This book devours tropes like candy in this first volume alone, you’ve got a wall slam, the princess carry/infirmary visit, one person hiding under the other’s bed covers with them in it, somebody getting a cold for no reason, somebody is incredibly bad at cooking, AND the elaborately written date plans that end up in the possession of the person being taken for said date. Line up your shots, it’s another teetotaler-unfriendly instalment of the Shojo Manga Drinking Game. but what do these two REALLY have to offer one another? He offers to help her out if she becomes his bodyguard. Enter the very popular Serizawa, who Shuko saves from a sticky situation (after injuring him only a couple times). “Unfortunately” for her, she’s insanely strong and the target of every hardcore sports club at school, not to mention really bad at controlling said strength. Shuko is ready to make her high school debut, but fate has other plans. It really detracted from the sweet moments. The action scenes coupled with the zoomed in panels and erratic speech bubbles often had me confused who was talking or what was happening. The other flaw of this vol would be how hard it was to follow. However, that view could have been more indicative of Kadokamine’s stance on the matter rather than the manga’s as a whole, because the male lead seemed to really dig Kadokamine’s strength, so maybe not all is lost and future instalments in the series could see Kadokamine’s personal character growth show she learns to accept herself more. Her strength was, well, a strength of her character, and it should’ve been embraced more thoroughly than it was. And that sexist view really put a dampener on the overall enjoyability and sweetness of the main characters and their dynamic. Granted, it was never stated that her strength made her not cute-which I did appreciate-but it was constantly reiterated that being cuter would make Kadokamine a “better girl”. However, this vol’s major flaw also resided in Kadokamine’s view that in order to have the romantic high school experience she wanted, she had to be cuter. What made Kadokamine such an interesting character was her strength and through her the manga made a statement on how strong girls are more than capable of being a protagonist. This was a cute romance manga, but not one without flaws.
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