Tenjho Tenge 13

Bob noooooo… he cut his hair!  Long hair screams when you do that.  It’s true.  It hurt even when Maya got her hair cut early on.  I’m kinda glad she did though, because I don’t think I could’ve dealt with both Natsume sisters having long hair like that.

Many things happened in this volume.  Many awesome things.  We get to see people being fed to Soichiro’s dragons so he can steal their power, one of them having something like deer legs, and she seems like kind of a cool character who may be sticking around.  We get to see a total bitch with the ability to control people through ki get punched in the face like she deserves, and we get to see Takayanagi being protective of his little brother, which is odd and also cool.

One of the best scenes in the series thus far, hands down, happened at the end of this volume though.  The reunion between Maya and Soichiro was so touching that I fell in love with this series all over again… and I was already pretty in love with it.

I know I mentioned something about the series being tightly plotted before… but I think starting next volume we get another flashback, way into the past, where Aya may or may not be caught.  This may have something to do with the 100-year-war people keep talking about as of this volume… and I have my doubts about this part being necessary, but maybe I’ll be totally shocked.  We’ll see, I probably will be.  I need more Maya and Soichiro moments, though.

Tenjho Tenge 12

So Masataka kicks a lot of ass in this volume, and we learn he is also the calm in the storm around him.  We get to see Masataka kicking ass with Madoka, and later, when Madoka has been freed from the power of the one who seems to be controlling F, we see another fight later.

With ZOMBIE FU CHIEN.

If you had any doubt that this series was unwilling to go to all lengths to get the best fight possible for you, here’s your proof.  Zombie Fu Chien.  This fight also includes Bunshichi, which is another character I miss.  A volume with him and Emi in it is a good one indeed.  Bunshichi is inexplicably strong for not being one of the… you know, the martial artists.

On another note, this is one of the most tightly plotted manga series I have ever read.  It seems like Oh! great has the entire thing planned out from beginning to end with no time for side stories or even for the characters to rest.  The only downtime anyone ever gets is to train.  There can be an argument made that the latter half of the story didn’t need to be conceived at the same time as the flashback that takes up most of the earlier volumes, but he introduced all the characters in the present and then went to a flashback, so there was going to be something involving them later… plus there are lots of loose threads left that it would be more than just the school tournament.  It’s awesome.  I like it this way.  It’s very intense.

Boo-hoo.  I see another cover bit the dust, even after the new rating system.  To be fair, the only thing Aya’s wearing is a bow around her neck, some sleeves (with the rest of the coat blowing behind her) and a smile, so… you know, I guess they probably couldn’t get away with that.  They did include it as one of the poster illustrations inside, so that’s nice.

Actually, I lied.  She’s not smiling.

Tenjho Tenge 11

You know what we get in the pull-out color poster at the beginning of this volume?  Maya’s nipples.  That’s right, we FINALLY get them, along with the rest of her exposed breast.  I actually like the other color images (one of Little Miss Muffet, one of Ms. Nagi and Mataza’s dad) a lot more than that one, but still… nipples.  What a shock in this series.  There were some nipples on the title page illustrations from last volume too, but I thought it wouldn’t be worth mentioning until they were in the color posters.

This is the meat of the fight between Soichiro and Mataza, and we finally get to see some more of Soichiro’s power.  We get to see a lot more of it than we have before.  There’s a really nice two-page spread where Aya reacts across several wordless panels (well, not completely wordless, but it was a sequence where it just focused on her face as she reacted in different ways while not speaking) that I thought was quite lovely.  Soichiro turns into a huge berserker after Mataza unleases his last-ditch effort, but luckily his mom turns up before he can kill anyone.  There are two violent things notable in this sequence.  One is that Soichiro punches Mataza so hard his arm is reduced to what appears to be a paper streamer blowing in the wind, and the other is that Makiko’s last arm BLOWS UP.  This is some ultraviolent shit, people.

The scene with Soichiro running through the mountains screaming while carrying his mom was probably the most touching in the volume.  There’s a scene at the hospital with Makiko and her husband which was kind of creepy… it started with him caressing her stump, and ended with her pleading, with no shirt on and no arms, for information as to why he was what he was.  She’s… just a torso now.  No arms.  The one that blew up doesn’t have a stump like the other one, so she’s not even a balanced torso.  It’s something to see her pleading, wearing only bandages and pajama pants.  I feel bad for her.

So we don’t get any Soichiro for awhile after this.  That leaves us with the rest of the Juken Club, sans Maya who goes off in search for him.  The second half of this volume was a fight between Bob and Little Miss Muffet.  Before this fight though, we get a huge panel of Soichiro blowing up as characters discuss what would have been.  It was an unnecessary and totally awesome moment of random violence.  Madoka and Bob’s fight is no slouch either, as Bob starts the festivities by announcing that he’s an expert at making the girls say “Unhh!”  There’s also another joke, I’m not sure how it translated into English so well, but it involved Bob grabbing her breast.  It was awesome.

So yes, Bob finds his special power, and it’s about time because the series hasn’t treated him as well as the other characters this far.  Apparently his is a big one, though.  Emi steps in to help him with the Madoka fight, and mentions he looks like a jackass dragging an old tire around.  I missed Emi so much.

Someone else who the series hasn’t been entirely kind to: Masataka.  He gets to kick some ass coming up too.

Tenjho Tenge 10

I let this one sit on my shelves for awhile because I STILL do not understand the whole Takayanagi family composition, nor do I have a firm grasp of what exactly all the conflict is about now.  After reading this and the following two volumes, I can see the conflict is at least caused by one man, but that is not made clear for quite some time, and I still don’t know why.  But letting three volumes of this series sit was wrong, because even if I don’t understand, it’s still awesome.

Mostly this volume is the buildup to a fight between Mataza and Soichiro.  Mataza is a member of F and a spear user, so of course his power is to use eight mechanical arms, each with a spear in it.  A little ridiculous, but he still manages to be a badass.  Not as much a badass as his father though, who shows up in briefs and wastes Aya’s sword with just a spear.

There’s a really awesome two-page spread where Mataza just DISINTEGRATES some main characters.  Guts and everything.  It was awesome.  Also awesome: Enmi.  She doesn’t play too big a role, but I liked her a lot anyway.  There were hints that she was the recipient of some really sloppy sex too, which kind of shocked me.  I hope she comes back sometime soon.

This volume just… seemed a lot more violent than some of the others.  The guts everywhere, there was a flashback to when Soichiro’s mother lost her arm, Mataza’s father poked his own eye out, Mataza’s brother got his foot sliced to ribbons in the grosest way possible, and Mataza got peed on, which was the worst.  I’m sorry, Mataza.  He’s still a pretty big dick, though.

Actually, there’s a lot of people in this story that only have one eye.  It’s kind of weird.

Tenjho Tenge 9

I read a TON of manga over the past couple days. In addition to Eyeshield 21 8 and Hikaru no Go 6 and 7, I also have Jojo 4, Sugar Sugar Rune 3, Ranma 1/2 33, 34, 35, and Tokyo Boys and Girls 4 and 5.

On one hand, I’m kinda glad that the introduction to so many of the Takayanagi heads of family followed the crap that got thrown at us about the family in the last volume. I’m still not entirely sure how the 36 houses work, which ones are magic, and which ones are still loyal to the current head of the Takayanagi family. But maybe that’s just me, maybe I should reread those parts.

The one thing I didn’t like was the introduction to the new squadron of the Student Government that seems to like murder. There was nothing redeeming about those characters, and it looks like they’re here to stay. I was especially mad after the Masked Rider encounter that the one kid had with Nagi.

I liked Nagi’s evolution, and I liked his new fighting techniques despite the fact it seems like he’s doing little more than going Super Saiyan.

Also, there was very little Maya in this volume. Unforgivable! To be serious was a little less enjoyable than previous volumes, and I really hope it doesn’t start the series down a new direction. A Bleach direction.

Tenjho Tenge 8

I decided to deprive myself of the newest volume until I finished the review for this one. Mmm… I need it.

This volume has my favorite cover so far. Maya and Emi are my favorites, and that’s a good picture of Emi.

It’s beginning to break up for me a bit, though. I’m not going to be able to follow this families crap that they’re starting to pile on, which I may have mentioned in the last volume review.

I’m kinda glad the flashbacks finally ended here. I’m a bit sad it revealed absolutely nothing about Mitsuomi’s motives, though. Maybe it was something deep and symbolic that flew straight over my head. My apologies, I’m in it for the boobies.

Speaking of, the fight between Maya and Aya was AWESOME. I loved the challenge, I loved the execution, I loved the implications, I loved absolutely everything about it. I was a bit sad that it resolved the way that it did, but that’s just fine, because it was the best fight in this series so far.

As for the ending… I’m not sure that I can handle where this is going with the dragons and transformations and stuff. Though I do like Soichiro’s Mom.

I’m reading volume 9 tonight!

Tenjho Tenge 7

We’re missing a poster of Emi and her bare bottom this time around, which makes me sad. Emi and Maya are my favorite good-looking girls in this series.

So we get an end to the flashback which has literally been most of the series at this point… or at least it mostly wraps up here (I read this and 8 back-to-back, so I’m going to have trouble remembering distinctions between each). I really, REALLY like this series. Despite it being censored, I like this manga so much that I dropped over a hundred dollars for the entirety of the anime after reading two volumes back-to-back. I know that fucking anime’s just going to be what I’ve already got here, and I know the ending’s probably going to suck, but I gotta have my TenTen fix.

So, after hearing all this stuff, I don’t know whether to love or hate Shin, or whether to love or hate Mitsuomi. I think I like them both, but think they’re both ultra creepy. The way Shin finally died (which isn’t a spoiler if you’ve gotten farther than the first volume) was appropriately tragic, and the relationship between he and Maya leading up to his death was so sad.

The stuff with the Mitsuomi family was very interesting and good to know, though something tells me that the technicalities of how that family operates are going to go way over my head very fast. This business made me hate Mitsuomi a little more, particularly since I can’t understand why he’d… make Masataka perform the short role that he did. I did like how that scene came out of nowhere and went in a direction I completely did not expect, though.

Tenjho Tenge 6

I still think the editing’s getting better, not that there was much to edit here. But we did get lots of panties, and we even got to see some nipples through Maya’s shirt. And ooh! Color pages!

The entire plotline of this series makes me wonder in the same way that Hellsing does whether or not the mangaka had a clear direction in mind for the plot. Both series are some of my favorites, but I have trouble believing all the plot stuff was thought of in advance. With this series, this flashback has been going on so long, and uninterrupted in this volume, it’s like he forgot about the plot he started earlier. The flashback is extrordinarily good though, and if it redeems a clear direction once its done, all the better. I like Shin a lot though, it’ll be really sad when he inevitably dies.

At the moment, one of the main problems I have with it is that it also mires itself in these metaphors that may or may not mean what they think they mean. The moth analogy was the worst offender, as it kept coming up throughout the volume in vague ways that I often couldn’t grasp. It was appropriate in a lot of parts, but when brought up elsewhere, sometimes it didn’t quite make sense to me. I love the character relationships though, and I do wonder about that one kid that Maya randomly drug into the Juken club. The all-school battle to decide the Student Council president got underway near the end, and I cannot wait for that shit to play out next volume. Plus all the characters got a lot stronger. If the flashback’s done anything for me, it’s made me like the elder Takayanagi a lot more. I just wonder why he was shown in such an unfavorable light in the first story… or I wonder how events played out so that the Student Council got as lousy as it did in the first story.

Tenjho Tenge 5

Yay! More censoring! One side of the color poster got taken away! Abbreviated sex scenes! But I maintain that we get a little more each time, so I’ll stand by that and say that, by volume 13, we WILL get our pubic hair. Or not.

But we finally got some awesome backstory. It doesn’t explain the “Mitsuomi’s actually dead” thing quite yet, but we do hear a lot about Shin and what a fucking nutcase he is. Maya and Shin were very close, which is adorable and makes me very sad that Shin eventually dies. We don’t find out the circumstances of that til later, though. This volume’s plot is roughly that there’s this person called the Katana Killer who goes around killing the students, and you’re sort of confused about who it is throughout the volume (or at least I was. I thought it was pretty clear who it was, then something random would happen with the other that would make me doubt).

Lots of action and lots of crazy violence and sex, which is exactly what I expect from this series. I’m so happy we’ll get to see Air Gear in English now too!

Tenjho Tenge 4

Gasp! Have people forgotten about this series? Why, it’s censored, and volume four came out last week, and yet there’s not a breath about it on the internet! The reasons for this may have more to do with the fact that people forgot than the fact it was censored. We got panties up the wazoo this time around, and there was maybe a couple instances of some coverage and probably stuff I didn’t notice, but overall it was very naughty this time around. And you know I’m all about the panties.

The story in this volume was very good. We got some backstory… not much, but just enough to keep me coming back. There was a tasty tidbit thrown in about the relationship between Maya, Aya, and Nagi, and I’m definitely coming back for more on that. There’s also weird goings-on with Takayanagi’s brother, and I’m not sure what the hell the characters mean when they say he’s dead, because he’s clearly not, and now we’ve got the elder Natsume’s sword playing a part… what’s going on here?! We go from a single battle in a bowling alley taking up one and a half volumes to a ton of information being crammed in this volume. The story’s still interesting and the characters are still good-looking though, so I’m all about the next volume.

Plus we got all the color material this time around I think! Hooray! No color illustration for the first chapter… but maybe it just wasn’t there in this volume.