Tenjho Tenge 14

http://www.librarything.com is an extremely useful service.  Aside from me using it as a glorified spreadsheet, you can see how popular certain volumes are by checking to see who else owns them and what they may have rated them or said about them.  Obviously, these statistics are arbitrary and based only on people who use Librarything and also read manga (and have everything matched right, which is hard to explain), but it’s a cool feature anyway.  It hurts when certain things are neglected, though.  I’m not talking about things like Baoh, where there’s little doubt no one but me and a museum in New York owns it, but I’m seriously the only one following Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which is some sort of sin.  Same with Tenjho Tenge.  Of the thousands of people who list manga there, there are only THREE PEOPLE who read past volume two, me and the aforementioned museum being two of the three.  What the hell.

Random advertisment and bloggish part aside, is this series really not that popular?  It’s impossible for me to believe anyone who’s read it (and didn’t decide to snub it) hasn’t enjoyed it at least a little bit.  It gets in over its head when it starts spouting philosophy and power ramblings and the histories of the families and stuff, but otherwise, it’s just so fucking cool in every way imaginable.  The battles, the character designs, the personalities of the characters, the fighting styles, and even most of the plot is cool to a fault.  It’s manufactured cool.  It’s been made with what you would like to read in mind.

For instance, this volume is almost entirely dedicated to a full-out fight between Maya Natsume and some sort of perfected iron man on the side of Soichiro’s dad.  You realize that fights with Maya Natsume are few and far between when you see her go up against this guy, who totally wipes her out.  The battle is about the most badass in the series so far, which says something since every volume tries to have at least one badass fight.  She manages to activate her sword too, which is totally awesome but involves a weird situation with Aya that I didn’t really like.  The best scene in this volume hands down was where the opponent was walking away after “killing” Maya, and she suddenly sits up in the water, totally demonic-looking, and says ”The River Styx was dried up, so my brother threw me back.”  Cool to a fault, you see.

Seriously, you guys.  Why isn’t anyone reading this series?  I thought it was more popular than this.  Or maybe it is, just not among the people who use librarything.