Jyu-Oh-Sei 1

I usually don’t go for sci-fi, but I felt like I should probably support this series.  It’s hard for me to pass up shoujo series for an older audience like this (or, at least, it seems like it’s for an older audience, the subject matter is a bit more mature, though the main characters are 12 or something).  I was a little surprised when I learned the history of this series.  Apparently it’s five volumes, with the complete edition that’s being published by Tokyopop clocking in at three volumes.  The gap between volume 1 and volume 5 was… ten years?  I was a bit taken aback by the retro art in the first volume of this.  I assumed it was a contemporary series because of the anime a few years back.

I was pleasantly surprised by the plot, too.  As I said, I tend to hate sci-fi, but this one drops a pair of twins off on a death planet after a political opponent murders their parents.  The planet is biologically set up to kill anyone on it, with 180 days of daylight with blistering hot temperatures, 180 days of winter with subzero temperatures, man-eating vegetation, and a population of cutthroat convicts.  Among the convicts and the native residents, there is an interesting society on the planet that the main character, Thor, sort of taps into in his attempt to escape the planet and figure out his parent’s death.  He’s got a long way to go ahead of him, but a lot of the connections he makes in this volume are pretty interesting.

The politics on Kimaera are probably the biggest attraction for me so far.  The races are broken down into separate “rings,” or cities on the planet, and from there, a select few get to winter in each ring’s fort.  There’s a society of children that are offspring of the convicts that raise themselves in the deadly jungle, there’s separate rings for the few women, there’s lots of etiquette about the tops of the rings and what to do and not to do around women and authority figures.  As tedious as some of this sounds, the series goes into a fascinating amount of detail.

The only thing I actually didn’t like about it was the whiny kid factor when Rai and Thor were together at the beginning of the book.  Rai couldn’t take care of himself and complained a lot.  This sort of set things up for Thor’s change of heart about Rai, and Rai’s departure, so it was necessary whining.

This volume was mostly exposition, but I’m already looking forward to the next, where Thor will likely continue to climb the ranks on the planet, we’ll get to see winter, more information will be revealed about what Kimaera is actually used for (there is a prison planet, so a death sentence planet like this one doesn’t make much sense), we’ll get to see the intentions of a few dark horse characters, and I’m sure Rai will put in a surprise visit as well.  It’s an extremely well-constructed story, and I’m looking forward to where it goes in five volumes.