Joou no Hana

So, in a nutshell, it is a pretty good manga. And i mostly hated it. As of the moment i write this, there is no "drama" tag for this. How come? The core of it is melodrama. A pure melo. So, don't go into it thinking it is a shojo adventure romance like... well "Akagami no Shirayuki-hime" for example. Although the comparison is weird and it has nothing to with it, i felt that it was closer to... "the human centipede"... maybe you will understand why if you read the whole review. And gosh, i am fairly intimidated before writting this review. I am not sureif i will manage to do it properly. How can i hate a manga that i felt was good, despite the fact that i could not identify any clear major objective flaws? First of all, as you may guess, your appreciation of this will depend on what you look for. I have no doubts whatsoever that some amongst you will fall hard in love with this manga. I am not one of you though. This review is meant to present the work in a way that will hopefully help you understand its nature. And i will try to limit the spoilers. It's not going to be a sinecure... So, i guess that i will start with the usual review of stuff, and afterwards, list the reasons why i hated it. Let's start with the most important: the writing. The setting is a mere excuse to tell a story. There are 4 countries surrounded by more countries. But beyond knowing that there is more than these 4 countries, we know hardly anything about the world beyond. The countries have super random and usual names like "Kou", "Ah", Sou" and "Do". Most of the story revolves around the royal families, almost all refered to by their title rather than a name (Queen Kou, Emperor Do, Prince Sou, Princess Ah, etc). What is more, it is your usual, run of the mill chinese-like setting with hardly anything that makes it unic or different. It is easy to see that the author didn't even try. You absolutely can't make it more generic than that. And no, this is not a reason why i hated it. Because why not? The story is very much character centric. So the setting being bland allows for a strong focus on the struggles of the characters themselves. What is more, bland doesn't mean shallow. And it being bland and strongly inspired from China makes it relatable to a japanese reader, who will feel at home, and understand instinctively all the little codes we may not know in the west (yes the author won't explain everything, and sometimes, some details may be confusing to us westerners. But this is a usual problem with such settings). Using such a bland setting is, too, a massive advantage for telling such a story, because your reader is at home and you don't need massive lore dumps on top of the rest. And so, while the setting is generic, it works well enough simply because using reality as a basis is the way to write a functional fantasy without becoming obnoxioulsy wordy or pretentious. So, so far, so good. Simple is best. Especially since the story itself is NOT simple. It is pretty much impossible to predict what will happen. This is why i had to reach the end to be fully certain that i hated it. The first 4 chapters are 100 pages long. Most of the rest are around 65. Yes, that means that if you count on the basis of a usual monthly publication, this manga would span 90+ chapters. So, it is not short. It is worth noting that the beginning is a different beast compared to the rest. The first 9 chapters or so feel very much like a shoujo fantasy full of romance subtext and omnipresent fan-service. The situations felt stereotyped and Hakusei (one of the 2 MCs) annoyed me immediately. What is more, as is often the case, you could tell that the author was still testing waters, as her storyboards feel shaky, and characters display emotions that simply feel wrong. Like a big smile for something sad when it should have been a wry smile or something. So, frankly, the only reason i didn't drop it early on is because i was under the impression that there was more to it... And then, after 4 or 5 volumes... ... the hidden beast appears. Mark my words. This is a MELODRAMA in a dramaturgic sense. If you ever read BS like "Hamlet" or any work by Racine, you will get what i mean.The whole work is built around the dramatisation of situations and characters. They suffer, and then they suffer more, they are fated to suffer, and you are told that suffering is what they need, and so, suffering is their life. And mind you, the author does it well. I could tell that she was trying to stress her readers out constently, but she does it decently well. There will be battles, but not that many. It is more the MC who is a victim and fights her victim status to become a winner. More or less. When i warn about the melodrama, i mean that despite the fact that this is shoujo, it is heavy. And despite the fact that the author is a woman, prepare for (almost)rape scenes. While she never goes all out with (almost)rape scenes, and while i fully endorse her respect for her setting (women were objects to be owned like cattle or horses back in the day), it is was still a hard read for me. Especially the way no one ever thinks badly of these guys. Yes, this makes sense with the setting, but be warned that the author is not timid. Despite being a shoujo, and despite the fact that there are plenty of shoujo filters and shoujo monologues, the content of these monologues oftentimes are... not quite shoujo-like. Actually, beyond the filters and romance fan-service, this sh*t is not a shoujo at all. Overall, the dialogues are good. Frankly, the dialogues tell a lot about the characters, and how they are double-faced. Or triple-faced... It is witty, serve the characters well, and make for interesting dynamics during interactions. Another good thing about the story and the writing is that we explore quite a bit of the 4 Kingdoms. It is not a "country A against country B" classic setting. And when it comes to writing... i have to say a word about the characters. Again, it's all good. The characters make sense. And despite the author being a woman, she seems to understand men like me pretty well. Some situations reminded me of how i felt with towards some of my ex-gfs. She depicted accurately the differences between men and women when it comes to psychology and understanding of relationships. Reading this reminded me of some cringe i had to go through in real life, and even of some extremely painful feelings i had back in the day. This made me feel terrible. Maybe because it is a shoujo, she doesn't go all the way with this either. I would have been more extreme than the guy, who quite patiently goes through much more than i could. The emperors are depicted as inhuman beings. There is this idea that an emperor is not human. Nothing new right? Except the way it is done there... is quite new. Emperor are refered as dragons. Since they are not humans, you may notice that their faces are hardly ever fully drawned. They become a sort of mask where only the mouth is truly visible and the rest is obscured by the shadow of their hat. This is very interesting honestly. What better way to depict how they are not human and don't have human emotions than obscuring their traits. Traits define identiy. Both trough emotions and looks. Here, they become "vessels". For something inhuman called a "King". This adds to this unease that surrounds emperors in this manga. But overall, it is all cleverly done. This is what i would expect from a japanese mangaka. I so love the intelligence with which they do things. Ok, the rest now... The least important, so it will be fast. Drawings are good enough. The best part is that while the setting is simple, the backgrounds are generally detailed. Which conforts what i said earlier: plain doesn't mean shallow. The author is not up there when drawing battles though. Probably one would need many assistants to do it correctly. It is enough to have a feel for it, but you won't find an "Arlsan Senki" level of detail of the battles or battlefields. The strategies are... overall decent. It is good enough to be believable most of the time, and so, i guess it is ok. My biggest problem is with the very first battle. This one feels awkward. But the later ones fare better. So, now, i did praise it quite a bit. So why did i hate it? Ok, here i go, with a list: 1) Early on we are made to hate a guy. And oh is he worth hating. He is the worst, clearly. You will hate him, too. But then... the story takes a turn that makes it seem like this guy was right all along, that wathever he did was right, and that he was a great guy because he had this determination of sorts... and it becomes clear that our MC should aim to be the same kind of person. Because this is the natural way of things for royalty. I mean, i love settings that sort of corrupt characters, from a naïve state of mind to a battle-hardened one. But here, this is something else. The overall mood of the setting promotes a kind of corruption that aims to reach a lower state of existence. Does it make sense? Sometimes, in medias, you have naïve characters that learn to make hard decisions. They grow. They gain charisma. They lose their naïvety, may discover a ruthless side to them, or even break down, but they don't necessarily go against nature. But here, society pressures for the idea that oppressing the weak is morally good if you have responsabilities, and anyone reaching for the throne will have to learn how to do it properly. Early on, we learn that even if you have a good heart, you may need to be capable of killing your brother without showing emotion. And such a thing is never condemned, never berated, never called evil, and as far as i coud tell, the sole outlook on this i saw was in the line of: "this guy did good and has what it takes". I mean, most characters commit betrayals, atrocities or slaughters to some degree and there is not a single one that will have a problem with it. Unless it endangers the kingdom, but even then... that's not too big a deal. If you are born royalty, you can only be a "monster" (not in the sense horrible person, but in the sense "inhuman"). This is what being a dragon is like. And because this is what being a dragon is all about, even our rebellious MC with have to face this reality one way or another and choose her path in life, since we all know that she was born a princess. And so, the problem is that despite being the MC that we should sympathize with, and that spurs the story forward, she became estranged to me at some point. Because she was born a princess, and because we are told repeatedly what royalty is meant to be like. Your mind will associate the two. She stopped feeling human at all to me, and hence, relatable. There was something disgusting about her that made me want to keep my distances with her, and this is partly tied to the romance aspect i will speak of next. This mix of situations made that once i had lost my involvment with her, it never came back, no matter in which direction she evolved later on. And i ended up looking at her without sympathy as a result, as if she was a beast of sorts, one that should be put down, and i could never accept to redeem her, no matter how she may have contradicted this first impression afterwards. The author does that deliberately, and she is good at it. But i couldn't stand it and couldn't dive into her story anymore. I believe it is very dangerous to deshumanize your characters. Because we relate to stories' protagonists through our shared humanity. It is because this character i talked about at the beginning of point 1) has no humanity that we grow to hate it in chapter 1. In this same chapter 1, everything i talk about here is already hinted pretty clearly and creates the canvas for the story. But if you write a story about a horse, it will be anthropomorphized and/or humanized ("Uma Musume"? or Dreamworks' "Spirit"?). Humanity is what ties us readers to stories. And once you have deshumanized your protagonist or the expectations your readers will have of it, no matter if the character ends up being humane again, you can't really go back, it is not the same anymore. "Wall-E" is a robot but we can relate to it because it has human reactions. "Madoka" is human in a setting that is not. If she had killed Sayaka at some point, no matter how many people she protects afterwards, she would feel like a corrupted machine to me. Do you get what i mean? The way this setting and story is, pretty much from the start, all about "kings are not humans but dragons"... was a dangerous bet from the start, on the author's part. 2) The romance. The romance is everywhere. I mean everywhere. This wouldn't be a problem normally, since it doesn't impair the storytelling too much, AND it is AGAIN, well done... But... there is a but. This is the classical story of impossible romance due to social status. This makes sense. I don't hate it. But when the authors starts, twice every chapter, to use this to generate more melodrama... however well done it may be, it started to cultivate an array of negativity in me. Again, it is character centric. And psychological. And if you are like me and have no control over your sense of empathy... the suffering of the characters will end up becoming truly yours... So we are repeatedly told in details about how they suffer, what their dilemmas are, why this appears to be hopeless, and we are shown the logic that they follow that, while making sense, at long last makes you want they would just spare you the crap. I can only empathize and relate so much to a character undermining itself and making its own life a pure hell, before feeling like i sink into my own socks. Ok, i understand, i understand i said. I get it. Really i do. Something else to tell me? I get this situation, no need to go into a tear jerking monologue about it 7 or 35 times... I do get it. This insistance on making us feel the miserable despair characters go through end up making these crap feelings stick with you like crap to your shoes... That follows you everywhere. Can you imagine what characters madly in love with one another may do for love's sake in such a setting? Can you? Overall, it was well done, again. But this ended up emphasizing the melodrama around the impossible love with constant "Romeo and Juliet" undertones (i mean, undertones that let you feel like it will end like Romeo and Juliet. I doesn't, by the way, but still. I can't simply be happy feeling like crap all the time). You could do that in a more subtle way where the drama and psychology are boiling in the background. "Song of the long March" is more subtle in every aspect of the storytelling and characters psychology. You feel the situation, even when not told explicitely, and it is not hamfisted. But here, it is very "here in your face". "Get the feels, because i want you too damnit". And, tied to this 2nd point... 3) Yes. The melodrama. The melodrama as a whole is something else. This pervades every pore of this work. The author makes sure from the start that you understand that *any* character may die at *any* moment. This is the exact opposite of "One Piece" where there are no stakes. Here... well. "Everyone will die someday" is stated countless times in the story. And trust me, there is an implicit footnote that is never stated clearly that say "yes, and rather sooner than later". Yes, the author used any situation, any character, any time, and any idea to include more drama. It is not exactly... forced melodrama, since it fits in the story and with the setting, but nevertheless, she never misses an occasion to make you understand that life sucks. She adds small story elements for the sole purpose of making her story more stressful for the reader, and/or dramatic and desperate. "Ah, this is a red flag". "Ah maybe not...". "Ah, it wil probably turn out this way anyway...". I ended up reading this story feeling as if i was spending my time looking anxiously at a mailbox, expecting to receive at any moment a notice of the death of someone close to me. Did i say that i ended up feeling uneasy while reading and stopped wanting to resume reading? Why would i want to read that in my spare time? She deliberately manipulates things to create misunderstandings in her story. Not between characters. But misunderstandings from the readers. She misguides us deliberately. Part is for the sake of introducing more twists, and part is for the sake of drama and melodrama. Honestly, there is one character out there that never ends dying. You will see everything about his death over the span of several hundred pages, the sorrow that accompanies it, the before, the after, how he agonized for so damn long, how he is happy about it, how everyone feels like crap and really should, how people kill themselves as a result because they don't have any purpose for living anymore, or even how killing oneself is actualy a national sport in this, how life is torture, but still, in the end "the world is beautiful anyway"... and so on and so forth... Yes, i will probably regret reading this. I just skimmed really fast through the last 2 chapters without really reading and the one thing i can tell is: good thing i did. I mean, all the metaphysical trip is not something i can take seriously in this particular story. Stop with the tear-jerking stuff to the bitter end. There is no beyond the beyond the reason or purpose of things and people. To me, it was not an emotional bittersweet story. It was only bitter, depressing, and never sweet, and this awful feeling still lingers in my chest. I am going to put just below a criminal spoiler somewhat hidden in random text. If you want to read this manga, i warn you to never read this spoiler. But if you won't... fell free... [SPOILER]blah blah blah je cause et dépose et blah et blah un peu de spam pour aider à cacher le méchant spoil de chez mémé if you want to read a story where basically the whole damn cast dies by the end then you are welcome oui comme je le disais c'est du melodrama et fouette la mouffette.[/SPOILER] 4) The convolution. Yet again, i never felt that it didn't make sense. But the author very clearly goes by the rule: "surprise your readers at every turn so that they will be left on the edge of their seats for more". I honestly don't know how she could include such an absurd number of twists to her story without making it look ridiculous. Because it works. But... It is f*cking exhausting... You will be thrown for a loop every 10 minutes or so. Scenes are always cut when you actually need to know what happens next, to the point that this time, i actually cringed because of it, and it is a roller-coaster. But worse in my case, it aggravates dangerously the fact that i was feeling more and more like crap while reading... Because anytime something turned out decently, i came to naturally expect another twist to mess it up again for the worse. I feel no joy in contemplating human misery or suffering, i have gone through enough of it myself for several lives, so give me something to hope for... So many twists prevented me from feeling good when i should have, and made sure i felt doubly bad when i was meant to feel bad... And yes, so many twists makes following the story an exhausting endeavor. I felt sort of out of breath, feeling pushed all around the story andl all over the place without my consent, all the time. This doesn't feel like a shoujo at all. Twists constantly cut story threads abruptely and definitely without giving you any time to digest what happened and relax, to suddenly start new ones with a sense of urgency, and then just cliffhanger the whole situation to start telling about something else entirely... This is exhausting, yes. You will probably end up skimming pages to reach a satisfying point before going back to read about the "something else". While the author manages to stuck you to her work, i felt like she had me bound on a seat and forced me to keep my eyes open to go along with her sh*t. This is mechanically very good to create in the reader the "need" to see what follows. But maybe my OCD turned that into more of a torture than it needed to be... Honestly, are there people out there who seriously feel that it is an endearing emotional trip with a touching romance? Who? Denounce yourself. THe story is good, but i never read or saw such heavy drama. Actually, i tend to avoid this genre... but there was no "drama" tag for this. And so... i expected something different. Make sure you understand what kind of story it is before starting. Don't think it is a "somewhat dramatic but endearing adventure with romance". It is a "filthy and bloody melodrama centered around the concepts of obligation and despair, with a mortality rate definitely higher than in Games of Thrones (or what i heard about it, since i didn't watch it)". In my case, i feel like i have gone through a seriously masochistic phase that i will have to pay the price for down the line. As several days later, images and things from this manga still flash through my mind despite myself, and awake this terrible feeling i am desperate to get rid of. Overall, this author mostly masters her subject. She is clearly talented. Aside from the first few chapters that feel shaky, she mastered her craft and skillfully managed to reach all the goals i suspect she had with this story. But... it won't be for everyone. At least, it wasn't for me. Is it really a shoujo?