Koibana!: Koiseyo Hanabi

Positive impressions from the mangaka’s other works and a good amount of volumes, expectations of a fun, light read were created only to be crushed by the immaturity of it. It was not so the clichés that tired (a romance fan is always ready for them!), rather the effort of pretending to have deep drama and escaping the “mold” was its downfall. The premise is pretty simple; you have a girl that her most interesting and annoying thing about her is her hatred of boys, who is at a school filled with boys (surprise!). One of the most basic recipes for romance! And it works… atleast for a while. Ignoring her random fits of hatred that produce headaches to the reader, she meets a guy and slowly develops romantic feelings and the story starts moving along. However, it does not go at a stable pace or cohesive as the relationship between them just randomly changes, much like her decisions. The story tries to be serious along the light atmosphere and show how difficult a love like this can be, but the 2 main characters are actually unlikable for a big portion of this, it does not showcase every side of the story and tries to explain problems and thought processes in a very shallow manner. And then, the story gets repetitive stale with her random hatred only being the focus in a semi-serious/comedic way. Thankfully, 3 other girls have a part in this story, each with her own romance problems. Some are more realistic than others and there is a lot of eye rolling as the manga tries to force more drama out of ridiculous situations, because characters in this work cannot act as normal human beings some of the time. Nonetheless, at least some of the progression of each girl (including the main character) holds some interest and does not feel as a chore to read. Also, it is sad that the manga does not try to promote some positive messages – other than the usual “Don’t give up!” and “Friendship is great!” – and sticks to stereotypes, negative even. The characters are hugely cookie cutter made and it says a lot that hating boys is the most interesting (if not the only one) trait of a main character. For the most part, most characters act their age and they make silly mistakes or overthink things, etc., but it does not always work that way and the development is either forced or minimal. Some supposedly turning points or important progression of the story are based on drama-based decisions rather than natural choices, which makes this feel very immature and the characters very unrealistic (What person does not try to kidnap another person’s sibling just because the individual they like fancies that other person?). Not mentioning some hugely exaggerated characters that were there just to move the plot in an instant and can conveniently fill many roles to make this even more dramatic. There were many opportunities to handle this better and have drama at the same time, but... Of course, no one can really expect authentic behaviors in such works, but the change sometimes is very random and even extreme to just overlook. Art-wise, it is very pleasing, although a bit generic! Distinct characters, good anatomy, giving attention to details and having a few different haircuts! There is no real complaint in this department, just that compared to the very often dialogue absence, there are lot of panels with no text (or the same cliché quotes one can imagine) and spreads with just the characters staring or something similar, etc., making this so fast to go through and easily ignore parts of the art. All in all, did I enjoy it? I did the first time I read it years back through detailed summaries. But for my 2nd read now? The problems were so glaring, I could not ignore them and had to address them here. It is truly easy to read though; lots of textless pages, basic quotes and dialogues and predictable events made this very easy, but it was just not satisfying when you could not really cheer for the main characters and then just stop caring about them because nothing changes, they just seem stuck in time with the same comedy routine and sometimes you cannot stop thinking the main guy is a douche. A 10 volume manga and it still feels incomplete on many levels.