Crown of Love 3

Yun Koga – Viz – 2010 – 4 volumes

Reading this and Gestalt together is really strange, because the two couldn’t be more different. Gestalt has very bold characters, touches of comedy, is a fantasy series, and can be very unsubtle about some things. Crown of Love is a romance with a totally subtle, subdued flavor I have yet to run across in any other shoujo manga.

I think the thing I love most about it is that it is full-bore romance without being either too comedic or too melodramatic. It simply is. The characters deal with the situations in a very straightforward way, and it’s also the only romance manga where rejection is so eloquent. Rima’s persistence in completely shooting Hisayoshi down and stepping all over his feelings in the plainest, most non-melodramatic way possible is compelling.

It is a little long-winded. This volume involves a lot of characters simply talking about the nature of love and relationships. Hisayoshi’s relationship with his parents deteriorates further at the beginning of this volume, and the characters discuss the nature of the parent-child relationship as we see not only Hisayoshi make up with his father, but Rima make up with her mother as well.

Rima is a very lonely girl, something else that’s emphasized here, and her rejection of Hisayoshi’s affections becomes increasingly ridiculous as it becomes clear that she’s extremely lonely and has no friends. That’s not to say she should jump on whoever offers to be her boyfriend first, but at this point Hisayoshi seems to have more than proven himself. Of course, there are the stalker issues, since he also follows her around a lot, but he is the most non-creepy stalker I’ve ever seen.

The reflections on love do begin to get ridiculous, and it’s silly when a high school student launches into yet another long-winded explanation on their feelings, but on the other hand, everything they say rings true, and it brings depth to what would otherwise be a very vanilla story. I like the vanilla flavor in this case, though, and I think it’s… well beautiful, both in story and execution. There’s nothing I can pinpoint that it excels at other than mood, but it does that very, very well. And it’s so much less creepy than Loveless.

I just can’t believe Loveless, Gestalt, and Crown of Love were all drawn by the same person. Part of me wants to pick up Earthian just to see how weird and divergent that is from the others.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.