12 Days of Christmas – Day 7 – Close Your Eyes for Five Seconds

…yeah, I got nothing. Just wanted to remind everyone that this was a thing that happened. Again.

Kimi ni Todoke – These Two Will Have So Many Fights

Believe it or not, this is the fourth time someone in this series has gotten hit.

Even in the same series, different couples can have their own individual methods for working through their problems. If that wasn’t true, we would have had to see Ayane and Kent blushing around each other for a dozen chapters before anything like this could have occurred. It’s still very strange to see Kent getting as passionate as he did in this chapter. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that this is the same guy who casually tried to seduce Sawako much earlier in the story. Nothing he’s done up until now has been this expressive, which is what makes it both much more shocking for him to punch Mogi and, at the same time, makes his feelings toward Ayane a lot easier to understand.

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.

Kimi ni Todoke – The Rebuilding Phase

Aw, I missed these reaction faces.

I did something that I should not have done. A few days before this chapter came out, I found a link to one of the Japanese raws for the series. I ended up looking through that with no real idea what the characters were saying, and that got me a little worried. What was Sawako crying about? What did this mean for their relationship? When I finally read the translated version, I found out that things were nowhere near as bad as I’d thought. The thing that really got Sawako upset was how Yano and Kent have been acting, and while her relationship with Kazehaya was discussed, that part of the discussion wasn’t as sad. However, after everything that happened there’s still something bothering me. Do you know why I decided to check out that raw scan?

It’s because I was scared.

Sukitte ii na yo – You Are Not Sawako Kuronuma

"I don't know why. I just do."

You know, I’ve been trying for a little while to figure out why I’ve had so much trouble connecting to this manga. After all, the whole reason I started reading it was because people compared it to Kimi ni Todoke, and after reading I can see where the comparisons come from. The heroine is a social outcast who attracts the attention of the most popular guy in school, and through this she ends up attracting a number of friends. The first big difference, though, is that Mei hooks up with Yamato extremely early in the series, which should please those who disliked the slow pace of Kimi ni Todoke. And yet somehow, I couldn’t find myself getting into this series on anywhere near the same level. I think this chapter has finally shown me why that is.