Stray Little Devil 5

I’m not sure if I ever mentioned this… but I feel like I’ve got to get it off my chest.  This is a shounen series, specifically a shounen series with comedy elements, and you can expect a certain degree of fanservice in such a series.  There’s a lot of fanservice in general in this series, since Pam and her friends always wear skin-tight hot pants and crop tops or less around.  But they look like they’re about 12.  It put me off.  One of Pam’s friends in particular usually wears just enough of a shirt to barely cover her breasts.  Fortunately, she doesn’t have any breasts to show off, but it’s still really creepy.   It’s more creepy when, for instance, a character that looks like an old man pulls on the tight hot pants and makes a comment about how they’re not very sexy.  This makes me feel bad.  There’s a lot of fanservice in every volume, but it seemed like there was an overload in this volume.  My conscience was screaming the entire time I was reading it.

Anyway.  How’s the story?  Things wrap up a bit messily, unfortunately.  It seems like every character has to be involved with the end somehow.  I think we would have been much better off with just Pam, Liz, Zu, and Linfa, but everyone makes an appearance.  Lots of things are explained, including the stone that Pam wears, why she was a human called into the Demon world, why Linfa looks like Rinka, and what exactly was going on most of the time.  The battle scenes aren’t too swift, and there’s just… a lot of clutter, but as I’ve said before with this series… the plot is decent enough, and I like the idea behind what’s happening enough to forgive it a lot of stuff.  I think a lot of what happened in this volume could probably have been condensed down, though.

Mori mentioned in the back that there was a lot of stuff he wished he could have incorporated, like Liz’s past and some information about Fallen Angels.  It’s stuff like that that I thought the series did well, and I would have liked to have seen a bit more background about that kind of thing… but it just took some things way over the top.  Mostly the characters, the comedy, and Pam’s good girl attitude.  But the angel/demon stuff was all pretty good for as stale as that sort of plot has the potential to be.

I’m sad there wasn’t more of an epilogue, but I also really liked the wordless approach the author took.  It took me two reads to understand everything that was happening, but I did like it.

It’s a fun series, and like I said, I like the basic plot well enough, but it’s got a lot of problems.  It’s middle-of-the-road in the same way that Princess Princess is, but it’s got a better story backing it up, and it’s probably a lot more fun than Princess Princess is.  I’m glad I read it, but there’s better stuff out there.