Papillon 3
Posted: December 31, 2009 Filed under: Papillon Leave a comment »Miwa Ueda – Del Rey – 2009 – 7+ volumes
I want to like Papillon. I love Miwa Ueda. But Papillon makes itself very hard to like. Ueda mentions the difficulty in writing it is that she’s trying to convey the problems and misconceptions of high school life along with healthy ways to solve them (hence the counselor character), and I do like that. The problem is that the counselor consents to dating Ageha, which isn’t realistic, and the misconceptions aren’t terribly realistic, either. Ageha freaks out over every little thing, and seeing her bounce around emotional highs and lows and mistrust absolutely everything that Kyu tells her is draining. I liked the positive messages in the first volume, but I liked it far less when I saw Ageha going for the obvious bait of Kyu, and I like it even less now that they are dating.
The evil that is her twin sister Hana is difficult to identify with, too. It’s obvious that Hana, for whatever reason, is obsessed with bringing her sister low, and will do everything in her power to ruin her life (or love life, at least). Convenient that they are identical twins, then, huh? I hated the confrontation between the two where Hana admits she hates Ageha, then spouts off a silly shoujo manga reason and runs off. Bah.
Ueda does try to offer good advice, and again, I respect the series a little for that. But it’s hard to take such advice seriously when everything about the plot and characters is so over-the-top. I’m going to keep reading though, because there’s still something very addictive about it. It’s not nearly as good as Peach Girl, or even most mildly addictive shoujo series, but I still kind of like reading it. A guilty pleasure, I suppose.
