Boys Be… 8
Posted: January 13, 2008 Filed under: Boys Be... Leave a comment »I realized today that I haven’t touched this series in nearly two years. New volumes have been coming out, but I totally lost interest in the stories. I’m just not the target audience.
Even after laying off for so long, the stories in this volume felt tired and repetitive. Lots of fanservice, shy guys, shy girls, misunderstandings, and every other plot device you can think of in a shounen romance manga. While I like the idea of short stories since it doesn’t run a plot into the ground, it does just give it reason to overuse other contrivances.
They can be cute though, and I did like a couple of them. There was a story about a boy and girl from the same school who run into each other at the train station, and by coincidence, each is traveling to Tokyo to look at the same university, and neither has traveled alone before. They decide to go together. It’s a pretty cute story, with a minimum of fanservice, and it doesn’t end with the two hooking up, which is always good. There was another story that gets major points for being about the girl beating up on the guy in hopes she’d pass a Women’s Professional Wrestling audition later on in the month. That one was pretty bizarre and funny.
I wish I’d liked more of them, though. There’s nothing technically wrong with any of them, and they probably weren’t nearly as repetitive as I think, because the series does do a pretty good job of coming up with different cute stories. I just can’t read them. It’s not my thing. I’ll probably read a few more volumes, just to see if maybe this one was just a weak volume, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get through 12 more volumes of this.
