Kare Kano: His and Her Circumstances

In typical fashion, I decided to read this manga months after watching the anime adaptation. And, while, the anime remains partly true to the manga, the manga itself offers so much more than what the anime ever could. Not only that, but it continues past the anime's ending point - the cultural festival, or more importantly the stage play that was taking place. As this is actually quite an important part of the story. Now, I know what you're thinking - 'this is just another high school romantic comedy manga'. You know the ones, boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boydeclares undying love fir girl = happily ever after. And for the most part, that is exactly what Kare Kano (His and Her Circumstances - which is the English title) actually is. But there is more to this manga than just a simple love story. The more you read into it, the darker it becomes. While the anime had some of the darker infusions towards the end - the manga delves in deeper. Much deeper. This story contains love, betrayal, secrets, child abuse, self-harm (2 instances), teen pregnancy, and a lot more that really makes it worth reading. All the pain and confusion that a person can (or could) suffer when growing up is all there in the Kare Kano manga. Like most manga, character development takes place over a period of time, and this is no exception. The more the story progresses, the more complex the character's personalities become. This is most apparent in Arima Soichiro's personality, and this generally starts to take place during the stage play (this is why it's a key occurrence). The art style changes slightly as the manga continues, but it keeps it's style well and is really fitting with the story content. The complexities between the relationships of some of the characters is also well constructed. Apart from the main relationship (Arima and Miyazawa), there are 3 other relationships that are happening - one being a step-brother/step-sister relationship, as well as a high school student dating an adult (however, this particular relationship receives much less attention in comparison to Arima and Tsubasa's respective relationships). In essence, the reader could possibly relate to any number of issues that occur in the manga better than the anime (with it's slightly off-key ending and no closure whatsoever). This is one manga that I would actually encourage people to add to their collections.

Kareshi Kanojo spends most of its story bland and forgettable. It briefly becomes so ridiculous that it’s hilarious, only to end abhorrently. The characters are remarkably shallow. Oh, they have “depth” that comes in the form of tragic backstories and internal self-hatred, but it’s all paper-thin. They aren’t believably flawed human beings. They’re perfect caricatures that exist for the reader to fantasize about dating them, and their “flaws” only exist to make them feel like troubled emo bishonen that a good girl can surely fix. Miyazawa, the girl, has less of this issue, though she isn’t particularly interesting. If she was any more bland than she alreadyis, I’d call her an intentional blank slate for the reader to slot themselves into. The story started with an interesting hook for her personality — an egoist who wants to maintain a facade of perfection to impress her peers. But this is only temporarily maintained for the initial drama for her to start dating Arima, and a brief arc of her being bullied. Past that, she essentially forgets that this was ever part of her personality, and settles into a forgettable lack of traits. You could call it character development, but she develops into someone with nothing interesting about her. Near the end of the manga she essentially stops having any relevance to the plot at all. Arima is the bigger problem. He’s so perfect it’s hilarious. #1 test scores in the country, kendo prodigy, likeable and lovable by everyone. His only flaw is that he believes himself to be a terrible person, for hiding the fact that he’s a terrible person from those around him. Notice the circular logic? Not all characters need to be perfectly rational, but the internal conflict should be at least believable. It reminds me of another manga, Kaguya Wants to be Confessed to. Kaguya feels like it took heavy inspiration from Kareshi Kanojo on several fronts. But it’s also much better written, and understood how to balance its perfect-seeming protagonists out by making them inwardly flawed in realistic ways. Arima feels like both of those characters wrapped into one perfect person without any of the realistic drawbacks to that lifestyle. If all you want out of it is an enjoyable fantasy of a perfect, darkly troubled bishonen boyfriend, then I don’t begrudge you that enjoyment. I don’t personally think it holds up as well written. Visually, it’s not particularly well made either. The art goes through three stages. The early art has extremely messy and hard to follow paneling, with way too many small (and weirdly narrow) panels crammed into single pages, and way too much dialogue crammed into those panels with very little flow. It was tiring to read. Luckily, past the beginning, the mangaka apparently got much more experienced with the art of making a readable manga, and it settled into a mediocre average. In this phase, the main thing I’d criticize is the extremely repetitive character designs. The mangaka blatantly had very few character design ideas to actually draw from, with many characters having the same faces and extremely similar hairstyles, differentiated only by hair color and height. There were countless points I mixed up the main girl with a temporary rival, or the main boy with the main girl’s father or another girl in the cast. If characters aren’t immediately distinguishable at a glance, then something’s clearly wrong. The art improves in the final stage, but I’ll talk about that part of the manga later. During those first two stages of the story, the plot is mostly bland. After Miyazawa and Arima settle into their relationship, it has a collection of arcs focusing on various other couples. Most of those are about as bland as the main duo’s romance, and I won’t say much about them. Though there’s a bit of a problematic romance between a high school girl and a 28 year old man. But that's another thing I’ll talk about later. Most of the drama during this stage of the story is, yet again, shallow. There are far, far too many misunderstandings borne purely of miscommunications. There are ways to make the resolution to that kind of thing satisfying, when they finally do communicate, but here it mostly felt arbitrary and forced. I also never found this manga funny. There was very little drive to keep reading. Later in the story, it improves… kind of. The art definitely gets better, with the occasional impact page that has solid shading and composition. This is where Miyazawa completely stops mattering to the story — now, it’s all about Arima, and his tragic backstory. The backstory itself isn’t that poorly written, but I’d laugh at the idea that this makes this story “dark.” It’s written to make Arima more of a caricature, the boy who’s oh so perfect yet is so darkly troubled. It’s dark in an edgy teenage way. All of the drama centering around his belief that he’s a bad person, because he was abused as a child, is just nonsensical. What’s a little more compelling is his relationships with his birth parents, which have a little more basis in truth, in the desire some adopted people have to gain some sort of connection to the people they never knew. It’s not awfully written, I’ll say that much for it. It does, however, lead to an absolutely ridiculous climax. It’s like the story goes from an extremely boring soap opera, to an spicy, over the top, hilarious soap opera. I’ll give this part of the story credit for having the guts to go crazy. After that, things get problematic. This is where I have to spoil a couple things, though I’ll try not to go into detail. Spoiler warning. In its epilogue, the manga starts to seriously idealize certain ideas, and I’d call it genuinely harmful of it to do so. The first is how it idealizes teenage pregnancy. Shockingly, there’s only a single character who has a realistic reaction to this reveal. Everyone else is happy and supportive. I won’t say it’s outright impossible for a teenage pregnancy to be handled in a mature way and for the involved parties to all grow up fine. But even with characters as “perfect” as the protagonists of this story, it comes off as incredibly tone-deaf and problematic to treat it as a perfect situation with no concerns. I guess it’s “believable” in this story since there’s rich grandparents supporting them through it, but realistically, I honestly don’t think this is a good message to end on, for shoujo readers to internalize or believe. The second is to do with Asaba’s ending. He’s Arima’s best friend, a womanizer who never found the girl right for him. Somehow, when he finds out that Miyazawa’s baby will be a girl, he goes through a strange thought — that this girl will be his soulmate. I genuinely gaped when reading this, going over the last few pages, certain I must have misunderstood something. I didn’t. In the epilogue chapter it makes it clear. Their daughter falls in love with Asaba, and he “resists” this weakly, essentially acknowledging that he’s going to “give in” because he loves her too much. This is not an okay thing to condone in fiction. I don’t care if you think that cases like this are okay because “the child wanted it.” Minors are not capable of making that kind of decision, full stop. Art does not exist in a vacuum. When you write something like this into a story, treating it like a positive, you influence your readers to think it’s an okay thing, to not be as careful as they should about not falling into abusive situations. If you read this and were smart enough to just take it as a story and not be influenced by it, then I’m happy you reacted to it properly. But that does not make it an acceptable thing to write. These abhorrent moments are at least small, near the end. The vast majority of the experience has nothing to do with it. And normally, I would have given that experience a 4/10. Because of the way it ended, it gets a 3/10 instead. But by and large, even without the awful ending, it’s not a manga I’d recommend. It’s uninteresting, unfunny drama, with poorly written characters. It feels like what Kaguya is making fun of, rightfully, and has none of the self-awareness. If you want to read a good shoujo, go read Glass Mask.

Now I wouldn’t really describe myself as being a big fan of the shoujo genre and to be perfectly honest I always normally hate series that centre around high school students (so perhaps I am not the best person to be writing a review for this series but oh well). The reason for this is that these stories have been done again and again thousands of times and have become stale but here we have Kare Kano (short version of the title) which is for all intents and purposes one of these old boring high school romance series that we have all seen far toomany times before, the only difference being that Kare Kano is a lot better than many other similar series that come to mind, and why is this exactly? Well Kare Kano really isn’t any different than any other high school love story you will have seen before. There are no radically new approaches to the genre or anything of the sort; on the contrary it is more like a perfect refinement of all of the elements that make up this kind of story. In short this is just a simple love story told very well. Well actually it is not as simple as I made it out to be, there are plenty of complications and unexpected developments to keep the reader hooked and complex multi layered characters that elevate the story above most anything I’ve read thus far, so if anything it is the depth and complexity of this story that makes it great. While the series appears to more or less be your typical high school romcom it eventually evolves into its own independent story and separates itself from those familiar series. If you go into this series (like I did) expecting some kind of fluffy romance then you will most probably be caught off guard as this story is a lot darker and more mature than you would expect. I think the main thing that stood out for me, personally, about Kare Kano was the feeling of authenticity that this series seemed to have. It felt like the author was probably basing aspects of the story on things that she herself had some kind of experience with, which makes a real change from those wish-fulfillment harem series that I am used to. The two main characters, Soichiro Arima and Yukino Miyazawa, particularly felt very real to me. They really do seem like real people complete with flaws (extremely well hidden, mind you) and emotional baggage. Everything about their relationship felt very truthful to me, nothing felt forced and all the challenges the two had to face were relatable. The cuteness of their relationship and the envy seen by fellow classmates also rings true as well. But each of the main characters individually are both really great as well. I especially liked Yukino because she is really completely unlike the stereotypical shoujo female lead. On the surface she appears to be the ideal student; kind, extremely smart and attractive as well. But this is only a mask beneath which lies a money crazed borderline sociopath that desperately craves everyone’s admiration and praises. Right from the get go I really loved her character for some reason but over time she really developed into a wonderful and really likable character. The male lead Soichiro Arima appears to be the typical super idealised male that you can’t help but fangirl over but he is a seriously complex character and much of the story deals with his emotional scars and checkered past. But Kare Kano is not solely focused on these two characters. There is a large cast in this story and unlike too many manga they are not mere cardboard cutouts, they too are fully fleshed out characters in their own right. I really loved the way that the author would occasionally take a step away from the main story to concentrate on other characters that would usually be ignored, this really serves the series well in my opinion as it makes the whole high school experience presented feel that much more personal for the reader which is always a good thing. I also feel like I should praise the use of comedy in this manga because the author managed to find that perfect sweet spot. There is plenty of comedy but it is always at the right moments and when the story gets more serious these jokes are carefully placed to one side and only picked up again when they should be, this is something that a lot of anime and manga completely mess up and I find it quite frustrating but Kare Kano did a great job in regards to the use of comedy. The artwork in this series is quite simple which is not to say bad, characters are all distinctive, landscapes are clean and there’s really nothing I can criticise…well sometimes she would put too much into a small panel and things would look a bit messy but this was only present in the early part. The art progressively improves as the series goes on and the mangaka did take special care with the art in the more significant scenes which makes them stand out and it makes them more memorable. Also I loved those little rant type things down the side of the page. The more I think about it the more trouble I am having expressing exactly why it is I liked this series so much. If I had to sum it up it was mostly because I loved both of the main characters and I was always very happy to see things work out for them. The story just sort of felt personal to me and I was able to get very involved and relate to the story, feel for the characters and I felt really immersed and captivated by this not-so-simple-simple-love-story.

Story: Kare Kano is a longer shoujo series filled with romance, drama, and the life of teenagers. We get to see the life of a high school couple overcoming many obstacles. This being a long 102 chapter manga, a lot of things happen. It is not a typical school/romance, you will notice. Art: really unusual art. definitely not a commonly seen style, but appealing nonetheless. Character: What's interesting is that yukino + soichiro are both very intelligent, and both pretend to be someone theyre not. The other characters, their classmates, add variety to the series with a bunch of side stories. The characters portrayed in thismanga are nothing of the recent more popular shoujo manga. Their personalities and interests are very widespread and unexpected, which makes you love them even more. Enjoyment: Kare Kano can be pretty mellow, with long lasting moments and a steady moving pace. It is very light-hearted and typical in the first few volumes, and it begins to get more deep and dark in vols 13+, mainly because arima's past is revealed. Overall: Read it. Not your typical romance, full of surprises, something the older teen audience would like. If you have seen the anime series, I definitely recommend this manga because it goes much more in detail.