W Juliet 6
Posted: March 3, 2007 Filed under: W Juliet Leave a comment »This one turned out to be one of the better volumes plot-wise. Again, I think Emura’s author talks are somehow much better than almost any other shoujo mangaka for whatever reason (and since I can’t think of a really good reason, it may be just me), and when she talks at the beginning of the volume about how it was odd to do a continuing story instead of one-shots, I was surprised she meant most of the volume. There were two stories here, one dealing with Mako’s sister Tsubaki and one dealing with Ito’s family. Both tell a lot about the backgrounds of the characters, which is a very good thing indeed.
Tsubaki is kind of a weird character. The plot of her story is basically that she gets transferred into Mako’s school as a teacher by their father to keep an eye on Mako. Of course, she finds out about Ito very quickly, and says if Mako wants to stay, his class will have to beat hers at the school sporting event. While Tsubaki clearly adores Mako (she’s got her bedroom papered in photos of him as a little kid), it’s kind of weird that she’d go so adamantly against his dreams like that. On the other hand, I think she wants him back home an awful lot. With both hands in mind, she’s still adorable and I like her.
The other story is about Mako going with Ito to her family’s main house during Golden Week. The grandma there is a real character, and lots of wacky hijinks ensue, the most important of which is that there is a time-travel story where Mako and Ito find out about how Ito’s parents got married. While I think time travel stories are generally in poor taste in something like this, Emura did apologize, and it was a good story, so I guess I can forgive that.
Did I mention shirtless Mako is in this volume? I’ve never seen such shameless fanservice. With the way Emura writes during her author’s talks, it’s easy for me to imagine a stern male editor saying something like “You’re still being stingy. You’ve included lots of kissing and male Mako, but now it’s time to show him without a shirt and work more of that into the plot.” See? It’s not Emura’s fault that way.
