as a prepubescent girl, we don't see any "these are my boobs, this is what I look like naked, how do you put on a bra" moments from her.  Not even in a lolicon setting.

That being said, this is hardly that kind of series.  It's just the kind of series that seems to be all sizzle and very little steak.  The art is great, though.

And, as the final nail in Tanya the Evil's coffin, I was just reading on Wikipedia that the series is still ongoing.  While that isn't necessarily bad in and of itself, the article goes on to basically state that Tanya still remains unchanged as of the present writing.

God put her in that body to help her become more open and empathetic, showing her the worst of humanity's cruelty and showing her what it's like to be so vulnerable that you have to believe in something to survive.  Unfortunately, this is just the kind of environment that someone like Tanya thrives on.

I guess he wasn't so bright after all.

(PS: It has come to my attention that Nameless Asterism is perhaps a tad sad, in that various misunderstandings lead to a ton of hurt feelings and seeming-betrayals and shit.  And I don't need that in my life.  It's slot will now be taken by Beasts of Abigail.

I also intend to review Angels of Death, but only if I can't think of anything to round out the number at nine by the end of the year.

And, finally, that one series I could never remember the name of is "Kigurumi Guardians".)

So, yeah, I would not recommend this series.

Yokai Rental Shop

Welcome once again, true believers, to Yaruki Man-Manga!

Apologies for not having been around since the New Year started, but this and that came up; you know how it is.

Anyway, I have a new series here I'd like to talk about called Yokai Rental Shop.

On her deathbed, Yase Hiiragi's late mother revealed to him the existence of his older half-brother.  The law-abiding civil servant Yase travels to said brother's last known address, only to find a mysterious shop full of exotic creatures and a bishie employee (who he, of course, immediately mistakes for his older brother).

The older brother in question is actually a heavily-bandaged and some what cynical albino named Karasu, who not only sells the exotic pets that this world provides, but also the services of the yokai (traditional Japanese monsters) to those who desire "that which gazes through to the very depths of desire".

The first few stories of Volume 1 take on the feel of Clamp's XXXHolic or Pet Shop of Horrors, but then the story abruptly changes when Yase takes in some yokai blood and unlocks his full potential as a half-yokai vampire.

I should also mention that I've read Volume 2 also, and that one seems more focused on the over-arcing overstory, which is that Karasu started up his business to gain the money and information he needs to track down and kill their shared father: Nurarihyon, the King of the Yokai.

Speaking of Clamp, the seeming overabundance of hot guy characters, the mysterious artwork and the dependence on traditional Japanese monsters also smack of various Clamp titles.

Not that this is a bad series or anything, but it seems to be struggling a bit with what exactly it wants to be.  I mean, first it starts out as a "cruel twist magic shop" story, and then it becomes sort of a "detective and underworld" story with monsters instead of shotgun-toting hitmen.

I enjoyed this series not only because I've always been kind of a fan of yokai, but also because I genuinely want to see where this is all going.  Will it intersperse the remaining yokai battle stories with more of what we saw in the first volume?

Whatever else it's doing, you can bet your bottom dollar that Yokai Rental Shop will milk all the "brothers" tropes and "Archnemesis Dad" tropes out of itself that it possibly can.

PS: Thanks to the magic of Amazon.com posting the release dates for various series, I actually have a plan of exactly what to post about next (albeit no idea exactly when).

The series I intend to read and post about are:
1. Nameless Asterism (releases 2/13/18)
2. Saga of Tanya the Evil (releases 2/13/18)
and 3. Kigurumi Friends/Guardians (already released, but I can't remember which one it was)