Love Comedy: Hero & the Princess of Darkness

tl;dr: A fantasy rom-com with a generic plot and with characters and comedy that are more annoying than amusing. This manga is about the romance between a male hero (Yuusha) and female demon lord (Maou). Yuusha falls in love with Maou and asks her out, and although she refuses at first, after realizing he’s overpowered and could completely destroy the demon army she reluctantly agrees. She starts off just using dates to try to find Yuusha’s weakness in order to defeat him and restart the demon invasion of the human world, but she pretty quickly actually falls in love with him, though she’s a tsundere soshe refuses to admit it. After that various others try to break them apart both from the demon and human side, but their love prevails. The plot here is a pretty generic Romeo and Juliet type story, though overall the themes in the manga lean more towards taboo romance than enemies become lovers. This is in part because of the way the romance between the main couple is framed, but more so because there are a lot of other relationships it also focuses on, the majority of which fall into romances that are taboo within the context of the world the story takes place in, such as yaoi, yuri, and incest. Still, all in all it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and when it does it’s pretty much always terrible, so don’t expect any depth in any of these. I will say however that I did like the ending, because even though it’s the most generic ‘powering up through the power of love to defeat the final boss’ type story possible, it still felt like it fit the story pretty well and was much better than all the other serious moments where it tried and failed to be deep. Rather than the plot, what is meant to hold up the manga is the characters and comedy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do all that good of a job with either. Character wise there are a few interesting and likable side characters, but most of the cast is boring and pretty unlikable. For example, Yuusha has some personality towards the beginning but as things progress it seems to disappear and he becomes even flatter. Maou starts off as a complete bitch, and she does have a character arc where she becomes less of one. But she never becomes likable, only bearable, and it takes her about two thirds of the manga to get there so for the vast majority of the manga she’s downright unbearable. Not being able to get invested in the cast, especially the main couple, results in most all the emotional beats completely falling flat. The comedy is entirely one note, and that one note is that everyone is an idiot. I can certainly enjoy that kind of humor, but it was so utterly repetitive here. And a lot of the stupidity is so utterly dumb that it’s not even funny anymore. I feel like this is part of why a lot of the cast was so unlikable as well. And simultaneously, not liking the cast made it harder to find their antics as amusing. So the two aspects are basically compounding on each other to make the manga worse. The art was a mixed bag. The art regarding and backgrounds and such is nothing special and not really worth talking about. The art in regards to characters can be pretty great, but the character designs don’t really seem to allow for that that much. There are certainly some great designs, but they’re also a lot of boring designs, and the characters focused on generally lean more towards being boring. Though I’m also kind of thinking that my dislike of certain characters is preventing me from appreciating their art. Also, the mangaka is good at doing extremely exaggerated expressions, but they’re used way too often to the point they’re not really impressive at all by the end.