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| details |
| The Genre: romance/slice of life |
| The Format: 21 Manga volumes from tokyopop |
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| The plot: Yukino Miyazawa is the perfect model
student.
Pretty, kind, good at sports, always at the top
of her class. But she's not all she seems. It's
all an act of deception; she is really the self-confessed
"queen of vanity," and her only goal in
life is winning the praise and admiration of everyone
around her.
When she enters high school, she finally meets
her match: Soichiro Arima, a handsome, athletic,
popular, and very intelligent young boy. Ever since
he stole the top seat in the class from her, Yukino
has hated him, and has been plotting on how to take
back her former place as the object of all other
students' admiration.
What she wasn't expecting, however, was that Soichiro,
the very boy she hated, would confess his love for
her. She also didn't expect that he would find out
about her deception - and use it to blackmail her!
Together, they discover that they have more in common
than they knew, and they promise each other that
they'll stop pretending to be perfect, and just
be their true selves. |
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| opinion |
| Now here's something of a brave move.
If you take even the briefest look at the anime,
manga and tv series I've reviewed over the year's
you should get the distinct impression that the
stuff I watch falls squarely into a handful of genres
and types.
And you'd be right.
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If you take a quick butchers too at the
marks I've given and the reviews I've done
(especially recently), you'd probably see
that, in a general sense, I'm a bit of a knuckle-dragging
neanderthal. Indeed, one of my earliest reviews,
of the Gold Digger animated DVDs makes no
bones about my appreciation of a... er...
fuller bossom. So you'd be right about that
too.
There's something of a tradition amongst
online anime reviewers to look down upon any
kind of nudity, fanservice or general sexiness.
I'm not sure why this is, and whilst it's
never made any sense to me, I'm not going
to pretend I do these reviews as any kind
of crusading bastion of the male ego, I just
give my opinion on what I like, and I happen
to like ladies.
So why the risk? Why the self-analysis?
Well, Kare Kano is a shoujo title.
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Okay, no great shakes right--Furuba was a shoujo
title after all, and I didn't make a big song and
dance about that. Well no, but then Furuba was a
romantic comedy with strong fantasy elements. It
was shoujo in fundamenntal structure, but it also
had plenty that appealed outside of that domain.
Kare Kano, or Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo (His and Her
Circumstances) to give it it's full title is proper
shoujo. And I don't do that stort of stuff... right?
I mean, there's no mystical curses in Kare Kano;
no futuristic or fantasy setting; no unrealism;
there aren't even any magical girls or comedy (there's
a few laughs, but it's not played for laughs, if
you see what I mean). No, Kare Kano is a proper
romance with real people in real situations, experiencing
real emotions and going through real character development.
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Or not. Ish. You know how all those Richard Curtiss
rom-coms are in one sense real, but also in many
sense unreal. They're often about foppish, upper-class
twats and a sort of polished, shiny version of reality,
rather than real, gritty, hole-in-your-shoe-letting-the-rain-in
type reality.
Well Kare Kano is set in that sort of reality.
The people aren't unrealistic in the sense that
a gigantic walking robot hitting gigantic aliens
in the face is unreal, but equally the fact that
all of the charactere are very well off and they
go to an exclusive, upperclass school certainly
puts the story a little outside of the norm.
Perhaps the parallel I just drew with the ouvre
of Richard Curtiss is an unfortunate one, as I don't
want anyone to get the wrong impression about Kare
Kano. It's not like a Richard Curtiss film.
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It's better than that. And longer. At 21
volumes, this is not a short story, but it
does mean we get a detailed and well developed
arc to the main protagonists, Soichiro (the
his) and Yukino (the her), as well as plenty
of diversions into the tales of the supporting
players.
What makes Kare Kano so good is an attention
to the development of all of these character
and the exploring of how they as a bunch of
people grow from being fresh-faced high school
kids, to young adults, and beyond.
I think one of the differences between western
comics and eastern ones is the type of story-telling
tradition they herald from.
In western comics, there's a narratives structure
that's goal orientated. When you watch a movie,
for example, especially the big summer blockbusters,
they are often about reaching a goal. What
happens along the way is then pitched as a
series of trials and tribulations to be overcome
or worked around in order to get to that final
goal. Time is expressed as a countdown to
zero.
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In eastern comics it's more about the journey.
There's often an appreciation that as we join the
story we're joining half way through. These people
had lives before we joined them and they will after
we stop following them. Time is a continuum from
which we're being shown a small slice.
And that's what Kare Kano is really about. If you
launch into it simply with the mindset of "will
they get together or won't they" then you may
be a little disappointed, because the 'ending' is
no shocking. Kare Kano whould be read from the minset
of interest in how they get to that end, not what
that end ulitmately is. |
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| summary |
| The Summary: 4/5 |
| The Score: It's very good, but it's definitely
very shoujo. |
| The Pictures:
(click for larger versions) |
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| about
trismugistus.com and digital-bondage.net are my websites.
trismugistus.com is where I upload my anime, manga and
tv&film reviews, and also where I post my short stories,
as well as extracts from my longer works and my non-fiction
pieces.
digital-bondage.net is my wallpaper site and provides
anime, manga and other desktop wallpapers in a variety
of resolutions. I also have a few tutorials and some resources,
such as psds for you to download.
I also run a site called scan-city.org, which provides
scans from the latest japanese anime magazines for you
to download and use in your wallpapers. |
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