Ranked #246

Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge (Manga)

Hilarious premise -- Sunako, the "wallflower" of the title, is not just shy but a certifiably insane horror movie maniac -- but eight volumes later this manga STILL shows absolutely no movement towards any kind of resolution, either of the main plot or of the romantic subplot. I love the characters, but I can only take so many gag chapters. Recommended if you're a Japanese horror movie fan or love parodies, but you have to accept that humor takes precedence over the plot.

This is a hard one to review, because it's so variable in quality. The best bits are really good, while the worse bits are really annoying.

The premise and overall theme are great. It's a quite different take on the whole ugly-duckling-becomes-a-swan storyline that should be familiar from things like "My Fair Lady", "Pretty Woman", and all the other stories that have a man turn a girl into a lady. Here, even four highly motivated pretty-boys have a heck of a time with just one very difficult young woman. She doesn't want to change, not in the least, and while the boys can often find a way to persuade her to play the part of a lady for a particular reason, she pretty soon snaps back into her reclusive, horror-movie-loving, not-taking-care-of-herself nature.

It's these snap-backs that make it a little hard, sometimes. Quite often, they're used as a method of hitting the reset button so that the next episode can start from the exact same place the previous one started with, like your average saturday morning cartoon. Real character development is agonizingly slow, and all too often an episode is "Let's have the boys cart Sunako off to some other place where nobody knows her, so that she can freak out, scare everyone around, and totally ruin the boys' plans before it's all resolved at the end with a heartwarming moment."

It feels to me that the creator is dragging out the story much more than it really should be. On the other hand, Sunako does manage quite a bit of character development over time, as do the boys - especially main interest Kyohei. I like that acceptance of Sunako's weirdness becomes as much the theme as her changing; she grows and evolves, but doesn't simply get remade into something different.

The art is mixed. When the artist could be bothered to actually draw the characters properly, which tends to be in more dramatic scenes, especially fights or contests, or opportunities for the boys to look hot, it's excellent. However, Sunako especially spends much too much time being rendered as a chibi (perhaps because this is supposed to be Sunako's own self-image) which gets a bit tiresome.

Overall, a flawed execution, but for me the good episodes were good enough to recommend it strongly but with caveats. read more