oyceter: man*ga [mahng' guh] n. Japanese comics. synonym: CRACK (manga is crack)
Oyceter ([personal profile] oyceter) wrote2006-06-26 05:58 pm

Aida Yu - Gunslinger Girl, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

The 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] 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!

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