Sakura of DOOM

It's been so long since I've read these that my memory is extremely hazy.

...why did I think it was a good idea to try and catch up on at least some of my review backlog?

Anyway. I first read vols. 4 and 5 in Chinese and had no idea what was going on. I suppose robots and mass murderers and worldwide plots is too much for my Chinese. These volumes continue Urasawa's trademark ever-expanding plots; just as soon as we get one answer, three more questions pop up.

( Spoilers )

I'm curious to see how Urasawa will wrap this up in two volumes; my current impression is that he could probably keep going with the story for at least ten more. Although I think this series starts off better than Monster or 20th Century Boys, its length may be its strength and its weakness. It's short enough to not be daunting or confusing, but it also means we spend less time with the characters and therefore feel less strongly about them.

Wow, the plot has really started to speed up! And Arakawa's beginning to draw back on previous one-off characters or happenings and tying everything together. I'm guessing the manga is definitely in the final stretch now. Again, her characters don't break my heart the same way they do in the anime, but I still love them, and wow, the plot is great.

( Spoilers are ordered not to die )

In conclusion: plot!

This is not a very flashy series, and although it isn't extremely memorable, I like it.

Volumes 2 and 3 get a little more into Randel's secret past, but not as much as I was afraid of. Don't get me wrong; I very much want to know what happened to him to make him a scary killing machine (metaphorically), but I also want to get to know the unit more. I get so tired of how single heroes' angst always ends up overtaking things. While the class issues are still not great, we at least get to see some more of it. It's still from the POV of the Pumpkin Scissors team, but I like that the situation is getting more complicated.

( Spoilers )

As a side note, although Del Rey's notes in the back tend to be good, the ones for this series are trite and boring. I can't remember, since I read these a while ago, but they either state the obvious or, at one point, make ambiguities clear in case the reader misses it. I was particularly annoyed with the latter.

Five-year-old Koiwai Yotsuba and her dad move next door to the Ayase family (one mom, one largely absent dad, and three sisters).

There is pretty much no other plot. We don't know where Yotsuba is from or why she has green hair; her dad adopted her after finding her alone in some country. The manga basically just goes from day to day, as Yotsuba explores life and frequently gets her dad and her neighbors into weird situations. This is the epitome of a slice-of-life manga, and while it has the same calm happiness that all my favorite slice-of-life manga possess, this series is exuberantly joyful as well.

My favorite bit so far is Yotsuba a few feet off the ground, hugging a telephone pole and Fuka (the middle, practical Ayase sister) walks by.

"What are you doing?" Fuka asks, since one does not normally see five-year-olds clinging like koalas to telephone poles.

"Miiin! Miiiin! Miiin! I'm a cicada!" says Yotsuba. Obviously!

The entire series is just like this: Yotsuba discovers cicadas, or fireflies, or swings, or air conditioning. She is frustrating, like all five-year-olds are, and yet, she is utterly adorable, and she makes me so happy.

Since I am currently in grad school, I am not buying new series, but I will make an exception for this one. Even now, when I am stressed out of my mind, it's making me laugh out loud just remembering little bits of it, and oh, I cannot even tell you how much that is worth.

Go read! It is so happy-making and fun, and it's probably going to be one of my favorite series of the year.

Whoo! The continuing excitement from volume 11 continues! And I get my favorite manga storytelling devices—flashbacks, flashforwards, and individual character stories!

( Spoilers are impatient )

Am dying to read more to get to spoiler spoiler spoiler scene which I have heard a great deal about on LJ.

I think I actually flipped through volume one in a bookstore before and decided the series was too bloody to read; luckily, my public library has it, so I ended up mainlining it anyway.

In a medievaloid fantasy world, humans are often preyed on by yoma, demons who can assume anyone's form and who like eating human guts. In defense, a secret organization of men created half-yoma, half-human beings to fight the yoma. For some reason, only women survived this transformation, and the humans call them Claymores after the giant swords they all carry. The Claymores travel through villages, kill yoma, and let the black-clad men of the organization get the money.

Unfortunately, the more the Claymores fight, the more of their yoma power they have to use, and eventually, it consumes them. Then, they either become yoma themselves, or they send a black card out to a fellow Claymore so they can die while still human.

Clare is a Claymore, with a more unusual backstory than most. In volume one, she wanders into the boy Raki's village to kill the yoma that killed his parents. The first volume plays much like a western: the solitary village, the villain, the innocent boy whose gratitude she earns, the triumphant yet lonely walk away in the sunset. But Raki ends up following her, and Clare begrudgingly accepts his company.

Like several other people on my flist have said, I love that this manga is shounen and yet revolves around a host of female characters. Raki is our viewpoint character for volume one, but he's really a very minor character who's mostly there to be the kid in distress for Clare to rescue. While volume 1 stands alone, volume 2 gets into a more interesting yoma plot (less slash and bash, more strategy), and then we get to Clare's backstory, which as mentioned, is great.

Unfortunately, the series bogs down a little later with many fight scenes and assorted new fighting techniques; this will probably be fun and enjoyable for shounen trope fans (I, on the other hand, have a limited tolerance of power ups and fights). I am still bothered by the amount of violence, though I've discovered it's less because of the bloodshed and more because so much of it happens to be the chopping off of limbs and assorted decapitations and bisections. I'm not quite sure why this makes me more queasy than a simple sword thrust to the gut, but there you have it.

On the other hand, there's promise of getting more into the nature of the Claymores, the history of the organization, whatever shadowy secrets the organization is hiding—what organization with black-clad men isn't hiding secrets?—and more of Clare's main goal. I'm hoping there will be less limb-chopping, although the number of limbs flying seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. Ah well.

Also, this series may have the first decapitated head hugging scene that is actually tragic and not accidentally hilarious.

Please put any spoilers for vols. 1-8 in <span style="color:#333;background:#333">spoiler text</span>! And no spoilers for further volumes; I have them on hold at the library.

Far in the future, humanity has trashed the earth and been forced to move to other planets. But in regret, they have dedicated themselves to restoring Terra by setting up a system in which children are raised by foster parents then put through a computer-aided "awakening" that takes away the first fourteen years of their memories and transforms them into citizens worthy of living on Terra again. The new adults are then shipped to Terra, where they act in socially desirable ways, which somehow prevents humanity from destroying the environment again.

Also! Thanks to the computer system that basically organizes all of human society, psychic kids called the Mu have started being born. They have psychic powers but are physically frail, and humans want to eradicate them. Jomy Marcus Shin starts life as a normal foster child on Ataraxia, but when he approaches his fourteenth birthday, he discovers that he's Mu.

And off we go on a huge story line that spans years and years and concerns the fate of a planet!

I wish I had enjoyed this more than I actually did; I've been dying to read more works by the 24 Year Group. The art didn't bother me, but I found myself a little bored by the storyline. It also didn't help that I had an impossible time keeping track of all the jumps in time and where all the characters were at various points, but I am not sure if that is because the series was confusing or just because I have a difficult time tracking these things.

All in all, the plot may have been interesting, but I simply didn't care enough about any of the characters to get emotionally involved. Also, it would have been nice if there had been more women.

Uehara Akira is a handsome but painfully shy high school student with a crush on the beautiful but crude Momoi Nanako. The girls don't pay attention to Uehara because he's too retiring, and the guys are all terrified of Momoi and her violent ways. But one day, Uehara walks in on one of Momoi's grandfather's wacky experiments, and they end up body switching. Now that their behavior matches social expectations of gender performance, both suddenly get much more popular.

We end up getting a lot of wacky hijinks as Uehara's (male) best friend Senbongi puts the moves on him-as-Momoi and as Momoi's (female) best friend Shiina gets a crush on Momoi-as-Uehara, especially when Momoi and Uehara can't switch back. Though Momoi seems to be perfectly all right with this—she's no longer punished for stepping out of the bounds of femininity and gets to enjoy a lot of male privilege—Uehara is less certain. For me, this echoed how USian society generally tends to be more okay with women acting as men or wanting to be men than with men acting as women or who want to be women; it's "natural" for women to want to climb up the ladder, so to speak, but "unnatural" or wrong or played for laughs if a man wants to take a step down. Morinaga also shows that Uehara is more prone to homophobia when it comes to himself, while Momoi doesn't seem very flustered by Shiina's attraction to her.

Though the gender issues are incredibly interesting, I keep feeling like Morinaga goes more for set pieces or laughs than for After School Nightmare levels of inner examination. Possibly this is because there are a lot of jokes about Uehara getting to see naked girls while changing for gym or looking at himself in the mirror and etc., complete with nosebleeds. The breast jokes in particular felt gratuitous, especially moments when Shiina touches Uehara's breasts. Let's just say I wasn't very surprised to find that the manga is originally published in a shounen magazine.

I'm also curious to see if the manga and the mangaka will end up challenging the gender binary or not; right now, she doesn't seem to be looking much at trans issues. Plus, if Uehara or Momoi were to decide that they were transgendered, it might end up validating the gender binary without a counterexample. Anyway, all this is speculation.

Not sure if I'll keep reading this; the ogling at the female body is rather off-putting, and I think I'd like it better if there was less zaniness and more conversation.

Wow, it's been a while since I've written this up.

( Spoilers are confused )

Please no spoilers for xxxHolic unless it's under <span style="color:#333;background-color:#333">spoiler code</span>.

(OT: May be (even more) out of touch than usual next week, as will be in Hong Kong and Shanghai, possibly without internet.)

This is Urasawa Naoki's remix of "The Greatest Robot on Earth" arc of Tezuka Osamu's Astro Boy. It's the future, and robots and humans live together, although robots are still constrained by the Three Laws of Robotics, and there's a growing anti-robot movement among humans. The POV character is a robot detective named Gesicht rather than Astro Boy.

There have been a series of murders, linked by each victim appearing with horns or antlers and each victim being one of the seven great robots or a human connected to robot politics. Much like Urasawa's other thriller series (Monster and 20th Century Boys), the pieces so far are very disconnected. Many of the chapters bring in more and more secondary characters and more and more pieces of the puzzle, and while it feels like we're not very far in solving the murders, Urasawa's presenting a lot of neat worldbuilding.

Many of the questions raised are about robot rights and if robots are human; Astro Boy, his sister Uran, and Gesicht can pass as human, which disturbs many people. There's a character who consistently confuses robot-detection machines, since he was heavily injured at one point and is now a cyborg. Robots can die, and one scene in the first volume has a robot grieving, and yet, people count robot deaths more lightly than human deaths.

I'm fairly sure many of these issues will be explored even more fully in later volumes; Urasawa's doing a lot of set-up so far, and if Pluto follows his other thriller series, pieces won't start falling in place until much later on. That said, the world he embellishes is so fascinating that I don't mind reading the worldbuilding, and as usual, I particularly love his secondary characters and how well he sketches them out in just a few pages or chapters. (My favorite was the piece on North 2, war, mass murders, and music.)

On the other hand, the parallels drawn between robot discrimination and other forms of discrimination—particularly racism, given that one robot hate group wears KKK-esque hoods—disturbs me. I'm tired of SF/F parallels to racism that create an entirely different group of beings to discriminate against, be they robots, clones, aliens, elves, or whatnot, when actual POC aren't included. Butler's Oankali series works because it explores fear of the other both in terms of aliens AND in terms of human cultures and races and gender; other series and works don't cut it because they pass off talk of overcoming differences without including actual diversity in their casts. I'm really hoping that Urasawa will include more non-Japanese POC later on in the series (amazingly, POC exist in Germany! I'm betting they still do in the future!).

Other than that, I'm enjoying the series a lot so far and looking forward to Urasawa pulling in more and more plot twists as it continues.