Loveless 7

Holy crap! I was going to make a joke at the beginning of the Futari H review about how I didn’t have any volumes of Loveless to read (since Tokyopop is featuring that heavily on their site today in addition to the Futari H giveaway), but I found the newest volume sitting at the bottom of my stack of manga to add to this site. It’s been a few weeks since I read it, but I desperately need something to push the Futari H review off the top of the page, so Loveless it is.

I’m more and more impressed with every volume of this series I read. Mostly this is because the story becomes clearer and things continue to build and be uncovered. The most memorable thing in this volume is that Soubi and Ritsuka break into a school for fighter pairs just in time for a battle royale amongst all the students. Seimei is around and stirring up trouble, but… well, there’s a lot left open at the end of the volume.

One of the more important factoids revealed is that the two fighters in a pair are joined by a string that both can sense. Soubi has this string, and Ritsuka has this string. Obviously both are meant to be fighters, but it doesn’t really say whether or not their strings meet in the middle, you know?

Part of me hates being so drawn into this series. While it seems okay that Seimei wants to test Ritsuka’s brotherly love for him (sort of okay anyway, Seimei seems more than a little deranged at this point), I still absolutely squirm when anything short of admiration is implied between Ritsuka and Soubi. Brr.

Where does that leave things at the end of this volume? Well, we still aren’t entirely sure what Septimal Moon is and how they figure into “Seimei’s Death.” We’re also not sure what the hell Seimei is up to. The fact that I understand what else needs to be revealed in order for things to make sense is a big step up for the narrative in Loveless. While there’s a lot of symbolic stuff floating around in the other volumes, it was frustratingly vague on what was up. The fact Ritsuka seems to have accepted his position as a fighter and wants to find out about Septimal Moon and his brother has done wonders for things as well.

In fact, I want to read volume 8 now. I do like the fighter system in this series, and I want to find out more about it, including whether or not Ritsuka and Soubi are a pair, and if not, who is supposed to be Loveless’s unit.

Also, one thing I forgot to mention is that we find out that Seimei may be a lot more cruel than Ritsuka thinks (which we could probably guess based on the weirdness surrounding the past couple volumes).  Soubi said he didn’t mind, but he reveals some pretty intense… they were either scars or tattoos, I couldn’t tell, but it was kind of a good cruel/kind thing.