12 Days of Christmas – Day 2 – Long Live The King

When watching an adaptation of one of your favourite works, you’re always nervous about how it will handle all the most memorable scenes. Sometimes the show can do the original justice, sometimes the Disgaea anime happens. Going into Persona 4 The Animation, the scene I was most looking forward to was the King’s Game, being originally one of the funniest moments from the game. Of course it wouldn’t take too much effort to screw it up by accident, so it was also the scene that scared me the most. Luckily the show managed to take this event and make it even funnier, and it’s very interesting how they managed it.

This Week in Manga – Cutting The Knot

I’ve thought about it, and decided to make the multi-chapter posts from before into a recurring type of update. The way I see it, there are certain series not many people who visit this site read, and some others where the chapter may not contain enough information for a full post. For instance, Law’s current plan from One Piece or the subject of Food Honour in Toriko could easily receive their own posts, but the most recent chapters don’t have quite enough information to write about yet. At the same time, there were other topics in those chapters and many others which I can analyze, but not at great length. Plus there’s the occasional time where I’ll miss a chapter just because I’m like that sometimes.

So my solution is “This Week in Manga”, a series I hope to come out each week where I quickly go over several chapters I couldn’t write a full post about. The ideal number is seven in one update, but it’ll most likely change depending on what comes out. For this week, we have Toriko, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, Kimi ni Todoke, Natsume Yuujinchou and Nisekoi.

Toriko – All’s Fair In Friendship And Cooking

Chefs in the Toriko-verse can be dicks sometimes.

The relationship between Komatsu and Take seems to have gone down a direction I didn’t expect. Even though I understood how he was being portrayed as a corrupt chef, I still thought he was going to end up a victim of the Bishokukai. With all the criminal acts they have committed so far, slavery doesn’t seem all that out of character for them. But in the case of Take, and most likely the other kidnapped chefs as well, it appears that they had some sort of brainwashing applied to them as well.

From this chapter, I think I can make a prediction or two. First is that Komatsu will get healed, most likely by Chin Chinchin and/or the Bubble Fruit. Nobody is expecting him to die right now, so it’s just a question of how he’ll get better. The second prediction, and the one far less likely to happen, is that Take will become a recurring enemy for Komatsu. He isn’t strong enough to just get beaten by Toriko, especially with this new powerup, and an act like stabbing Komatsu can’t just be forgiven in a few chapters, so turning him back into a good guy now is unlikely. With those two out of the way, the most likely option is for him to leave and return in a later arc, at which point it’s hard to say what he’ll be like. I hope that’s the case, because Komatsu could use a good enemy that is only his and not Toriko’s.

Catching Up on Things – Seven Posts in One

So my exams for this year have finally ended, and now I’m free from all that stuff for another few months. Now all I have to worry about is my GPA and work and my website and countless other things. I suppose this is what being an adult means. Well at least I can be an adult and still enjoy manga the way I do. Since I’ve had difficulty talking about the most recent manga chapters lately, I thought I would make a post briefly discussing the things I might have blogged about had I not been busy. These won’t be as long as my normal posts, but I thought I should do a little catching up regardless.

One Piece – Caesar Clown’s Playhouse

His favourite song is Jumpin' Jack Flash, in case you were wondering.

Enemies in One Piece tend to fall all over the morality scale, from honorable soldiers like Smoker to professional killers like Rob Lucci to complete sadists like Moria. What I found interesting about Caesar Clown (aside from the name, of course) is that he’s managed to convince people he’s much more honorable and less insane than he really is. Listening to Brownbeard talk about him, you would almost think he was a decent guy with a passionate love for science. Of course one look at him shows that he’s every bit as insane and sadistic as the term “passionate love for science” would imply. This series used to tiptoe around the use of drugs and WMDs, which makes Clown’s behaviour feel all the more extreme and cruel. I honestly think all of Luffy’s training will have been worth it just so we can see him punch this guy in the face properly.

Yotsuba&! – Reach Out And Pet The Tiger

Not very talkative.

Some of my favourite chapters in manga, and in shonen comedies in particular, are the ones that show the interactions of characters who don’t normally get much time together. Now while Toriko Torako has had time with Yotsuba before, it’s almost always with either Asagi or her father as well, so the atmosphere is very different now. She was always the quiet, stoic type of character, which I suspect is why there have been so few scenes of her with only one other person. You can’t really get a good dialogue going when only one person is talking.

Liar Game – Chapter 145

What.

There’s a consistent pattern most rounds in Liar Game follow. There’s the set-up, the pre-game, and multiple levels of back and forth scheming before the big reveal at the end. If most of that doesn’t sound too formulaic, that’s because it really isn’t. It’s the sort of formula that allows for quite a bit of room to play around, which I think is the best kind of formula a series can have. However, there’s one thing that has been consistent in almost every round of this game, and it’s really starting to get kind of annoying. Every round starts off with Nao being made a fool of by the enemy.