Aida Yu - Gunslinger Girl, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)
Mon, Jun. 26th, 2006 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterThe cover of Gunslinger Girl has a pre-adolescent, innocent-looking girl with a sad face wielding a giant machine gun.
Have I mentioned how predictable I was?
In a manga-version of Italy (aka, set there so people can have names like Giuseppe and Tiela and go to assorted piazzas), there's a government agency that takes in young girls when they're near death and makes them into cyborgs. The girls are conditioned to be assassins and paired up with a handler (almost always an adult male), with whom they train and go on missions. The series so far is really a bunch of shorts on the girls in the program, all of whom are struggling with being human and normal when they're cyborg killing machines. There are ruminations on the messed-up nature of the cyborg/handler relationship -- some handlers treat their assignees as tools, others treat them as daughters, and thankfully, there are no horribly squickly Lolita-like fantasies. There's lots of angst.
The art is a bit blocky and not always wonderful, but of course, I love it to pieces. I have also stuck the anime in my Netflix queue.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija, I'm not sure if this hits your bulletproof kink, given that they're not mutants, but it is a school of special kids.
I was getting a little tired of the one-offs and wanted a longer, angstier arc, but I suspect I will keep reading this because... angsty little girls who are cyborg killing machines!
Have I mentioned how predictable I was?
In a manga-version of Italy (aka, set there so people can have names like Giuseppe and Tiela and go to assorted piazzas), there's a government agency that takes in young girls when they're near death and makes them into cyborgs. The girls are conditioned to be assassins and paired up with a handler (almost always an adult male), with whom they train and go on missions. The series so far is really a bunch of shorts on the girls in the program, all of whom are struggling with being human and normal when they're cyborg killing machines. There are ruminations on the messed-up nature of the cyborg/handler relationship -- some handlers treat their assignees as tools, others treat them as daughters, and thankfully, there are no horribly squickly Lolita-like fantasies. There's lots of angst.
The art is a bit blocky and not always wonderful, but of course, I love it to pieces. I have also stuck the anime in my Netflix queue.
rachelmanija, I'm not sure if this hits your bulletproof kink, given that they're not mutants, but it is a school of special kids. I was getting a little tired of the one-offs and wanted a longer, angstier arc, but I suspect I will keep reading this because... angsty little girls who are cyborg killing machines!