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.
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