Skip Beat 3
Posted: December 30, 2007 Filed under: Skip Beat 6 Comments »The battle with the stuck-up starlet ends with yet another display of how awesome Kyoko is. She demonstrates her skill at the tea ceremony along with her ability to control herself and, well, never stop smiling in front of the customers. She also gains a new goal in her quest to defeat Ren. Ren is an excellent actor, and he totally led her performance when he read his lines, so now she’s out to make him melt when she reads her lines.
The end of that story leads into the next one, where the head of LME asks Kyoko to help his granddaughter, who seems to be selfish and annoying. We’ve met the granddaughter already, and Kyoko and she quickly bond since the little girl seems to have an evil streak and love for cursing people equal to Kyoko’s. The point of the Love Me exercise is to save the granddaughter from this life of evil though. The little girl hates people because she feels adults talk down to her and only tell her what she wants to hear. Mostly she’s upset, though, because she thinks her dad stays away from her because he blames her for her mother’s death. There’s deep stuff, and Kyoko pulls an evil performance out to save the day.
Man, Kyoko’s totally not a spineless, crybaby shoujo heroine. She’s working very hard to get what she wants in life. I love her very much.
I must say I interrupted reading this volume in favor of The Young Magician series that I couldn’t put off for 8 volumes… anyway, I don’t think this series is for me. I don’t like the main heroine much and I also don’t like showbiz so even if this manga is funny and quite interesting, I don’t think I will continue buying it.. I must be also careful about my manga purchases these days as the dollar is going strong…
How is The Young Magician? It sounds okay, but I haven’t really heard much about it. It must be good if you read the eight volumes together.
I’m sorry to hear that Skip Beat isn’t to your liking. If you don’t like it after three volumes, I can’t really think of anything that it does differently later, so it’s probably good that you quit before you’ve spent any more money. I am sorry you never got to the good Ren parts, though.
Hmm, I really wonder if I marathon The Young Magician because I like it so much or because I’m afraid of forgetting what the story is about (so I must read the following volume immediately). It’s a weird manga, that’s for sure, Yuri Narushima’s style is dreamy, very slow narrating (quite similar to her other manga – Planet Ladder), backgrounds simplistic and faces quite similar to each other. You must read some passages more times to understand what’s going on. But the result is, surprisingly, that I really like it. It’s something else than your average manga, there are some interesting ideas about people and about magic and the story is quite deep. I would recommend this series but I know some people hate it and some people love it. It really depends on an individual case. But it’s deffinitely an underrated series. It’s much better than Planet Ladder, that is more popular because it was done by Tokyopop.
See, I would have been more inclined to pick up Planet Ladder, I’ve heard a bit more about that one. You’ve described a few things that normally put me off (having to re-read sections of story to figure out what’s going on is the main thing), but I also kind of like getting into series like this with complex plots and systems and all that. I’ll keep it in mind, I’ll have to pick up a bunch of volumes next time I see it on sale.
I’d deffinitely recommend The Young Magician over Planet Ladder. It’s more mature, more interesting, more everything..
Okay, The Young Magician just moved up on my list in place of Planet Ladder.
By the way, have you ever tried a series called “Red River?” I’ve been thinking about starting it, it seems to be a shoujo series about a girl that is somehow pulled into an ancient middle eastern kingdom (like Mesopotamia or Babylon or something) and gets caught up in the politics and drama there. I heard a few really good things about it when it first started a few years ago, but it’s getting ready to finish up, and I really haven’t seen anyone talk about it in a long time.