Sand Chronicles 4
Posted: December 10, 2008 Filed under: Sand Chronicles 3 Comments »Oh dear. I was kind of rooting for something all along, and it looks like I got my wish this volume. I don’t much like it, though, since it seems to be stirring things up quite a bit. I should just learn to wish for happiness for characters instead of change.
Anyway, both chapters this time are mostly just about Daigo and Ann, as opposed to… well, their families, or Fuji’s family, or anything like that. Fuji’s still AWOL through winter break, so Ann and Daigo do some major bonding to make up for it. Ann is still rather affected by the death of her mother four years ago, and… well, Daigo just can’t comfort her. The first chapter is one that starts off quite well but doesn’t end that way at all.
The second chapter is about Ann struggling by herself back in the city. This broke my heart far more than I thought it would, mostly because of Daigo. Daigo and Ann have the type of problems where you just want to yell out the right things to say to them in order to fix things, because the two always seem to come up short in that area. Other things happen with Ann too, as well as Daigo, and again… I know I wished for it, but now I’m not sure if I want it.
Oh well. Now that I’ve got my wish, I’ll just have to see where it goes. I have a hard time being able to tell where things are going in this series too, just because the characters stir up most of the drama themselves over the silliest misunderstandings. The fact that I like it despite this speaks volumes, since it means that the characters come across as really genuine. But I wonder if Ann will stick with her country town for the entire series, or if perhaps life will take her elsewhere. It is a fun prospect to see her whole life ahead of her like this.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
[...] to be reviewed on their site. Lissa Pattillo reviews Sighing Kiss at Kuriousity. Connie checks out vol. 4 of Sand Chronicles and Heaven’s Will at Slightly Biased Manga. Isaac Hale takes the long view in his review of [...]
“the characters stir up most of the drama themselves over the silliest misunderstandings”
I don’t think they stir up all the drama themselves… I mean, there’s some legitimate reasons. And even then, don’t we make the biggest fusses ourselves?
But I agree with you. The action and characters are really genuine.
Oh, I didn’t really mean it as a negative. I don’t mind that they stir the pot. What you say is true too, a lot of conflict comes from friends fighting amongst themselves in real life, too.
And yeah, there are some good reasons for the emotional outbursts between the problems with Fuji’s parents and the suicide of Ann’s mom (I didn’t really mean to be insensitive about those things). I was thinking of Fuji’s sister stirring up things between Ann and Daigo, or Fuji’s leaving, or Ann shooting her mouth off to Daigo and then not fixing it for months. I always want to step into the story and fix things like that, I guess, just because the solutions seem really obvious. But watching the characters fail at fixing it themselves is a good way to show their weaknesses and give them depth, too.