I discovered Devil & Love song when I was in high school.
At the time I was very impressed by the character design of the protagonist.
I remember that I found her extremely beautiful and fascinating, so much so that I even wanted to cosplay her.
Almost ten years later I admit that I remembered absolutely nothing about the plot except that it had a protagonist with a difficult attitude and with the habit of sing sacred hymns with the voice of an angel.
Despite this, I remember that this manga had impressed me a lot and that, if it hadn't been for the prohibitive price of the entire
...
series, I would have liked to be able to read the volumes following the first.
Well, here we are a decade later.
I'm glad to have read this manga via scanlations and not by buying the physical volumes because, as much as I hate to admit it, this manga is mediocre in every aspect.
My experience reading this shoujo fits perfectly into the situation: if you remember something fondly you would be better off not picking it up again years later.
STORY
The story of this manga is terribly inconsistent.
Just as happens in Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic and in To Your Eternity, reading this manga you will have the impression that the mangaka did not have a clear idea of the story she had in mind to tell.
Many times it will seem like you are reading a completely different manga from the one you were reading previously, both in terms of a continuous sudden change in tone of the events narrated (including extreme changes in the setting or in the main cast of characters), and in terms of the change in drawing style or even in some cases of the character design itself of some characters, first of all Kurosu Shintarou.
In fact, he is drawn in three completely different ways throughout the course of the story, so much so that he is unrecognizable if it weren't for the fact that the other characters call him by his name.
The arc of school bullying
The story of Devil & Love Song is leaking from all sides.
In the first volumes we will have our protagonist, Maria Kawai, who after being expelled from a prestigious girls' high school run by the church will have to settle into a common japanese high school, which will not be easy at all given the difficult personality of the protagonist: she is extremely (TOO) sincere and therefore tends to often say uncomfortable truths to people.
Ah! Finally a protagonist different from the others! You will say...
In the first volumes this characteristic of her could fascinate and could be interesting to see, but as the story progresses, trust me, this way of acting and reasoning becomes boring, repetitive and even unbearable.
Not to mention the fact that from a certain point onwards in the story... poof... very little of this marked peculiarity of her (which is fundamental in the first chapters of the story) will remain.
As would be expected from such a premise, at the beginning Maria Kawai will struggle to win the hearts of her classmates and numerous misunderstandings will arise between them... predictable, right?
Well, yes, but this situation will be developed in a slightly excessive and surreal way.
I don't know how widespread the problem of school bullying is in Japan (both by students and teachers), but in this manga this reaches such high peaks and is so normalized that it is not very credible and at times unnerving.
The characters all seem to be extremely idiotic, especially the girls in the protagonists' classroom, who continue to call Maria "devil" for... very trivial reasons.
Even the class teacher, an inept who is bad only because he likes to be bad for no particular reason, never misses an opportunity to treat our protagonist badly... so... randomly.
The personality and attitude of the protagonist doesn't help but... come on... it doesn't make sense for them to define her as a devil!
She's not bad, she doesn't do anything bad or against the rules... well... it makes no sense!
Over the course of about thirty chapters this whole situation is broadly resolved.
The protagonist integrates into the class, the professor continues to be such an asshole, but hey!
We're only on the fourth/fifth volume!
The plot must move forward!
The telenovela begins!
From this point on, what seemed to be a manga about school bullying turns into a sort of soap opera adapted in a japanese comic.
An important note is that, due to the absurdity of the events that will follow from here on out, the personalities of the already inconsistent characters of this manga will end up becoming more and more distorted as the chapters continue.
At first we have a faint love triangle between Maria, the typical fake "rebel" boy of her classroom, and her now mute "friend" from when she attended the prestigious religious high school.
In this narrative arc you will only have unnecessary dramas and the already anonymous, due to the terrible character design reserved for them, classmates of the protagonists, poof... will disappear.
In particular, Hana Ibuki, the "main villain" of the previous arc, who is initially sold to us as a fundamental character in the classroom of the three main protagonists, disappears and never reappears again.
Even some anonymous supporting secondary classmates will make some brief cameos, when the mangaka remembers that our protagonists attend a high school, but she, who was very important and who also has a slightly more refined character design, is instead completely eliminated from the plot without us being provided with any information regarding his sudden disappearance.
A similar situation will also happen with the "main villain" of the arc of this faint love triangle, given that even Anna Soma, the mute "friend" of the protagonist, once this narrative arc is concluded, will leave the scene with a really absurd motivation, only to be mentioned sporadically and appear in a rather idiotic way in the following chapters (especially towards the end).
Just to lengthen the plot, for at least one volume, after having had chapters with so much innecesary drama, the character of Kurosu Shintarou will be introduced.
He is nothing more than a first year boy who enrolled in the same high school as our protagonists only because he fell in love with the protagonist after seeing her sing in the television program mentioned in the first chapters of the manga.
His function?
Making jealous the male lead of this story (poor Kanda Yuusuke, he is so deep in the friendzone that the mangaka felt the need to forcefully insert a new rival), who at the end of the previous narrative arc had stupidly rejected the love declaration of the protagonist due to a reason so idiotic and not very credible that it seems to be 100% the result of the script of a low-quality soap opera.
Therefore, for a few chapters we will go from hyperdramatic soap opera tones to something light-hearted perfectly in line with the shoujo mangas set in high school, with also a beach episode!
Oh, the beach episode couldn't be missed!
Probably due to the immense boringness of these banal chapters in perfect line with the more conventional shoujo mangas, we will end up returning to immerse ourselves in reading a succession of needlessly hyperdramatic twists, which will accompany us almost until the last volume of this manga.
If you think I'm exaggerating, I'll list some of the craziest things that will happen:
- The protagonist will lose her voice for a certain number of chapters. The way to get her voice back will be investigate her hyperdramatic past.
- The protagonist will discover that she was born due to her mother's rape
- The protagonist's mother, who is surprisingly identical to her unbearable mute "friend" (tell me how many chances there were for such a thing to happen), committed suicide. At the moment of her suicide she had tried to take Maria with her too, but in the end she was unable to kill her.
- The male lead of the story hesitates to start a romantic relationship with our heroine because he fears that by hugging her she might remember the moment of her mother's suicide, and thus end up wanting to commit suicide herself (the most absurd thing is that this bullshit... REALLY HAPPENS!)
- Maria's grandparents feel terribly guilty for having accepted a large sum of money to cover up what happened to their daughter, and refuse to have anything to do with Maria, saying that she only came to visit them because she wants their inheritance (WTF?!).
- The mother's rapist became a priest and after what they call "the accident" (SRLLY?!) he fell madly in love with his victim (that's right, in this really poor written story rape is romanticized too). Ah, as if that wasn't enough, he is in a certain sense also Kurosu's adoptive father since he has become so good that he even manages an orphanage.
- The name of the orphanage is ANNAMARIA, Anna like the protagonist's mother (which is also conveniently the same name of her "friend" who has become mute, who, let's remember, is IDENTICAL to her mother) and Maria, our soap opera heroine. This is obviously because he loves both, the girl he raped in the past and the little girl born from that rape.
- In the midst of a hyperdramatic moment Maria will try to slap this wretched priest but since he was a former soldier he will instinctively dodge her every slap, creating an embarrassing failed comic gag.
- The protagonist's grandparents, the ex-rapist priest and the protagonist will begin to consider each other family and love each other (definitely absurd stuff).
- The protagonist's romantic interest, given that he no longer has any excuse to not be happily with her... will decide to leave her to have surgery on his hand in the USA.
All this will be overdramaticized because his dream is to become a pianist like his father (a very famous world-famous pianist) but due to an accident caused by Maria he was seriously injured in his hand and it is probable that he will never be able to play the piano again. In the past soap opera chapters he has instinctively protected his hand instead of mindlessly using it to literally SAVE her LIFE on a couple of occasions, so he doesn't believe he's worthy of being her boyfriend anymore.
After having made us experience all these rollercoasters of emotions bordering on the absurd, the manga will calm things down again, giving us some very boring slice of life chapters in a certain sense also with a musical theme (apparently the mangaka wanted the music to be important in this manga but for the entire duration of the story this insistence only felt useless and forced) with the few theoretically main characters of this story as protagonists.
The intent of these chapters would seem to be to close the narrative arcs of the main supporting characters, but, given that these characters did not have the slightest relevance for the entire story, these chapters dedicated to them in a certain sense appear to be useless and tedious to read.
The only one of these characters who deserves to have one or more chapters focused on him before the end of the manga is Kanda Yuusuke, the protagonist's ONLY TRUE FRIEND, who has always been by her side since the first chapters (except when the mangaka suddenly forgot about his existence), regardless of the fact that he never managed to take even half a step out of the friendzone.
Very few insipid and embarrassing panels of the final chapter of this absolutely forgettable manga will take care of the "closure" of his storyline.
As you may have guessed, this unnecessarily long manga also has the courage to end with an unsatisfying open ending which, once you reach the last panel, will immediately make you regret all the time you spent reading it.
In short, if you want to immerse yourself in reading a senseless hyperdramatic soap opera, you can skip the first thirty chapters and start immediately after the final chapter of the high school singing event.
DRAWINGS
When I was a teenager I remember that I found them very beautiful, above all I was in love with how the protagonist was drawn.
Now, after about ten years, I have to confess that the drawings in this manga don't convince me at all (in the last chapters they even get worse, becoming even more anonymous!).
Even Maria Kawaii no longer fascinates me as she once did.
The enormous eyes full of exaggerated eyelashes of the protagonist irritate me rather than fascinate me, and I'm not much of a fan of her chibi caricature with her big duck lips.
One of her characteristic elements was the redness of her lips, a fundamental element of her character design which will disappear almost completely in the last chapters.
I don't even like the two male protagonists very much, and above all I find the way they wear their uniform trousers quite ridiculous (probably in the 90s or early 2000s it was fashionable to wear them that way but damn, that aesthetic choice has aged very badly! More than looking cool, now they make you laugh!).
I found both Meguro and Yuusuke to be somewhat anonymous, although they were deliberately designed to be the most attractive male characters in the manga along with Kurosu.
And when I say this I am not exaggerating.
Meguro, Yuusuke and Maria (and very few other secondary characters such as Kurosu and Anna) stand out in beauty, especially our protagonist, who is continually described as an extremely attractive girl by the secondary characters of this story; this, however, is not because they have an actually memorable character design, but rather because all the rest of the cast of characters is deliberately drawn ugly and/or with obvious "aesthetic defects".
This will avoid the disturbing effect of the "same face syndrome" typical of many shoujo manga, but at the same time it will lower the general aesthetic quality of the manga panels.
Be careful, I'm not against the choice of include characters who are not "conventionally beautiful".
Indeed, I often find it ridiculous to see when characters drawn in such a way as to appear to the reader as actually "beautiful" make observations about the "extremely fascinating" appearance of another character who however is not aesthetically too different from them, however I find that in Devil & Love Song this aesthetic device is used so poorly that it renders most of the story's characters anonymous, including many of the main ones.
It is possible draw "unconventionally beautiful" characters without making them aesthetically boring and easily forgettable!
CHARACTERS
As you may have already understood, the characters in this manga are not memorable at all.
Their character designs are bland and even their personality are quite empty.
First of all: Kousaka Tomoyo.
She is presented to us as an insecure girl, who always smiles and who always does what others tell her to do even if she doesn't agree with them.
As the chapters continue she suddenly becomes the supporting character "friend" of the protagonist.
By the way, "friend" not because she's actually a bitch with double ends (cough, cough, like practically ALL the somewhat important female characters in this manga), but because she's so anonymous and useless that she's only put there as a friend of the protagonist to increase the number ot the main cast characters and to make some senseless jokes in the background as a really poor written comic relief.
The only thing that could in certain way define her as a character is her passion for dark, punk or similar aesthetics, such as the fact that she loves black, objects with skulls and in theory everything that is associated with this type of subcultures.
The problem is that this characteristic of her is handled so poorly that it falls right into the "show, don't tell!" problem.
Sometimes she makes silly jokes like say something like "oh, we could dress like punk idols!" in the background, or she appears in the illustrations at the beginning of the chapter, or in some pages wearing vaguely alternative clothes, but nothing more.
In short, we know this characteristic of her but it is never fully exploited to develop her character.
Plus, I personally can't stand her. She always smiles in a silly way and aesthetically I find her so anonymous that I can't like her in any way.
Despite this, unlike the other characters in the main cast, the anonymous Kousaka Tomoyo remains somewhat herself from beginning to end.
Even the protagonist turns out to be terribly inconsistent as a character.
In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Maria Kawai of the first chapters turns out to be a totally different character from the Maria Kawai that appears in the last volumes of the manga.
This change is not due to the maturation of the character but rather to a complete distortion of her personality, which occurred over time as the plot became more and more senselessly dramatic.
Another character who I noticed have a depersonalization similar to our protagonist is Kanda Yuusuke, the only noteworthy supporting character in this story, who in addition to undergoing a continuous terrible redesign goes from having a hint of personality to becomes the typical blonde frienzoned and pure-hearted friend of the shoujo manga heroine.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
The only nice thing about this manga is the high quality of the Italian edition.
Flashbook never disappoints. It has a double cover and the pages are pleasant to the touch.
Unfortunately, however, this manga lacks in substance.
Honestly, I don't even recommend it to those who are still beginners with shoujos because, at least in my opinion, in addition to having anonymous characters and an inconsistent story that is nothing special, this manga doesn't even know how to entertain.
I don't even think that Akuma & Love Song is one of those mangas that I would recommend just to collect the drawings because even those are nothing noteworthy.
The only way to maybe enjoy reading this absurd shoujo manga in some way is to read it in scanlations, just to be able to read at the end of each chapter the hilarious opinions of those who have read it before you.
I hated reading this manga so much that I felt it was the least necessary to do a super detailed review.
Mar 6, 2024
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At the time I was very impressed by the character design of the protagonist. I remember that I found her extremely beautiful and fascinating, so much so that I even wanted to cosplay her. Almost ten years later I admit that I remembered absolutely nothing about the plot except that it had a protagonist with a difficult attitude and with the habit of sing sacred hymns with the voice of an angel. Despite this, I remember that this manga had impressed me a lot and that, if it hadn't been for the prohibitive price of the entire ... 
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