Flower of Life 3
Posted: August 20, 2007 Filed under: Flower of Life 8 Comments »So this is the last one I had backlogged for review. I wanted to finish with this, because this is one of the best series I am currently reading. I was thrilled when I found out that there’s one more volume coming out.
What makes this one of the best series I’m reading right now, standing with Jojo and Holic and the like? Unfortunately, I cannot adequately describe to you the charms of this series. It is almost wholly based on conversation and everyday events between high school students, and everything about it is touching and funny and just hits all the right spots for being a really sweet series.
One of the things I admire most about it is that it has not fallen into romance territory at this point. There are two side romances going on, but none of the main characters are really falling in love with each other, and to avoid that plot trap in favor of having Christmas parties is truly a feat. One of the two romances is actually more for comedy’s sake than anything else, and I about DIED when I read the last page of this volume… not only because of the situation, but the perfect joke that was thrown in there as well (not the one about the breasts, the one about the situation). It’s also almost totally aware that it’s a manga, and manages to make snide and perfect geeky commentary on the medium via one character’s shounen ai mangaka hobby and another character’s total otaku-ness.
There’s usually a perfect moment in every volume, and this time around it was a quiet one on a train between two secondary characters where they discuss how Christmas was their favorite time of year because you’ve finally gotten to know everyone in your class, there’s no pressure for exams yet, and the time when you all split up and move on to separate classes and have to start over again getting comfortable with other people is far away. It was bittersweet and just… wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
This series is just perfect. It blows Antique Bakery out of the water, and that’s hard to do.
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I just found out that DMP is going to release Flower of Life 4 this May. Finally!
Among other things, I love the Rose of Versailles jokes in Flower of Life. The one in this volume “Even Sir Oscar was shown to be a glamorous beauty when she put on a dress!! So why is it that I only look like a cross-dressing man?!” is especially funny.
Yeah, I was so happy when they finally announced the release date for this! I preordered it a week or so ago during a sale. I don’t expect it to have any sort of definitive ending, but I’m still happy to be getting a new volume of it.
That entire chapter (or two) with the manga being slowly transformed into yaoi rather than the historical epic that she had originally drawn it as was just awesome. This series will always be one of my favorites for that alone. I haven’t read it in so long, I’ll have to brush up on it before the last volume comes out.
The plot around A Daisy Blooms in Louisiana/Catch Me in the Office is my favorite part too. On the other hand, there actually is an excellent Rose of Versailles fanfic which is set in modern times. And I almost never read/enjoy fanfic, so getting praise from me no small feat.
Hmm. I haven’t read fanfic in years, though I liked it a lot when I was younger. Series like Rose of Versailles and From Eroica With Love tend to have good fanfic though just because it’s mostly older women writing it. I’ve often thought about trying out some of the more highly-praised Eroica fanfic.
Hmm, I never read fanfic either, though I enjoyed it quite a bit when I was younger. I think series like Rose of Versailles and From Eroica With Love tend to be pretty safe bets for fanfic though, just based on the age of the audience that is likely to read them. I’ve often thought about trying some of the more highly-praised Eroica fanfic.
I also think Rose of Versailles lends itself to fanfic better than some other stories because, well, Rose of Versailles *is* fanfiction … based on real historical figures and events.
Eroica fanfic also sounds good, though for different reasons. It’s episodic and campy, so it’s a good match for silly fanfic. Where could I find this highly-praised Eroica fanfic?
Eroicafans.org hosts a bunch of fiction archives and links to zine-type sites and archives, as well as a message board where there’s a couple years of people posting and commenting on fanfic. It’s not a big group of fans, but they all seem to have been around awhile (I think Eroica is probably one of the first fan-translated manga, apparently copies were circulating in the early 90s), and there’s quite a bit of fiction there.
Bizarrely, Yasuko Aoike has written several spinoff series, and they were mostly serious. There’s a series called “Z” which sounds like it’s mostly about that agent going on James Bond-type adventures, and a one-shot military themed volume featuring Klaus. Z is the only one of the spinoffs that’s very long, but it’s hard for me to imagine that fans of the series were clamoring for serious spy and espionage stories starring the characters. It’s a weird way to supplement the series. I haven’t actually seen either of these save for a few pages of Z.
There’s also two series that act as prequels starring Dorian and Klaus’s ancestors (the one featured in the Major’s detested portrait and the pirate that Dorian mentions at one point). They are also very serious, but they have the benefit of being swashbuckling sea stories. Again, they act as sort of weird complements to the series and I’m not sure why it’s all so serious. Some of the characters also appear in a series she drew called Sons of Eve, which is a mostly silly boy band series and the only one of the bunch that is as campy as Eroica, though it is much less refined and seems more slapstick than Eroica.