Of Swords and Parasols

It's been a while since I did this, and I posted separately on a lot of what I read since the last time i did this, but I think this is everything else since then.

What are you currently reading

Shion no Ou. A seinen manga that's probably best summed up as "mute girl becomes professional shogi player to find her parents' killer," which is both technically accurate and a misrepresentation. i'll say a lot more when i'm finished, probably, but I'm enjoying it a lot.

What did you recently finish reading?

Bride of the Water God vol 14 by Mi-Kyung Yun. So much drama (some of which I find hilarious, though that's not the mahwaga's intention)! So much pretty! Sadly, I am not well versed enough in Korean mythology to completely following all the celestial shenanigans.

Kimi ni Todoke by Karuho Shiina Vol 17-18. Adorable awkward misfits manga is still adorable.

( brief spoilers )

Dogs: Bullets & Carnage Vol 8 by Shirow Miwa. it's too long between volumes for me to keep track of all the genetic experimentation reveals and 30 or so people named Naoto running around straight in my head, but I'm ok with that, because the entertainment level is high. I'm also pretty sure the main point of this volume was to make sure all the readers shipped main!Naoto/Heine.

Strobe Edge Vol 1-10 by Io Sakisaka. A very cute and sweet shoujo manga about Ninako a girl who, like most of the other girls in her school, likes a classmate name Ren. Through a sequence of events, the two become friends, but Ren has a girlfriend who he's devoted to. Rather than chase after him or be jealous, Ninako decides to just be friends with Ren, and see where life takes her. Ren, thankfully, is not a cold aloof jerk like so many school "princes" in shoujo manga are, though some characters who haven't bothered to actually interact with him assume he will be. It becomes more conventional in the later volumes, but largely manages to avoid falling into some of the more irritating pitfalls other shoujo romances do, despite later volumes getting somewhat bogged down in "I cannot let the person I like know I like them because this other person likes them, even though the person I like has not implicated by word or deed that they have any interest in this other person."

Hero by Alethea Kontis. Sequel to Enchanted, and about the 6th sister of the family, Saturday, who is abducted by a witch's Raven who mistakes her for her heroic older brother, Jack, and taken to the witch's mountain, where she meets a prince who was enchanted by the witch's daughter to take her place. It has fun with the almost literal genderswapping, but doesn't seem quite sure what it wants to say about gender conformity. It's a more cohesive whole than

I read the prologue (prequel?) volume of Dogs a while back, enjoyed it despite not exactly understanding everything that was going on, got the rest of what was out, and the got distracted by something else. (This is how you end up with a backlog that would take years to read through, just FYI. Well, that and booksales.)

Dogs is a futuristic story about stray warriors with secrets, Epic Angst, and bad attitudes. There’s a stoic swordswoman looking for her family’s killer, a quasi-easygoing Old Dude (who just happens to be a dead ringer for Hohenheim from Full Metal Alchemist), an apathetic reporter who kills everything in sight if he goes 5 minutes without a cigarette (literally), a winged mute girl, a blind priest with a concerning loli fetish, and a seemingly-immortal mercenary who has a charming backstory involving things like genetically altered children being tossed into a pit with a giant monster to see how quickly they pull their body parts back together. Literally.

At a certain level, it’s like Kazuya Minekura binged on Kaori Yuki’s entire backlog and then created this. Possibly while drunk.

I’m still not entirely certain what happened with all of this, even after reading it twice, but I do know that I was entertained, if in a rather morbid way.