Hayate X Blade 4

Shizuru Hayashiya – Seven Seas – 11+ volumes

This series is totally not my style, and yet I like it anyway.  Why is that?  Maybe it’s Jun, who’s awesome and is an anomaly as a side character that wins popularity polls by landslides (but yes, she really is that awesome).  Maybe it’s Wanko, or Ayana, or Hayate, or any number of the other insane characters.  Well, yes, that’s what it is.  There’s borderline too many of them right now, but they’re so easy to like, and… the stupid jokes are just so funny, that it’s easy to overlook a lot of things I normally dislike.

Mainly it’s the sense of humor.  It’s pretty over-the-top and chock full of the kind of obvious jokes that I hate, but somehow the jokes go so far over-the-top that they reach back around to the bottom and are funny again.  Everything from Jun’s lecherous comments to Hayate’s often dim-witted observations and Ayane’s surly moods is just great.

Again, the number of characters is beginning to become a little hard to follow, and I was completely lost after a few more side characters got wrapped up in the main story.  I know that the side characters are repeating themselves, and I really should know characters like Hayate’s roommate by now (who is forgettable because she is probably the most normal), so it’s not as bad as I make it out to be.  The most difficult part is tracking what appears to be the approaching ongoing plot of the series, involving a lot of the S-rank girls.  Other than the school leader and her sister-in-arms, I can’t remember any of those girls, so their scheming and whatnot means very little to me despite the fact that it’s clearly important.  I’m sure it’ll all come together later, though.  The good thing is that the plot is never really over-complicated, so leaving the series for awhile doesn’t mean I’ll have problems picking it back up later.

This volume finishes up the story about Jun and her partner, and then moves on to a sub-story about Hayate trying to improve herself, and most of the rest of the volume is a story about Wanko and her sister-in-arms, Hayate’s roommate, working through some partner issues.  A girl with supernatural powers wants to pair with Wanko and uses the fact that Wanko and her partner don’t know much about each other to split the pair up.  As I said, Hayate’s roommate is the most normal and thus leaves the least impression, but Wanko more than makes up for that.  I love the lengthy description of exactly how terrible Wanko’s powers were that came at the end of the volume (and that Wanko took as a compliment), and I also love the fact that Wanko still speaks in the special creepy font, even though her appearance is now much cuter.  And there’s a bonus Jun side story at the end, but it was a little less silly than what I was hoping for.

I’ve got one more volume here with me, so I think I’ll go right into it, the better to follow all the characters and whatnot.  I do hope that the issue of Hayate’s twin will be addressed soon, that’s really the thing I’m most interested in.  Other than Jun.  And Ayana and Hayate getting married, of course.