The art isn't as great as the mangaka's later works and my first impression was facepalm but at least the female lead isn't some crybaby ditz or a MarySue-type.
As others have commented, the heroine is pretty kick-ass but some things just got me railed up(see rant below).
It's shoujo so cliches are to be expected but the archetypal bitches are here and they just seriously piss me off so much, it makes me want to stop reading because you can't help predict how awful they're gonna be and how effing frustrating the plot's gonna wind up.
Thank kami for the heroine having some backbone or I would never have finished this. I would've given this a better grade just for the heroine alone but daaaamn, everything else was just...I guess I overestimated this because of the mangaka but still...
Good points, I guess, are that the heroine has guts and she speaks out for herself.
The thing that gets me about this is that
she's never fully independent. The hero has to still somehow come in and save her(and kinda does it halfassed if you ask me). sigh It is shoujo after all. I mean, I like a supportive hero and all but this hero isn't that kind of supportive.
He's just...there? His presence is supposed to be something she draws strength (which I find unnecessary) and we're supposed to feel some kind of endearment toward him. It fails in that aspect.
Sorry. I'm just hating on the male lead. He's the type that goes "Oh, I'll leave this to --heroine's name-- since I know she's strong" but then never follows through with it. He doesn't meddle but does...? He meddles to a point that leaves you hoping he'd do more so you're left hanging and going like "whu?"
And then he goes ahead and dates the bitch because he thinks the heroine should have the initiative to confess her feelings to him herself and so he dates the shallow bully to give the heroine a little push into the "right" direction. Right. Because that's how you totally make your 'bestfriend' fess up to her feelings for you.
I kept waiting for the real hero of the story to show up. The hero who sees and treats the heroine as an equal. Who isn't a wimp, emotionally retarded, or a moron. We're told that Sorao is the hero of the story but seriously, nine-tenths of this volume, I seriously kept going "So...when's the real male lead turning up?".
It became so frustrating at one point that I ended up reading something else to cool off for awhile. It just grated on me the way a bad yaoi manga, where the seme is so clearly undeserving of the uke that I wanted the uke to move onto someone else, grates on me.
In no way do we get to feel that Sorao deserves Sorako, like at all. So when she pretty much throws a tantrum instead of being her usual cool self when Sorao dates the bitch, it detracted on how much I liked her.
She does cool down after her initial reaction but I found that too small a relief to cover the face-palm moment that follows. The hero meddles and it's not the good kind.(the chapter is only saved by the heroine being seriously badass)
The characters have their own inconsistencies and not the realistic kind of inconsistency. Some moments don't fit well with others. I kept doing a double-take because I still can't believe that the mangaka is the same as the author of Yamamoto Zenjirou to Moushimasu.
The grade is for the heroine's "I will seriously kill you if you dare mess with me anymore than you have" aura/expression at the end of chapter 3 and beginning of chapter 4 but then the next pages just want me to give this a fail.
Yes, the bitches kinda get what they deserve but the last chapters do nothing to endear me to the jerk that is the 'hero'. Even when he delivered the line that really hit the bully in the gut, he still felt irredeemable.
The part where the heroine totally calls the hero on his asshole-ness, I started slow clapping. It had me itching to give this a ten.
She goes, "I'm not your toy!" in a totally non-wimp manner and she shows how pissed she is at the hero's idiocy. Another line she says "...Ah, I'm tired of being with you" and the hero's stunned expression really had me cheering like heck because I was hoping that maybe this manga was going to be different and that the heroine was going to move on with her life.
NOT. Haha, this manga is like some cruel joke or something. I turn a page and go "Woohoo! You go girl!" then go on to the next pages and I end up resisting the urge to bang my head on the table. The jerk-type hero has zero redeemable qualities. The romance genre is tagged onto this but there was no instance where I found this romantic at all.
The heroine is great but ends up wimping out in some instances.
Like right after she calls on the hero's jerk-qualities, she ends up chasing after him because she can't help it. She 'wuvs him very much' after all. He isn't even the lovable mean-hero type(Natsume from Gakuen Alice and other popular jerk-like heroes in the shoujo world), he's just a jerk.
Seriously, he doesn't deserve her. At one point I ended up sorta hoping in some twisted way that the teacher(Kuririn, I think?) would end up with her because he was the only one who showed any inclination towards believing in the heroine.
Sorry, I'm railing against this so hard because I'm just so disappointed.
(-30)
