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I dropped the anime many years ago in the middle of Episode 2 because I found Black Star completely insufferable. Knowing that it's a popular series though, and knowing that I find it easier to deal with annoying characters in manga form, I decided to give it another shot and really try to give it a fair shake.

It sucks. Black Star is far from the only problem. All of the male characters are completely unlikeable, and all of the female characters are shackled to one of them. Maka is fine but she's a pretty generic shounen protagonist, and she's shackled to Soul who's basically just ... a generic dumb punk. Tsubaki is inoffensive and bland and is shackled to Black Star, who's only personality traits are "dumb" and "self-centered". The twin gun girls seem fun enough in a vacuum but they're shackled to Death the Kid who's only personality trait is his obsession with symmetry. I expect that the idea is that the male characters' quirks are supposed to be funny, but they're... really not. Black Star is just a stupid egotistical asshole, and Kid's symmetry obsession feels really forced and takes up WAY too many panels.

Beyond that, this series is also one of the worst shounens I've read with regards to tasteless ecchi shit. On top of the female characters being shackled to the much-worse male characters, they are also *frequently* sexually assaulted, to the point that it makes you wonder if their purpose in the story is primarily to serve as sex objects with no agency. It's extremely gross.

The supporting cast continues the trend of being bland, one-note, and painfully unfunny. Blair has huge tits and is horny, that's it. Maka's dad is a neurotic womanizer, that's it. Stein is a sciency science man who loves dissecting things, that's it. Nearly every character in this series other than Maka and arguably Soul literally has one exaggerated "quirk" that the author seems to think qualifies as an entire personality.

Beyond my myriad issues with the character writing and humor, the story also just seems boring. So much panel time is spent vaguely explaining soul mechanics that I could not possibly care less about, and then the actual "plot" seems to amount to little more than evil spooky bad guys working in the shadows to summon an ancient evil or whatever. Literal anime 101 bad guys. I don't care to see how the plot progresses from there.

Anyway. I guess I can see why everyone loved this show when I was 13, because for an early-2000s "quirky" edgelord pre-teen it was probably exactly what they wanted. It's got a punk aesthetic and obnoxious "random XD" characters with decent character designs, great for 13-year-olds to base their entire personality on. And as it is a shounen series, I guess that's the core demographic. But unlike many other shounen battle manga, it's hard for me to imagine anyone outside of that demographic taking much interest in it.

A great fight that's part of a great story, recreated by Boichi. I generally love Boichi's style and I've greatly enjoyed his previous One Piece works, but man I wish he would learn to draw a woman.

Boichi's art is technically brilliant, and especially when he's drawing men it looks phenomenal. But I really cannot get over how derpy his female faces tend to look. On top of that, he's changed around some of the paneling and camera angles in this fight to be *way* more horny, making it look like Kalifa and Nami are getting each other off moreso than fighting in a few places. ... I wouldn't be entirely comfortable reading this in public, which is something I've never said about One Piece itself.

As for everything besides the art, it's the same as it was in the source material which is great. I haven't factored this into my score much since the point of this manga is the new art.