A Brief Review of Some Completed Shoujo Manga because I'm a 33-year-old sad loser

I don't know how to do this without spoilers, philosophical persnicketiness, or proper review elements whatsoever, so I'll just bulldoze my way through it.

I've been reading manga the past few evenings. I started with Iya da Nante Iwasenai, an average work about a relationship between two childhood friends whose love is constantly challenged by an age difference. Magnet na Watashitachi was a bit better, if only because the female protagonist wasn't as annoying, and the male protagonist is severely dysfunctional (though without the comedy of the one in Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun.) It's your formulaic outcast-helped-by-a-compassionate-person story, with lolicon subtexts that aren't disruptive, and the female character is okay. Kiken Mania's female, by contrast, is... Wait, by far, the most annoying of all the female protagonists in both manga and anime that I can recall off the top of my head, perhaps because it's made explicit time and again that she's really cute and shit. So it's the male protagonist that somehow substantializes the manga, bringing to mind Yahiro Saiga's character in Special A. And if you spread the annoyance throughout the characters such that it thins out and equally disperses to all the characters, you have Silent Kiss, whose female wants to keep on throwing herself in front of cars and trucks and trains and whose male lead buttons up his shirt collar because he's this suicidal girl's prince. Yes, yes, there's a toe dipped into some psychological depth, and I shouldn't have put it so cynically given the mental issues involved, but hell, this girl really wanting to kill herself would have been rendered with more dignity had it not occurred every chapter and had the story not kept referring to Sleeping Beauty.

I just finished Hirunaka no Riyuusei yesterday, and like all long manga, it's supposed to develop characters more fully and more slowly. It did that well with the female lead, who I like better than most, if only because she doesn't fall into an annoying stereotype and has somewhat more sense than the female protagonist in Strobe Edge. The male character whom she ends up with is not overdone, silent, solid; and the other male protagonist is almost overdone in his dancing around backwards and forwards with commitment. If he wasn't drawn so well I would've smacked the living hell out of him. Similar to Strobe Edge, however, when the female characters faffle in their love interests, the mangaka really do make them faffle, awkwardly, unceremoniously, with no grace or beauty whatsoever.

Akuma de Koi Shiyou, however, is in a different league altogether. It's masterfully written, in just four chapters. Normally, I do not have "sweet" in my vocabulary whenever I want to praise anything, but this manga is sweet, as in "poignant," and sweet, as in "Dude, that's sweet." It's what Murakami's On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl one Beautiful April Morning would be without the overt tenderness and the fumbling description of a fated love at the end. This manga just lays all of that like smooth marble, airtight, well-paced, brilliant like a diamond. The last chapter is exceptionally well done, and the entire work has enough complexity (in four chapters, did I mention that it only has four chapters? It's only got four chapters.) to keep you from myopically anticipating a star-crossed thing at the end, which somehow dilutes all love stories that have that but did not take your mind sufficiently off of it. It's one of those mangas the story of which, and not the characters themselves, is the masterpiece. It's one of those mangas that I read again the minute I finished it, at any rate. Wait, actually, it's the only manga that I read again the minute I finished reading it.