Sakura of DOOM

(林青慧 - 星之衣*羽之紗 Eternity)

Unsurprisingly, I have now forgotten everything about this, save the art was pretty and the story involved angels and demons.

There's the princess of heaven, and there's some big power of heaven that will help in their war against the demons, only no one knows who will wield that power. The princess is to marry whoever wields the power, at least, I think.

Um. And some demons show up to wreak havoc. It's not very dark and rather like Angel Diary in tone, and obviously not too memorable.

(林珉萱 - 雞排公主)

Brain currently too jetlagged for coherent post on cultural appropriation. Here, have fluffy manhua about chicken instead!

Also, because I miraculously remembered my propensity to forget character names, I wrote them down before I returned the manhua!

... alas, I left the post-it in Taiwan. Of course. Thank goodness for online summaries...

Tao Yong Xin goes to a school that has a club for everything, and she's the president of the Fried Chicken* Club, which has two other members. But! The guitar playing club is trying to take over their club space, and as a means of bargaining, Yong Xin manages to get the teacher responsible for club stuff to promise to give them back their space... if only she can convince the troublesome playboy hero Zhou Yu Xi to join! But woe, he hates fried chicken!

This totally cracked me up and I love it, but as I'm sure you have all figured out, I am endlessly delighted by high-school shoujo and food, particularly when the two are combined! My favorite bits in this are when the heroine and her two friends (the two other members of the club) wax rhapsodic about the joys of fried chicken, over and over and over again. Oh, also, the hero hates all fried chicken, except the fried chicken the heroine makes. Of course.

One of the heroine's friends gets extremely good grades and is very cute. But as school gossip goes, she's apparently been seen fixated on a fried chicken vendor's pot of boiling oil. The other friend is very cute, but talks about fried chicken nonstop. And school gossip says the heroine herself is also very cute, but she's *gasp* been known to turn down a guy because she loves her fried chicken more!

My favorite line of dialogue is Yong Xin telling Yu Xi, "Oh, you're actually pretty nice! If I were any other girl, I'm sure I would fall head over heels for you! ... But I love fried chicken too much for that!"

Possibly there will be more character development and plot in latter volumes, but honestly, I do not care as long as they keep talking about fried chicken. Also, the art is good!


* Fried chicken here is actually not the US kind, but Taiwan 香雞排 (xiang ji pai), which is a kind of deep-fried chicken steak, probably pounded thin, with some kind of spice mix on top. It's usually sold in street stands, and they're really tasty.

(licensed in the UK as Cavalier Princess by Shiau-Jing Tsen)

Note: I don't remember most of the names in the series, and I can't look them up since I borrowed them in Taiwan.

Yaxi and her father wander about; Yaxi tries to keep her father out of trouble, and her father tries to pick up women. But soon, he tells her that her mother is actually the queen. They set out to the palace to catch a glimpse of her mother, and on the way, Yaxi ends up cross-dressing as a palace guard, getting to know her half-sister the princess, and falling in love with one of the guards.

There's a lot of plot so far: someone's controlling the king, the princess is to be engaged to a prince of another kingdom to prevent a war, the princess is in love with the same guard Yaxi is in love with (for values of "in love" for twelve- and fourteen-year-olds), and there's a mystical power passed along the royal bloodline that Yaxi of course has.

The art is actually better than most manhua art I've seen, though the bodies are still a little stiff and awkward. The plot has been interesting, and Cen has been pretty good about introducing a large cast of characters and giving a sense of history. I particularly like the hints about Yaxi's father and mother's story, along with the people in their generation.

Looking forward to seeing what happens next (although frustrated that I'll have to wait for my next trip back to do so).

(Title in Chinese: 幽夢影)

Que Ying Shuang's life is going very nicely until she runs across a half-dead Shan Yu Mu in the streets. She takes him in and finds out that he wanders from village to village because he has the ability to draw the future (like Kaitlyn in Dark Visions!) and most people tend to think he causes bad things to happen. Sure enough, bad things start to happen to Ying Shuang, and soon, she leaves to wander about with Yu Mu.

While the plot is somewhat interesting in a "bad things happen to those who think they can change fate" kind of way, the art is pretty terrible. It's very much like Yi Huan's: round and strangely stiff, and I can't help but think that the proportions are all off in some way. I did like that it was set in Song Dynasty China, but outside of that, everything seems fairly standard, and even if the plot moves away from one-offs and focus on the main villain to developing the relationship between Yu Mu and Ying Shuang, I'm still not sure I would be into it. There's just not much depth or sophistication in the story or the characterization, although Xiao Jun does have narrative drive down.

AKA: My First Manhua

I've been trying to look for actual Chinese manhua instead of translations of manga, though it's been difficult. I suspect there's even more manhwa here than manhua, though possibly I'm looking in the wrong places. But given that a lot of the idol dramas in Taiwan are based on manga and manhwa, and given the prevalence of Japanese stores EVERYWHERE, I don't think I'm overestimating the prevalence of manga and the paucity of manhua, at least in Taiwan as opposed to other Chinese-speaking locales.

I did manage to find the recently licensed manhua Divine Melody, though I didn't get it because I didn't like the art that much. On the other hand, that was before I realized it had gender-bending, fox spirits, and reincarnation!

Angel Hair is a collection of three short stories. The frame story has two hikers coming across some ruins and a statue of the angel Nathaniel, who has a scar on his (zir? her? I am fairly sure he's coded male by the language, the story, and the art, but as we all know, it can be hard to tell) cheek and long hair on one side and short hair on the other. The three stories are all explanations of how he got the scar and the chopped off hair.

I find it rather disconcerting but not startling that the stories are all Euro-centric; I'm fairly sure the frame story is set in Europe, and all the characters have Western names.

The first story is about Princess Chantilly, her guardian angel Nathaniel, and the neighboring Prince Gouman (spellings are approximations). Chantilly wants Gouman to marry her because his country is richer and her country needs the money, but she has gorgeous long black hair and he hates black hair and loves blonde hair. The entire thing is about her begging her guardian angel to turn blonde. I found this story extremely frustrating and problematic for the obvious reasons.

The second story posits that Gouman and Nathaniel are actually close friends, and the third is Nathaniel's story. All of them star Chantilly, Nathaniel and Gouman, albeit in different capacities, and in all of them, black hair is abnormal or a sign of evil, while golden blondness is a sign of angelicness (literal and figurative). The final story does the most to argue with the simple black-blonde dichotomy, though still not enough for my taste. I'm not going to go into theories of self-hatred or wanting to be Western, because I think while that is a part of it, it is also too easy to blame it all on the person exhibiting the self-hatred and/or desire to be Western and to ignore fun things like cultural hegemony and cultural colonization.

In conclusion, really boring and problematic, with not-so-great art to boot. I think next, I will pick up the fox spirit one or one that was set in Song Dynasty China.