Slightly Biased Manga

I’m sorry friends, I just can’t do this one. I thought that maybe after introducing Angelosis and explaining that this was hidden from the general public so that the people who suffered from the disease weren’t ostracized and exploited, volume two would move onto other things. I was pretty sick of having nothing but the pure struggle for Angelosis acceptance beaten into my head again and again last volume, but it goes on for another half of a volume here.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that what it’s trying to do is a bad thing. As I said, I think approaching the “outcasts” element as people with wings is really strange and random, and there are better devices to use if you want to tell a serious story like this one. Angelosis can be a stand-in for a lot of other things (racism, classism, political divisions, etc), but I think something more serious-minded would have worked better. I guess there’s just something appealing about wings, though. The overall anti-discrimination message is a good one, but I feel like nothing else happens story-wise until a love interest is introduced halfway through this volume.

That nothing happens story-wise isn’t entirely true. The main character works his way into the government branch meant to deal with Angelosis, and he becomes a superstar and we see what the department involved with Angelosis is supposed to do. Even though the general public didn’t know about Angelosis until the main character’s outburst, there’s still a lot of people with the disease in other countries being sold and traded like slaves, and there’s some stories about how some of the characters were basically artificially created in labs, how others were raised in an isolated government environment, and how yet others survived being maimed by their parents. But all of it beats into your head again and again that People With Angelosis Are No Different Than You Or I But Their Lives Are Very Hard. Like I said, it would be easier to take if what the discrimination was based around was a real-life problem. I’m not sure why my mind won’t make the jump from Angelosis to, say, racism, but it just won’t.

I think what this series lacks is a character who is actually out in public and has to deal with Angelosis among real people. The main character becomes a spokesperson and a celebrity, lives in an isolated environment, and basically only appears in public at functions, interviews, and situations where he is otherwise making a spectacle of himself. All the other characters we meet have lived similar isolated existences, and while we hear a lot about how things would go poorly if people with Angelosis lived among regular close-minded people… other than the mentions of the slave trade in other countries, there is no actual evidence of this in the present day in whatever country this is supposed to be taking place in (presumably Japan). I mean, yeah, it’s likely, but I just want to see someone with Angelosis who has to hold down a regular job every day. I think that may make for a more interesting story in a lot of ways than the crusade that seems to be going on here.

The love interest is introduced, the girl with black wings, and of course she and her people also live in isolation. There’s something extremely artificial about the romantic relationship, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. The two come together after a pair of traders try to capture the main character at an event and nearly kill him, which is the only part that makes me wonder about the people out in the everyday world.

I’m honestly just kind of embarrassed to be reading this series. I had to hide it so that my roommate wouldn’t find it. Not only would he never let me forget the really horrible coloring on the cover, if he opened it and found out what was inside, I’m pretty sure he would never speak to me again. I would almost rather my mom found my volumes of Silky Whip than find and read Flock of Angels. Don’t get me wrong, I’m horrible about dropping series I hate, so I’ll probably keep reading it. The book ends with the plot finally moving (the main character may not be able to escape where he’s being held by the girl with black wings), so maybe once it gets going the story will get better. Maybe it just took an unusually long time to set things up.