I Hate You More Than Anyone 1
Posted: August 27, 2008 Filed under: I Hate You More Than Anyone 8 Comments »I had been really wanting to try this for awhile, but I began to get a bit weary when I sort of heard people talk about it more. Warning bells flashed in my head when the first page made no sense and much of the first chapter was lost on me in the same choppy, hyperactive, random-stuff way that much of Go Go Heaven gets lost on me. But once I got past the first part, I really, really started enjoying it, even though it does have one of my taboos, the older-younger relationship.
I really liked the fact that the heroine had a large family that she had different relationships with. Her parents are not shown (her mother is shown for a few panels at the end, I guess), but she has five or six siblings and different relationships with all of them, like some she likes to humor, some she thinks are cute, some she gets razzed by, and a sister she sorta doesn’t get along with but they help each other out anyway. She also has a friend and an enemy at school, and I really liked the structure this gave things. Instead of soloquizing by herself or having constant shy run-ins with the love interest, her problems are talked out with her supporting characters. I also like the fact that they seem like the types that will remain faceless, so I won’t be put in a situation where I’ll need to keep tabs on all her siblings.
I was kind of surprised by how quickly the heroine’s interest shifted from one guy to the other. I figured she would have her eye on her crush for awhile, or at least long enough to build up more of a love-hate relationship between her and the hairdresser. While she does hate him quite strenuously, a lot of that seems to have given away to more-or-less major annoyance by the end of the volume.
I was surprised by how sincere the relationships seem already, too. There are a number of really touching scenes, which surprised me because I don’t really like the main character or the love interest that well yet. To be honest, neither of them seem like characters I’m going to sympathize with, but then again, I hated both the characters in the main couple in Paradise Kiss, and I still cry like a baby every time I read the end of that series. I guess me liking or not liking the characters has no bearing about how touching the romance is, but it does give me high hopes for its potential as the characters are developed further.
I’m not sure which I prefer at this point, this or V.B. Rose. I like the plot of V.B. Rose better, but this one has all the romance so far. Both are good though, and I’m kind of sad I’ve been missing out on Banri Hidaka all this time.
In the interest of full disclosure, this was a review copy provided by CMX. It totally made my day yesterday, too, when I got back from my vacation.
I guess you liked this a whole lot more than I did! Maybe I’ll give another Hidaka seres a try, for whatever reason I Hate You More Than Anyone just didn’t do it for me.
i think the main character chick is one of the ugliest “cute” characters i’ve ever seen. but she grows on you.
Tears of a Lamb had a slow start, too. In one of her authorial columns, Hidaka said that she had a certain part of the story she was anxious to get to, but hadn’t put as much thought into how the beginning was going to go. Maybe that happened with this series, as well.
ame – Yeah, I agree 100% with you. For me, I’m sort of hair-centric, so I was horrified when so much was made of her cutting her hair so short and making her look like a boy. People cutting their hair so short will never cease to disagree with me.
jun – I didn’t read the author commentary in this volume because I was so put off by the first chapter. What you say makes sense, though. It kind of blows my mind that something like this can commence when the mangaka is unsure how she wants the story to go.
[...] Protector at PopCultureShock’s Manga Recon blog. Connie goes for some light reading with vol. 1 of I Hate You More Than Anyone and vol. 15 of Iron Wok Jan at Slightly Biased Manga. Jason Van Horn reviews vol. 29 of Naruto at [...]
One interesting thing about this title is that it’s actually the 5th in a ‘series’ of manga devoted to the family seen here. The other 4, which were written earlier, were all one-volume one-shots dealing with the other siblings in their high school years, with our heroine from I Hate You More Than Anyone as an adult older sister figure. This was the last of them, and easily the biggest hit, as IHYMTA runs for 13 volumes.
The author seems to like having cameos from her other works pop in and out, as we see in VB Rose.
Yay, you liked it! Yeah, like Sean said, Kazuha was originally designed as the “older sister” of the main character(s), not necessarily intended to have her own series, which may have something to do with her non-standard-shoujo-heroine appearance (and, as the first ongoing series Hidaka wrote, may also have something to do with the uneven pace of the first chapter). I was pretty shocked by her haircut at first too, although now I look back at volume 1 and find it strange to see her with long hair. She does have a rather odd (tomboy + early 90s fashion) sense of style though…
Also, Hidaka’s sidebars and commentary are probably my favourite of almost any mangaka (in case that compels you to go back and read them…. :D)
Sean – thanks for that tidbit, that puts things a bit more in perspective. I wasn’t sure if that first page meant that there were other series tying in or if it was some sort of framing device. It bugs me when I can’t read that sort of introductory story stuff in cases like this, but it’s good to know that it was mostly just one-off stuff.
Lys – Good to know that she writes good sidebar material. I probably still won’t go back and read the stuff in the first volume, but I’ll know not to skip over it now. It’s always refreshing when a mangaka isn’t constantly talking about her assistants or where she went shopping or what bands she listens to ^_^;