Enchanter 8

Now… this is one of those cheesecake shounen series with magic.  The cheese factor in this one isn’t nearly as high as in, say, Pastel, but this is slightly more shameless.  Possibly because Eukanaria, the one at the center of most of the fanservice, doesn’t really care one way or another what you think of her.  And that’s fine.  As long as she doesn’t change behind the front door of the house, then beat up Haruhiko for “peeking” when he happens to walk in.

Actually, this series takes a step in the other direction.  Haruhiko wakes up with Eukanaria in his bed, and rather than her getting mad and beating him up, Haruhiko points out that, if their genders were reversed, it would have been a crime.  It was a proud moment in manga.

I still feel like there’s something missing from this series whenever the inventions/demon magic stuff isn’t talked about.  That hasn’t been the focus of the series for quite some time, which is a shame, because I liked that Haruhiko was good at building demon weapons.  Plus, there was a real variety in the types of inventions.  There’s a lot of potential there, but… that’s just not what the series is about.

The Mercurio storyline continues, and she begins to have problems concealing her split personality from Haruhiko.  It turns out that the balance in her body is similar to the problem that Haruhiko would face in letting Fulcanelli inhabit his body, so some questions are raised towards the end about who should get to keep a body in the case of two souls inhabiting it.

The other conflict in this volume is about the invention that Haruhiko is trying to make in order to communicate with Fulcanelli inside his demon stone.  Complications arise, and Haruhiko takes a lot of time to consider how Eukanaria will feel about what’s going on.  The amount of attention paid to Eukanaria’s actual feelings (rather than just the over-the-top jokes about her having sex with Haruhiko) was almost touching.  It’s been a long time since Eukanaria has been treated like a real person with feelings, and it’s interesting to see her taken seriously.

There are actually a handful of funny moments in here, which was unexpected since this type of humor (vague sex and gender jokes, over-the-top misunderstandings, occasional physical gags) isn’t my thing.

This isn’t a really great series, but it’s got a lot of interesting stuff going on, and the humor and character relationships aren’t so far over-the-top to make it an annoying read.  I always think of Sorcerer Hunters when I read it, even though Sorcerer Hunters had a lot more to do with magic and this is more about high school romance (of a sort, I guess a lot of the characters are demons, but still).  I’ve got a couple more volumes of it here, but I’m pretty sure my opinion of it really isn’t going to change reading the volumes back-to-back.  It’s been maintaining status quo for the past several volumes.