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Pick of the Year: Anime, Publishers, and Podcasts

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SEAN: As always, there’s been so much this year that it’s hard to choose. Honestly, my pick of the year is an anime, and one that ran in 2022 as well: Birdie Wing: Golf Girls Story. The perfect sports anime, the perfect (almost) yuri anime, and totally, one hundred percent gonzo and ridiculous. I hope it gets a series of light novels, manga, and a sequel.

MICHELLE: For various reasons, I haven’t read much of *anything* this year, so instead of picking a title, I will pick a publisher. Seven Seas keeps licensing things I *want* to read, like Guardian and Don’t Call It Mystery, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that.

KATE: My vote goes to the Mangasplainers, both for their awesome podcast and for their publishing efforts. Okinawa was a terrific first project, and bodes well for the other titles they have in the pipeline for 2024.

ASH: Like Michelle, I haven’t had the chance this year to read nearly as much as I would have liked, but I am still very grateful for the variety publishers releasing such a wide range of materials that I will have plenty to keep me busy for a very long time. That being said, I have managed to follow Drawn & Quarterly pretty closely this year and have been very pleased with its 2023 catalog, from the new and improved edition of the previously out-of-print Kitaro anthology, to contemporary indie comics by Woshibai, to alternative works by Japanese women, to classics of avant-garde manga, there’s been so much to appreciate and enjoy.

ANNA: I’m terribly behind in my manga reading as well, but for this year I want to highlight two titles that I thought would never be licensed – Don’t Call it a Mystery and Neighborhood Story. It is great that I can still be pleasantly surprised by licensing decisions! I also want to give a shout out to March comes in Like a Lion which I was eagerly anticipating.

The Crown of Rutile Quartz, Vol. 1

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By Surume Enoki and ttl. Released in Japan as “Rutile Quartz no Taikan: Ō no Tanjō” by DRE Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Alice Camp.

This is another book that I enjoyed, but was not wowed by. It’s always hard to review those titles. “This was pretty good, all things considered” is not exactly a blurb you can put on a back cover. This is a good coming of age royal fantasy series. If isekai are about the hero gaining cool powers and a harem of hot babes, then the small but notable genre of “military/royal fantasy” usually involves the hero being either royalty or the close advisor to royalty, and instead of a harem there’s a relationship between the royal and their advisor. Also, redheads feature heavily. I’m not sure why. In any case, this is squarely in that genre. Slain, the new king, is a decent guy, proves a quick study, has some military ideas that no one there has considered, and gets the girl. It’s a feel good sort of book. That said, nothing here is surprising, except maybe one thing that I’ll get to later. It’s “pretty good”, but not in a bad way. If that helps.

Slaine is a young man whose mother has just passed away. He never knew his father, so is rather surprised when suddenly a royal escort appears in his small village. It turns out that his mother had once been a servant in the royal palace, and left after a dalliance with the King. What’s more, the entire royal family has just been killed in a fire, leaving Slaine as the heir apparent. Needless to say, he feels he is not remotely ready. But his mother was a scribe, meaning he can read and write due to her teachings, and he has read history books. He also has nobles who are willing to be patient with him, and a talented aide, Monica, at his side. He’s actually getting the hang of things faster than expected. So provided another neighboring country doesn’t declare war and invade them, they should be fine. Oh dear.

The thing that interested me most in this was the way magic was used. At the start of the book I wondered if it wouldn’t have any magic at all, and just be an alternate-world royal book, but that was unlikely to sell to a light novel publisher. So yes, there is magic, but it’s not a constant in this world. Only about one in 30 people have magic at all, and even then it’s not super powerful. Neither Slaine nor Monica have any magic. We see water magicians around the castle, and they use their magic powers to do things like fill barrels, or clean. This of course also leads to Slaine’s idea on how to win the battle against the foreign country invading them, which works well enough, though everyone’s praise of his idea reminds me of those isekai books where people are stunned at the idea of crop rotation. I also wish we’d gotten a bit more with Monica, Slaine’s aide, who has a chapter or two at the back that quickly shows why she went from “uncaring and emotionless baron’s daughter” to “please take me”, but you get the sense it was written after the fact when someone pointed out we knew next to nothing about her.

So, this wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible. It was pretty good. It passed the time. If there’s another volume (it’s a Drecom book, so this is it for the moment) I’ll read more.

Fake Saint of the Year: You Wanted the Perfect Saint? Too Bad!, Vol. 3

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By kabedondaikou and Yunohito. Released in Japan as “Risō no Seijo? Zannen, Nise Seijo Deshita! Kuso of the Year to Yobareta Akuyaku ni Tensei Shitanda ga” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Rymane Tsouria.

There have been a LOT of series recently with a guy who dies and is reincarnated as a woman, or is isekai’d into a woman’s body, etc. So many that we’re even seeing a few that are explicitly (at least according to the author) a “transsexual fantasy” (see I Guess This Dragon Who Lost Her Egg to Disaster Is My Mom Now). That said, Ellize is here to nip all that in the bud. She makes several things clear over the course of this volume, and the ones that do not have anything to do with her baffling and depressing death wish have to do with her sexuality. She’s a guy. She’s attracted to girls. She has absolutely no desire to admit that lesbians exist. And so therefore she plans on rejecting Verner no matter how high his “affection score” is with her. That said, the ending of this book seemingly makes all that irrelevant.

After the events of the last book, it’s clear that it’s time to take care of the Witch once and for all. Especially as the Witch – or rather, her most intelligent monster minion – is starting to make moves like “let’s kidnap someone and make them a patsy for Ellize to kill”. Which also involves kidnapping several students, and leads to… Eterna awakening as the Saint. OK, not a problem, Ellize can gloss over this. Things get a bit trickier when they journey to an island nation and find the grave of the First Saint… which turns out to have the first saint in suspended animation, and Ellize can free her. Now they have TWO real Saints and ONE fake Saint, and need to work out how to defeat the Witch without starting the cycle all over again. Oh yes, and Verner has figured it out: Ellize is not the Saint.

I’ll be honest, I thought this was the last book, and when the fourth volume in the series appeared on the JNC streaming site it startled me. Everything was set up for things to finish here. The trouble is… everything was set up for things to finish here tragically. Indeed, that’s the ending we get. The book ends with Ellize dying in order to prevent the Witch from taking over the next Saint, and the tragedy is that she mistakenly thinks that this will make everyone happy (because the world is saved) rather than destroy everyone around her (because they all love her). If this were the ending, it would be bitter indeed. I’m not sure what happens in the fourth book, which we are told *is* the final one, but I assume Ellize is not going to spend the whole book dead. Something will have to be done. And I sincerely hope that something will also fix Ellize’s “nothing matters because I’ll be dead soon” attitude.

This series has its flaws, mostly from when Ellize remembers to be skeezy, but it’s still more interesting than I expected. It’s worth sticking around for the finale next time.

Innocent, Vol. 1

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Innocent is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s a meticulously researched period drama starring real-life figures such as Charles-Henri Sanson, Casanova, Robert-François Damiens, and Jeanne Bécu, the sort of thing you might see on Masterpiece Theater or HBO. On the other, it’s a lurid portrayal of a young man’s corruption, filled with over-the-top scenes of torture and debauchery that, intentionally or not, recall Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue. The tonal mismatch between its historical aspirations and its treatment of the principal character never gel into a coherent story, however, resulting in a handsome but repellant mess that isn’t serious enough to move the reader or ridiculous enough to be enjoyed as camp.

The series opens in 1793, then jumps back in time to reveal how Sanson evolved from a sensitive young man into the Royal Executioner of France. In making Sanson his protagonist, author Shin’ichi Sakamoto has a major hurdle to overcome: Sanson executed almost 3,000 people and championed the guillotine as a more efficient, humane tool for dispatching convicts. To ensure the reader’s sympathy lies firmly with Charles-Henri, therefore, Sakamoto commingles fact and fiction, depicting Sanson as a beautiful, raven-haired teen with flowing locks and trembling lips, the epitome of a guileless young man. Everything makes Charles-Henri’s enormous eyes glisten with tears: the cruel comments of boarding school classmates, the sound of a flute, the sight of a beautiful young aristocrat. He’s also prone to outbursts of teenage indignation and fits of nausea, unable to stomach his father’s lessons on how to decapitate a person with a single blow.

For all the feverish dialogue and graphic violence, there’s almost no meaningful character development, as Sakamoto seems more intent on demonstrating Charles-Henri’s capacity for suffering than in depicting a flesh-and-blood person’s efforts to resist his destiny. In one of the most egregious examples of this tendency, Père Sanson tortures his son with techniques cribbed from the Book of Martyrs: he shackles Charles-Henri to a chair, deprives him of food and water, pierces his skin, and pulverizes his legs with a sledgehammer in an effort to bend Charles-Henri to his will. The true horror of the scene, however, is undercut by the way in which Sakamoto luxuriates in Charles-Henri’s wounded body with same fervid zeal as Titian painted the Crucifixion; Charles-Henri is stripped to waist and strapped to a pole, his hands tied above his head as he cries out in bewilderment. And if those Baroque flourishes aren’t enough to ruin the scene’s emotional authenticity, the cartoonishly evil Père Sanson is; he’s less a fully-realized character than a foil for Charles-Henri’s innocence, prone to making over-the-top pronouncements that would be right at home in a Nicholas Cage flick.

If the narrative disappoints, the artwork does not. Sakamoto draws sumptuous costumes and grand estates, lavishing considerable attention on small but historically meaningful details—a china pattern, the buckle of a shoe—in a meticulous effort to evoke the material culture of eighteenth century France. His real gift, though, is making obscure historical figures come to life on the page. Anne-Marthe Sanson, the matriarch of the Sanson clan, is a prime example: she looks like a bird of prey with a piercing stare and sharp nose, an impression reinforced by the way her fichu drapes across her chest like a ruff. In several key scenes, Sakamoto illuminates her from below, casting her face into shadowy relief to reveal the full extent of her hawkish vigilance:

Sakamoto also has a flair for using abstraction, fantasy, and non-sequiturs to reveal his characters’ innermost thoughts. Not all of these gambits work; in one visually jarring moment, for example, Sakamoto depicts Charles-Henri in modern streetwear, an image that serves no obvious dramatic purpose. Other scenes, however, are devastatingly effective in conveying the full extent of Charles-Henri’s paranoia and loneliness. After botching the execution of an acquaintance, Sanson looks out at the crowd and sees a motley assortment of faces staring at him:Sakamoto then repeats this motif, adding more and more faces:It’s a simple but powerful sequence: we feel the collective weight of the crowd’s revulsion and the individual opprobrium of everyone who witnessed Sanson’s orgiastic display of violence. At the same time, however, we feel Sanson’s growing sense of terror and confinement, imprisoned in a role he loathes and unable to escape the scrutiny of commoners and noblemen alike.

These kind of emotionally resonant scenes are few and far between, however, as Sakamoto is more interested in showing Charles-Henri’s martyrdom than making him into a real person; you’d be forgiven for thinking that Sanson was a real-life saint and not someone who’s remembered today for his enthusiastic embrace of the guillotine. Not recommended.

INNOCENT, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY SHIN’ICHI SAKAMOTO • TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GOMBOS • LETTERING AND RETOUCH BY SUSIE LEE AND STUDIO CUTIE • DARK HORSE • 632 pp. • RATED 18+ (Violence, nudity, language)

Though I Am an Inept Villainess: Tale of the Butterfly-Rat Body Swap in the Maiden Court, Vol. 6

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By Satsuki Nakamura and Kana Yuki. Released in Japan as “Futsutsuka na Akujo dewa Gozaimasu ga: Suuguu Chouso Torikae Den” by Ichijinsha Novels. Released in North America by Airship. Translated by Tara Quinn.

There’s a lot of terrific humor in this volume, most of it stemming from the series’ premise. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s even more true in this book: both Reirin and Keigetsu are absolutely, 100% terrible at pretending to be each other. For the most part they’ve been helped in the past by a) no one knowing bodyswapping was a thing, and b) no one knowing the two well enough to be able to pick out the obvious poor performance. Now that both of these things are no longer true, the best gags in the book come from Reirin’s misplaced confidence that she’s got Keigetsu down pat, or Keigetsu’s inability to not let her cynical anger seep in through everything she does. That said, it’s a good thing that there’s some humor in this book, as the basic premise of this arc is evil and terrible, and the consequences, for some people, are rather chilling.

We pick up where we left off. Reirin has just been rescued from her attempted murder, and has swapped bodies with Keigetsu in order to repair all the damage she blames herself for and take back everything they’ve lost. In practice, this means finding out why exactly Kasui snapped and tried to kill Reirin, plus what she’s actually desperately looking for. She also needs to try to stop Reiga and Hourin from trying to kill her – or rather, using their maidens to try and kill her – and if the way to solve that problem is by getting the maidens on their side, then it’s something she’s going to have to do, even if it means allying with (ugh) Houshun. And then there’s Anni the shaman, the cause of everything that’s led up to this and possibly the most evil person we’ve seen in the series to date.

I continue to absolutely love Ran Houshun, even though she’s also possibly the most terrifying of the maidens. I’m used to hearing Reirin rattle off “Though I am an inept villainess” when she’s gloating over her supposed attempts at being bad, which usually are nothing of the sort. With Houshun it’s chilling when she utters the same phrase, because she’s about to let her Consort and “mentor” be beaten nearly to death by all of her court ladies. And yet it’s also triumphant, because Hourin is a piece of shit who’s spent years abusing and torturing those same court ladies, and for once vigilante justice feels like (at least narratively) the correct answer. As for the others, Kasui gets the closure that is all she can get, really, and can finally achieve a real bond with her own (non-evil) consort. And as for Seika and Reiga, they also get a good scene, but it pales next to Houshun, who’s simply better at this. You can see why Reirin hates her.

I enjoyed this so much I will forgive the use of a deus ex machina “this gets people so drunk they tell everyone the plot out loud” device, though I do hope this is the last we see of it. The next volume promises to be lighter in time, and (theoretically?) only one volume rather than an arc. Can’t wait.

Manga the Week of 12/27/23

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SEAN: Ready to wrap up 2023? Scared of 2024? Let’s go.

MICHELLE: No and yes, respectively!

ANNA: I’m scared!

ASH: What meaning does time have these days anyway?

SEAN: Airship has new print volumes for Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation 25 and The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash 5.

And for early digital we get Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells 9.

Two volumes from Cross Infinite World. We see the 4th volume of The Drab Princess, the Black Cat, and the Satisfying Break-up, and the 3rd and final volume of Revolutionary Reprise of the Blue Rose Princess.

From Ghost Ship we see Manga Diary of a Male Porn Star 4 and Welcome to Succubus High! 5.

A Christmas Day debut from J-Novel Club. I Could Never Be a Succubus! (Watashi wa Succubus Ja Arimasen) features Liz, a normal, upright, well-behaved noble woman at the academy. But she has a secret, and when the hero arrives at the academy… she asks for his underwear! Can she struggle against her true nature (it’s in the title)?

ASH: Spoilers!

SEAN: Also from J-Novel Club: 8th Loop for the Win! With Seven Lives’ Worth of XP and the Third Princess’s Appraisal Skill, My Behemoth and I Are Unstoppable! 2, Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools 8, the 4th manga volume of Did I Seriously Just Get Reincarnated as My Gag Character?!, Earl and Fairy 4, the 2nd manga volume of Hell Mode, My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me! —AΩ— 8, My Magical Career at Court: Living the Dream After My Nightmare Boss Fired Me from the Mages’ Guild! 2, Now I’m a Demon Lord! Happily Ever After with Monster Girls in My Dungeon 7, and Young Lady Albert Is Courting Disaster 4.

ASH: That’s quite a few titles! (I think… or maybe just a few really long titles??

SEAN: The print debut for Kodansha Manga is My Ultramarine Sky (Gunjou no Subete), a BL manga from the creator of My Summer of You that ran in Gateau. It’s complete in one volume. Two boys who sat next to each other for two years in high school now find themselves in different classes.

MICHELLE: The cover, at least, has an appealingly wistful vibe.

ANNA: I sometimes enjoy wistful vibes.

ASH: Same.

SEAN: Also in print: Blue Lock 10, EDENS ZERO 26, Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms 4, Nina the Starry Bride 2, Ogami-san Can’t Keep It In 2, Shangri-La Frontier 9, Something’s Wrong With Us 18, Super Morning Star 2, and Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun 5.

ANNA: Gonna pick up Blue Lock for one of my kids, and as always I am delighted that Nina the Starry Bride is getting a print release!

SEAN: Digitally we see Boss Bride Days 12, Drops of God: Mariage 4, Even Given the Worthless “Appraiser” Class, I’m Actually the Strongest 9, Gamaran: Shura 15, Issak 5, My Home Hero 11, and Searching for My Perfect Brother 3.

One Peace Books has the 2nd volume of It Takes Two Tomorrow, Too.

ASH: I rather enjoyed the first volume.

SEAN: No debut manga from Seven Seas, but we do see Berserk of Gluttony 9, Chronicles of an Aristocrat Reborn in Another World 8, Correspondence from the End of the Universe 4, Drugstore in Another World: The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist 8, Dungeon People 3, Even Though We’re Adults 7, Futari Escape 4 (the final volume), I Got Caught Up In a Hero Summons, but the Other World was at Peace! 7, Reincarnated as a Sword: Another Wish 5, She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man 10, and Though I Am an Inept Villainess: Tale of the Butterfly-Rat Body Swap in the Maiden Court 4.

Square Enix Manga has the 9th volume of Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!.

MICHELLE: Gotta catch up on this!

ASH: I’m behind, too, but have been enjoying the series.

SEAN: Steamship releases its first light novel, a one-shot. Loyal Soldier, Lustful Beast (Gunjin wa Ai no Kemono) stars a noblewoman who is in love with her manservant. Then she is called upon to be the King’s Concubine. Surely they’ll have to give up on their love… right?

ASH: Oh! I missed that Steamship was going to release light novels.

Tokyopop debuts Mitsuka. This ran in from RED. A host at a host club is supposed to sweet talk his female clients… but all he can think about is the hot male prostitute who introduced him to gay sex. This is definitely a “dubious consent” title, BTW.

From Viz: If you enjoy Spy x Family but wish it were in prose, why not read Spy x Family: Family Portrait, a short story collection?

They’ve also got Cat-Eyed Boy: The Perfect Edition 2 and Fist of the North Star 11.

ANNA: Cool.

ASH: Most excellent.

SEAN: Remember when the last week of the year had no releases at all? I do, but I’m old. What are you buying?

My Stepmom’s Daughter Is My Ex: “A Proposal Isn’t Enough”

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By Kyosuke Kamishiro and TakayaKi. Released in Japan as “Mamahaha no Tsurego ga Motokano datta” by Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Gierrlon Dunn.

For a series whose strongest point is not its fanservice, this series sure has a lot of it. That said, at least the fanservice serves a narrative purpose. Even the sex scene in the book – not between our two leads, I hasten to add, but between Aso and Hoshibe – ends up demonstrating, somewhat painfully, that the blush of first love is not always perfect, and that sometimes simple physical difficulties can “ruin” your perfect memories. Meanwhile Yume has been revving the fanservice up, in an effort to get Mizuto to drop his stoic poker face, and ends up going overboard, to the point where he finally snaps and screams at her in desperation. As for Isana… well, yeah, that is fanservice pure and simple, but it also serves to underline for Mizuto that he can’t simply pretend to be a logical robot who makes every decision using bullet points. And that’s important, because there’s a rather annoying thing undercutting this wannabe romantic reuniting… they’re both family now.

It’s Christmas, and Yume has a lot to worry about. She’s set a deadline of the new year to either get Mizuto to rekindle their relationship or just give up, and he’s not cooperating very well, to the point where she’s forced to do things like wave her cleavage at him and hope he reacts. Her birth father wants to meet with her and Mizuto, and given that he’s never particularly cared about Yume before, she’s not quite sure why. And Mizuto has started spending all his time at Isana’s place. The last is for a very good reason – having seen Isana’s art and how good it is, he realizes that she needs a manager in order to achieve anything, as she has no real drive to succeed of her own. So it’s time for Pixiv accounts and Twitter alts, as well as drawing more and more so that she improves. But doesn’t everyone still think they’re dating?

The “is this incest or not?” part of the conversation is not really resolved here, mostly as, well, the premise of the series means that “not” is going to have to be the correct answer. I think the fact that they’ve only been siblings for 9 months takes the curse off it a bit. More difficult is that these two are both big, BIG nerds, and it not only comes out in their school work and reading but also in how they live their lives. Mizuto has never really felt passionate about much till he gets the idea to “manage” Isana’s art, and he proves to be very adept at it. Unfortunately, he’s also listening to Yume’s dad, who is projecting hard onto Mizuto and giving him advice that may not be that helpful. As for Yume, she doesn’t want to cut Mizuto off from Isana, who is her friend as well, but can’t quite work out how close they should be after he and Yume become a couple without resorting to math. Never decide how friendly your lover can be with other women using math.

The author is quick to assure us the series is not ending despite the couple confessing (reconfessing?) at the end, so we’ll see what the fallout is. But this was an in-character, if not entirely satisfying, way for these two to fix things.

Spy Classroom Short Story Collection: The Spy Teacher Who Loved Me

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By Takemachi and Tomari. Released in Japan as “Spy Kyoushitsu” by Fujimi Fantasia Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Nathaniel Thrasher.

(As a warning, this book deals with the sexual assault of an underage girl near its end, and this review briefly discusses that.)

Spy Classroom has, as one of its main goals, to strike a careful balance between gripping, and frequently deadly, spy drama and the wackiest and goofiest of comedy. Sometimes it manages to hit this goal a bit better than others. The first story in this book is a good example: it’s almost entirely light-hearted, then gets more serious towards the end, then gets very serious as we’re reminded how screwed up Annette is. By contrast, the Erna story pinballs between very dark themes and “ha ha, Erna suffering emotionally is funny” so fast that I could not keep up, and it jars. That said, on the whole these short stories are stronger than the first collection, both tying into the girls’ backstories (Thea especially) and expanding on some of the books – the 4th short story is blatantly “there wasn’t room for this in the fourth volume”, as the author admits. And, as a Lily fan, I’m pleased with this, though it does not really remove my irritation of how she’s treated in the actual 4th book.

The wraparound story has Thea trying to decipher a note left to her by Hearth, the spy who mentored Klaus and also rescued Thea from kidnappers. Unfortunately, several of Lamplight get a very wrong idea about the note. In between this, we see Annette being the best waitress ever in order to see if a former spy front is now a legitimate restaurant; Sara gets a secret admirer and Thea tries to make sure that she has the best date ever while also making sure the guy is good enough; on the cruise to not-America in preparation for the 4th book, Erna discovers a suicide cult that makes her their leader; and during the events of the 4th book’s climax, we see how Lily managed to escape getting brutally murdered by Purple Ant’s people.

Some of the comedy in this is very amusing – Annette being a fantastic waitress, and everyone’s reaction to this, is probably the highlight. I think I’d have appreciated Erna’s story more if the suicide cult had not been… well, a suicide cult, and its attempts to show off how the war destroys the underbelly of society needed greater depth, I feel. Sara essentially takes over Thea’s story, and we are reminded that she is the one girl in Lamplight that everyone loves unreservedly. Reading Lily’s story I wondered if the author has read the Excel Saga manga, as Lily very much reminds me of Excel at times (what are you, Steel God Jeeg?), and her truly monstrous stamina is terrifying. And then there’s Thea’s backstory, as she confronts repressed memories of being raped by her kidnappers. Fortunately, the author knows this is NOT the time to insert some laughs, and it’s handled fairly well.

So yeah, good stuff. That said, I’d like to read the next few books of the actual series soon. How are things with our FILTHY TRAITOR? :)

A Late-Start Tamer’s Laid-Back Life, Vol. 8

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By Yuu Tanaka and Nardack. Released in Japan as “Deokure Tamer no Sono Higurashi” by GC Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by A.M. Cola.

At one point in this book, the game is doing a huge mock battle with a massive bird enemy, featuring lots of derring-do and feats of strength, and Yuto manages to win the day by a combination of (accidental) self-sacrifice and being very clever, and he and his tamed monsters look very good doing it. At other points in the book, Yuto discovers rice and also gets a penguin as a tamed monster. It’s not a surprise to readers of this book that the latter two events get a far bigger reaction from other players than the first one. This is a series that revels in its little moments, to the point where the epilogue blatantly has the game devs talking about how their new competitor, about to be released, is deliberately designed to be as different from Law of Justice Online as possible. Yes, Yuto is very cool at times, much as he doesn’t think so. But more importantly, he can cook and has cute pets. Priorities.

The book starts with Yuto completing his underwater expedition with the three other girls in his temporary party, and arriving at a swampy paddy… which, much to his delight, contains an ingredient called “Paddy”, which can be used to make rice! Rice has been one of the foodstuffs that no one has been able to come across in the game, so this discovery is huge! It also leads to more of Yuto’s wacky cooking experiments. After this, we get another event, as Yuto and several others are sent to defend a small fortress that is being beset by birds, Hitchcock-style. Yuto spends most of this time finding bird-repelling things and being baffled that everyone is treating him as the leader of the group. He even manages to do some actual fighting, though it does, of course, kill him. And then there’s his new, tamed monster… a penguin!

It has been both amusing and a bit annoying seeing the evolving relationship between Yuto and Alyssa, his main contact with the information group Quick-Eared Cats. At the start of the series, she was mildly shocked at all the stuff that he’s brought to her and claimed was nothing. But by now his very appearance in their home base causes her to get ulcers and have panic attacks. I kind of wish they stayed closer, but I get it. Yuto’s number one character trait is being oblivious to his own greatness, and that means he has no idea that the things he’s bringing to her are worth a fortune – which means they’ll make the money back eventually, but it puts the Cats in an awkward position of being deep in debt right after every visit of his. As for the penguin, it’s basically written in to be a joke about the Tomihiko Morimi book Penguin Highway, but it also looks like it will be one of the stronger characters in future volumes.

Somehow I’m guessing the new game coming out to challenge LJO is going to struggle. Why shoot other players to death when you can watch a beat, a mole, and a penguin frolic around?

Pick of the Week: Breakfast, Crowns, and Insomniacs

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SEAN: As I said in Manga the Week of, I do like a good military fantasy. And with the series I like either about to finish or on hiatus, it’s a good time to grab a new one. The Crown of Rutile Quartz is my pick this week.

MICHELLE: I like food manga and I like cats, so my choice is clear: Breakfast with My Two-Tailed Cat!

ASH: Same! And yokai, too. I somehow hadn’t even heard of Breakfast with My Two-Tailed Cat before Sean mentioned the manga; I immediately placed a pre-order for the first volume.

KATE: A new volume of Insomniacs After School is always cause for celebration!