Black Peach Flower

Few oneshots are well written enough to make their readers want more, yet Black Peach Flower seems to reach this status within all of twenty six pages, even with its average, stereotypical shoujo art and underdeveloped characters. In a word, this manga can be described simply as "charming". The characters are charming (even though they're rather fluffed up; you have the girl desperate for a relationship, her gaggle of friends whom constantly berate her, the somewhat cool senpai, said senpai's friends who want him to date the desperate girl), the art is charming, the motives that push the characters to do what they do arecharming. It's this, paired with the somewhat predicable plot twist, that makes a reader wonder if they legitimately want more of the series, or if it's simply the drive to attach more substance to a somewhat flimsy idea. At the end of the day, depending on how much you enjoy shoujo, it can go either way for you. The setting of BPF is, again, stereotypical of the shoujo genre: a generic high school where girls evidently have nothing better to do then stalk their crushes and be teased by gaggles of their friends for doing so. Such is the case for our main lead, Tsukimi, who is currently watching as her crush walks hand in hand with another girl from her classroom window. After seeing how hopelessly in "love" - she shyly confesses to never talking to him once - she is, her friends point her in the direction of chemistry lab affectionado Okino-senpai, who they claim has accidentally created a love potion. It's interesting to see Tsukimi interact with the world around her, as the plot line progresses, she's one of those characters you can almost feel the desperation wafting from. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as anyone who was once a teenager can easily identify with this feeling. To go into detail about what events unfold would be indirectly giving away the entirety of the short, twenty six page plot. It certainly brings a rather dark undertone by the end of the story, and leaves you with a question about what merits true love at its core, so if you're an overanalyzer, this might be a field day for you. While the ending will be clear to some, it's still a worthwhile read if you can spare ten minutes of your time. It's certainly a cut above most oneshots, and is a great filler in-between longer mangas.