meganbmoore | manga: V.B. Rose Vol 1-2 (Reply)

Ageha has always idolized her older sister, Hibari, and has never thought much of Hibari’s boyfriend, who Ageha thinks is boring and nothing special. So naturally, she’s utterly aghast when Hibari announces that she’ll be getting married soon due to an unexpected pregnancy. Ageha tries to have nothing to do with the wedding, but can’t resist the lure of the world of sparkles when Hibari invites her to come with her when she selects her wedding dress. Ageha, it seems, is utterly in love with weddings and everything associated with them. Really, with anything pretty and frilly.

The shop, Velvet Blue Rose (V.B.R.), is run by two young men, Yukari and Mitsuya. When he hears Ageha’s tirade about her sister’s marriage, Yukari kicks her out (literally) and tells her to never come back. This, of course, means that she snuck back as quickly as she could. During her second visit, Mitsuya ends up with a cut hand that won’t let him work as fast, so Ageha, who designs and sews handbags as a hobby, volunteers to help finish Hibari’s wedding gown, and works to come to terms with Hibari’s wedding. Later, she gets hired on as a regular part time assistant.

The series is amazingly shoujo-y. Not only is there a near-lethal amount of flowers and sparkles, but Ageha even comments on the flowers at one point, and other characters seem to take how many sparkles and flowers surrounding her as a sign of how much of her own happiness she’s creating. Thankfully, this manages to be charming instead of cavity-inducing. Ageha has a bit much of the normal shoujo airheadedness and “I must help others regardless of any consequences to myself” going at times, but not enough to be irritating, and she’s pretty adorable overall. Yukari sometimes threatens to be an alpha shoujo bastard hero (but he really isn’t, he’s just irritable, and rather obsessed with his shop and what it represents), and Mitsuya a perv (well, he might be, at that…), but scratch the surface and they’re both pretty sweet.

The manga is obviously headed towards a romance between Ageha and Yukari, but so far there doesn’t seem to be an uncomfortable lack of a balance of power between them. It helps that he wasn’t immediately romantically interesting in a teenager, much less aggressively pursuing her like the hero in I Hate You More Than Anyone. In addition to lead pairings with significant age differences, the mangaka seems to like writing about positive family relationships, and friendships between female friends. Actually, I adore Ageha’s best friend, Mamoru, who is rather stoic and deadpan. She also has a line that rings sadly true of a lot of fiction. “Friendships between girls are ground to dust underfoot when guys are involved.” Actually, given some of Mamoru’s comments and the fangirls in I Hate You More Than Anyone, I wonder if the mangaka is a fan of shoujo-ai, though there isn’t (in what I’ve read) any actual shoujo-ai in the series.

While I’m not quite sure about the pairing yet (but leaning on the positive side), I like the overall setup and character relationships, and I like how the mangaka has her heroines deal with learning that their ideas and how they deal with things might not be the best, and may be hurting themselves and others.