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I've been enjoying Mizuho Kusanagi's current work, Yona of the Dawn, so I thought I would try one of her earlier works. The basic plot idea had some potential to it; meeting your reincarnated lover and best friend and discovering they are each now a different gender could have been done in a way that humorously turned gender and sexual expectations on their head in a fun and interesting way. Instead of doing that, it turned into a story that was blatantly homophobic, where the main character constantly worries that he might still be attracted to his former lover despite the fact that she is ... now a man, and everyone around him also reminds him that it's wrong. The villain(ish) character is revealed to be an 'evil lesbian' who tormented him in his past life, and who is now a male school teacher who tries to seduce his female students, along with being physically and emotionally abusive to the main character (who is also his student). It's hard to imagine how this could have gone even further off the rails. If anything, it's made me reflect on how incredibly heteronormative Yona is and how Kusanagi would treat a queer character in her current work (if there were any).

Some of the problematic aspects get dropped with time, such as the abusive lecherous teacher becoming more of a cranky character, and the ending does tie things up reasonably well, but this unfortunately isn't a manga that I would really recommend.

The story follows Sarah and her friend Tseu as they journey through a violent dystopian landscape.  There are parts of this manga that are redeeming- a female action main character, Sarah is well-developed and the story includes moments of focusing on the tragic aspects of motherhood in a violent environment.

The main downsides are the constant violence (including frequent rape scenes).  There are several arcs to the story, but they are all largely the same.  Each arc basically involves Sarah looking for her children and encountering military personnel who are violent and morally bereft.  Mass violence ensues, Sarah kicks butt, and then moves to the next ... town to continue her search.  There's constant fighting, but the reasons for it are barely ever discussed or explored to any degree.  It might have been the intention for that to be a sign of the pointlessness of war, but it plays more as poor plot development.

On paper, the story for Okko's Inn has potential: a young girl who just lost her parents goes to stay/work in her grandmother's inn while talking to ghosts.  It sounds cute and slightly dramatic.  In execution, it doesn't quite seem to know what to do with itself.  It mostly tries to be a slice of life story about Okko trying to be a junior innkeeper, but it also awkwardly tacks on pieces here and there about how she is dealing (or not dealing) with the grief stemming from her parents' deaths.  Instead of cute or moving, it mostly comes off as annoying.

The weakest part of ... this movie are the characters.  We are very quickly introduced to Makoto, a ghost that lives in the inn and constantly picks his nose.  It's as off-putting as it sounds.  He starts by harassing Okko and then badgering her into working as the junior innkeeper.  Everyone else agrees to this, seemingly without considering whether this is what Okko actually wants or something that would be good for her.  Makoto's character doesn't really ever improve, and he never takes responsibility for his poor behavior.

Okko herself has her own problems.  She is your typical cliche shoujo heroine who is dim-witted and clumsy; she also constantly lets people walk over her and bends over backward to make the people around her happy.  If this was confined to her job as junior innkeeper, it might have been acceptable, but it is an attitude that she brings to her entire personal life.  She goes along with whatever the people around her want, whether it's her grandmother or a random ghost.

The rest of the characters are a random assortment of personalities.  Some of them seem like they had potential, such as the fortune-teller who befriends Okko, but that potential was never met and the connection between the various side characters and the story is tenuous at best and awkwardly forced in at worst.

The animation was fairly lackluster.  The backgrounds were largely fine and I didn't see any major problems there, but the characters were so oddly animated that they looked like the anime version of plastic dolls.  The contrast between the backgrounds and the characters frequently made the characters feel out of place.

While I'm usually a sucker for an Alice in Wonderland adaptation, I was sorely disappointed in this one. It starts out with an interesting twist: Snow White is an albino girl who suddenly gets sent to Wonderland. She meets Alice, who is a guy.

It's here that the entire story begins to go down hill. Alice is cruel and abusive toward Snow White, frequently insulting her and addressing her as bitch and skank. She realizes that he's bad news, but ends up going to his house and cooking for him anyway. She's not allowed to go home until he becomes king, ... so she's presumably going to be stuck with him for a while.

This is a common (and sexist) shoujo manga trope of a girl falling for the abusive guy who is trash by working to tame him with her femininity and domestic prowess. The first volume doesn't make explicit that the two of them will end up together, but it is implied by the author at the end. I should note that Snow White also embodies the tired and overused trope of being good-natured but clumsy. The author did take an interesting turn with the idea that animals flock around Snow White. They now actively attack people who threaten her. It's a somewhat amusing twist, but not nearly enough to make the second volume worth reading.

The artwork is mediocre, jumbled, and it is frequently difficult to decipher what is happening in any given scene. Also, despite being a comedy manga, it's just not particularly funny.

I read this manga after having read Mahoutsukai no Neko, which is also by Yui Kikuta. I didn't really care for the disorganized nature of that manga, so I didn't have high expectations for this one. As I read it, I was pleasantly surprised that it is a pretty decent manga. It's not a great manga, mind you, but most manga aren't.

The story spends a lot of time analyzing the characters feelings: how they feel about love, betrayal, and friendship. I don't want to reveal spoilers, but the plot involves many different twists and turns. The characters have many hidden ... feelings and plans and they change allegiances faster than East Germans under the Iron Curtain.

With only four volumes, there are some areas that I had wanted to see explored with more depth (such as whether or not the legend about how nymphs came to be was true), but for the amount of space the author told the story in, the plot and characters each went on a satisfying journey. The main protagonist's thoughts on love made me think that he was to some degree aromantic.

The art is decent enough. One downside is that some of the characters look so similar that I had to read through a couple times to figure out who was who.

Overall, I enjoyed reading it.

The first thing about Madowania Hoshi is that the description doesn't fully capture what the manga is about. It's not inaccurate, but it leaves a lot out, mainly that the manga is in many ways a physics and astronomy lesson with a plot built around it.

The anthropomorphized version of Earth is in trouble and the other planets assume human form to find a way to help. In the process, the moon gives continuous physics lessons, which can be interesting, but if it's not what you're looking for, it can easily get annoying. The main story, about finding out how to help Earth ... and the divisions between 'outside' and 'inside', is frequently left behind so that multiple chapters can be devoted to the moon's physics lessons. The story itself is interesting, so I found myself wishing that it had more attention instead of the focus on teaching physics.

As for the characters, the protagonist S-Zawa is a change of pace in that he is pudgy and not at all handsome or extraordinary looking. At the start of the story, he is wearily going along with his job and life when all of this is thrust upon him. It's nice to have a break from the constant focus on teenage protagonists. Where things start to break down is that S-Zawa is a bit of a perverted incel. He's attracted to his co-worker and blames her for distracting him with her sexy body. He also openly states that he prefers the more well-endowed planets (which is a sentence I never thought I'd need to type). I personally find the perverted protagonist trope to be tired and overused, so his behavior was kind of annoying. Although, for better or worse, the physics lessons frequently take precedence over exploring more of his personality.

Almost all the other characters are attractive women, and the female planets frequently don't wear much in the way of clothes, so there's fanservice, which I don't particularly care for. The only thing that keeps it from being a harem is that the planets don't seem to have any interest in S-Zawa. The standout character is probably the moon, who is the resident physics teacher and regularly gets mad at people for not understanding physics or at anime programs for not being realistic.

The art has a "Wizard of Oz" theme to it. Whenever scenes take place in the outside or on the Earth's surface, they are black and white. Scenes that take place in the anime-centric inside are presented in full-color. This helps to present the distinction between the elite-but-idle and those that labor on the outside.

Overall, I think this series has a lot of missed potential since it focuses more on physics lessons than it does on the story of Earth or the divisions between 'outside' and 'inside'. Only four volumes are out, so this could change in the future. There are underlying subtexts on consumerism and ecological responsibility (and the anime industry); if those were explored with more depth, it would greatly improve the story.

Kunoichi Joshikousei Otonashi-san has a somewhat interesting (if not overdone) premise, but it doesn't really take that premise anywhere interesting. The characters are, at their best, flat, and at their worst, offensive caricatures. One of the characters is most noted for his tendency to refer to women in their 30s as trash. It's even more disappointing that the female character in her 30s that he refers to still has feelings for him despite his obvious sexism. Another character is an empty caricature for stereotyping Americans. I'm okay with my country being occasionally mocked (we do some silly things, after all), ... but open caricatures of Americans aren't any less offensive than caricatures of Japanese people.

The art isn't anything special. It is good enough to be able to tell what is going on in the panels, but it is a bit simplistic.

My biggest criticism of this series is simply that it isn't that funny. There are cute moments here and there and moments that are vaguely funny, but none were ever funny enough to make me laugh out loud. Much of the humor is very repetitive and it gets old fast (about half the jokes have to do with the Otonashi constantly eating). I went in thinking that this might be something like Ninja Shinobu-san no Junjou, but it doesn't have the humor or the charm to compare.

I was interested in reading this manga, since most of the horror manga I encounter are either shounen or seinen. The protagonist Tenome (or "The Eye of the Hand") is an interesting character. She's a traveling performer who goes to different sake houses. Unlike some female horror protagonists, she's confident, intelligent, and can take care of herself, which makes for more enjoyable reading. She frequently winds up naked, which is a little annoying, but it doesn't impact her sense of agency, which is something at least. She starts the series as a teenager, but grows into a adult over the ... course of the first volume.

The chapters are episodic in nature, with each one concerning Tenome meeting some monster or other supernatural creature. In some cases, one chapter will follow the events of the previous chapter. Many of the setups are the same, where Tenome meets a person who turns out to be deceiving her (or themselves). We learn a little bit more about her as the story progresses (but not a lot more). She also meets a girl named Shao Tsu, who becomes her companion.

The setting is in the time period before, during, and after World War II. Many of the chapters have to do with the devastation Japan experienced during and after the war.

The art style is kind of different, but not in a bad way. It looks like charcoal style art blended with more 'normal' manga style. It works well for the story.

Spoilers: Tenome isn't present in the final volume and we don't learn what, if anything, became of her. Based on the postscript, it appears that the author had intended to write more of a story. If there had been an explanation or proper ending, I would have given the manga a 7 instead of a 6, since I don't like being left hanging.

I wasn't particularly impressed with the first two volumes of this manga. I don't particularly care for ecchi, and the chapters in these volumes all had scenes of Anzu either being naked, almost naked, or getting into some sort of sexually charged 'misunderstanding' with Ginnosuke. I don't really find much humor in ecchi, so those two volumes almost put me off the series. Things start to turn around in the third volume, which sees another character introduced, the existing characters get better developed, the ecchi content disappears, and Anzu's clothes stop emphasizing her chest. The story also begins to build in ... drama and complexity, doing a much better job of drawing you in and making you feel connected to the characters.

The switch in tone for the manga really helped to turn it into an enjoyable story. All of the story line were wrapped up by the end (although I was left wanting a little more with some of them). The art, while not perfect, seems well-suited to the story. The characters are also well done, and their development feels natural and earned.

I'm conflicted in my thoughts about Kuzumi-kun. I can appreciate that it takes a non-traditional approach to manga romance by making it much harder to decipher what the male lead is thinking or feeling. On the flip side, that approach can also be incredibly annoying. Kuzumi's lack of verbal communication (which lasts for the entire series) quickly grows tiresome. A minor spoiler: his reasons for not talking are never explained, so we never figure out if he is pathologically shy or if he is somewhere on the autistic spectrum and has trouble expressing himself verbally. If the manga had portrayed ... Kuzumi as autistic, a story that tackled how a budding romance might develop could have been very compelling, but since nothing like that was ever developed or explained, I was left simply thinking that Kuzumi was just self-centered and thoughtless.

Erika Sakura, the female lead, while not as annoying as Kuzumi, had her own similar problems. This mainly stemmed from her tendency to get angry and flustered, which was initially endearing but after eight volumes, it seemed tedious. Fortunately, the side characters were much more dynamic and interesting than the main characters. Yuuko and Haruna in particular helped to salvage the manga and make it more interesting.

The art was decent enough and I didn't have any complaints about it. The tone of story and the characters don't change much over the course of the series, so if you initially like/dislike the manga, that initial opinion probably won't change.