Wild Act 2

Rie Takada – Tokyopop – 2003 – 10 volumes

I finally got the rest of this, so I’m going to go ahead and start reading it.  As of volume two, I couldn’t be more pleased with the direction the series is taking.

The plot itself isn’t really the draw.  It’s not bad, and I like the quirkiness of the Yuniko, who is a thief stealing the possessions of her favorite deceased actor and slowly falling for the token bishounen, himself a very popular actor.  In this volume, she struggles with family things, like having to deal with her mother’s hospitalization and coming to terms with a shocking surprise about her father that is not at all shocking to the attentive reader.  With the plot alone, it’s a decent series.

It’s the sense of humor (helped immensely by the translation, I think) and the characters themselves that pull the series into fantastic shoujo territory.  While they are a pretty stereotypical couple, Yuniko and Ryu stand out because of the banter they pass back and forth.  They flirt with each other humorously, and not with overt gags where one overreacts or gets too shy like a normal shoujo series.  A lot of the flirting is loaded with sexual innuendo, and they and the other characters in the series talk and joke about sex frequently.  It’s not terribly naughty, and they don’t talk about actually having sex more than once, really, but a lot of the jokes just use sort of childish innuendo that you just don’t see in a series like this.  Sex is treated like the bubonic plague in these series, except here there is very nearly a sex scene about a quarter of the way into volume two.  Of course it is stopped, and Very Important Issues are worked out first, but the fact that this cheerful mood between Yuniko and Ryo and pretty much every other incidental character in the series is reflected in this healthy (and not terribly out-of-place) joking make the characters a notch or two more natural than what you would normally find, which is pretty incredible considering one is a talented thief and the other a hot celebrity.  It takes a lot to humanize characters like that.

Yuniko and Ryu also act like real people.  They have their tiffs, mostly surrounding the fact that Ryu thinks he’s just a substitute for the dead actor Yuniko likes, but misunderstandings are dealt with and forgiven, and you can’t help but smile when something happens like Ryu showing up at just the right moment and hiding himself from the cops by pretending that he and Yuniko are smooching country lovers.  There’s lots of cool stuff like that, and it’s even better that something like that can happen without Yuniko smacking Ryu upside the head and yelling at him.  In fact, they get a cute, real kiss immediately after that scene is over.

It’s just incredible how much of a breath of fresh air Wild Act is.  I can’t wait to keep reading, though again, I’m not really looking forward to this whole Yuniko’s dad business.  Oh well.