Princess Princess 5

This volume was almost entirely student council elections, with a lot of intense bickering between the new character and the two main characters, with Akira thrown into the middle of things.  There was also a bit of plot where Yuujirou wasn’t sure whether or not he had cleared the hurdle with his family, and he took the other main character home with him for moral support.  This wasn’t actually all that… good at all, really.  It was okay, and it had all the elements of being a touching family scene, but it just didn’t come off as very sincere.

There was also a farewell bit for all three of the Princesses after the student council elections, and we get one last performance along with some flashback and memories from past volumes to wrap up their year as princesses at this school.

As I said… while there’s technically nothing wrong with this series, and some parts are enjoyable, it was just powerfully mediocre, and I wound up not liking it too much. The best evidence of this is probably the fact that the farewell/flashback didn’t really do anything for me, nor did the “emotional” family scene.  I did like when the princesses were saying private thanks to one another… maybe the farewell/flashback was marred by obnoxious characters, among them the costume designer, former student council president, and the new character from last volume.  There was a part where the princesses were wearing wedding gowns as their final costume that I thought was kind of a fitting way to end.  That was also okay.  But… yeah.   These good things are a matter of 2-3 pages each, and the book was, you know, around 200 pages long.

It has a lot of different genres going for it, and it works pretty evenly across all of them, but I suppose it does comedy best.  The jokes aren’t really that funny, but light comedy series like this one also aren’t really my thing, so maybe it’s better than I thought.  It has some moments of light drama, and it flirts with being a BL series (it’s extremely easy to slash the two main characters if you want), but the comedy is probably its strongest quality.

It is much, MUCH better than Day of Revolution though, and I can see how Princess Princess might appeal to some people.  I’ll probably wind up reading the one-volume Family Complex when it comes out in English soon.  I suspect the quality will be somewhere between this and Day of Revolution, but eh.  It’s only one volume, and I think it will inform at least one of the characters in this series.