manga: Rose Hip Rose Vol 1-3

This is a sequel to Rose Hip Zero, but actually came out before RHZ. You don’t need to read RHZ first, and actually, not all events add up. The premise is essentially the same: a teenaged girl who was once a brainwashed assassin for a group called Alice has defected and now works with Tokyo’s police department in hostage situations as she tries to hunt down and eliminate Alice. Kasumi is a little older and has a different cast, but it’s two stages of the same story.

Sadly, it shows that this is an earlier work. RHZ has it’s fair share of fanservice, but RHR’s is worse, and the characters are…less appealing. To be honest, I probably would have been annoyed by Kasumi if I didn’t already like her from RHZ. Unfortunately, her foils aren’t as good, either. In RHZ, she’s partnered with a sympathetic cop whose sister was killed by Alice several years earlier, which eventually results in a rather sweet surrogate brother/sister relationship that also fulfilled my “badass loner and cute little thing” kink, but also made the cute little thing ten times as badass as the badass loner. Here, Kasumi’s initial foil is a classmate who starts out taking illicit pictures of girls’ underwear on the bus and selling the pictures online. He becomes more sympathetic, but is thankfully eventually written out and is replaced by another defected Alice agent, Natsuki. She starts out a little too trigger happy and cutesy for me, but gets better.

By the end of the three volumes (during which it seems there was a break in publication, and the name in serialization was changed to Magnum Rose Hip) there’s been a significant increase in quality, thankfully. Still not as good as RHZ, but good enough to justify more to get the rest of Kasumi’s story.

Gossip Girl 1.2-1.5

Am I the only one who actually thinks that Blair is prettier than Serena? Maybe I just prefer the slightly-classic look to the blonde bombshell look. Also, Serena talks kinda funny. She always sounds choked up. (None of these statements should be interpreted as dislike for Serena.)

Also, I find this show watches best when you picture Veronica Mars hiding in a cupboard and cackling like a madwoman.

( spoilers )

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EEEE!   My copy of Palimpsest has shipped!

Also "Gossip Girl...WITH VAMPIRES!" is neither as cracktastic nor as spiffy as one would think.  "Gossip Girl does 1899, take 3!" however, lives up to expectations.  (And I completely did not notice that the 2 books I grabbed to take to work were riding the Gossip Girl wave when I grabbed them before leaving the apartment.)