Heart

This weirdly entertaining story is about Yume Katsumi, a sincerely honest and stup- I mean nice girl who falls in love with a Shoubu, the new kid at a neighboring school and notorious ex gang leader. To put it simply it’s the story of Yume winning Shoubu’s heart. Then after she wins it, it’s about, through unusual circumstances, them staying together or breaking apart. It’s a weird day in hell when I’m halfway through the manga and I think, “this is where it usually ends…why isn’t it ending?” The I start doing a mental checklist of things that usually mark it as a finale: Girl meets destined futureboyfriend. √ Soul mate rejects her. √ Unrealistically optimistic girl acts like a dog in heat and turns into a stalker. √ Soul mate notices and sheepishly announces his feelings. √ Soul mate’s best friend has a crush on Optimistic Girl. √ She’s an idiot and gets into a misunderstanding. √ They break up. √ They get back together. √ Why hasn’t it ended?! Well the short answer is to see how far Yume can push me into smashing my head against a wall. If it wasn’t for the filler chapters and the lead character’s pathetic attempt at coercing her boyfriend to sleep with her or trying to figure out what having sex meant, I would have enjoyed it more. It was trying to hard to be humorous and cute that it just ended up feeling forced after a while. Not to mention the bringing in a bunch of extra characters into the manga for the same purpose. Not an army, but an ex gang member has to have some sort of posse right? Well I’m not sure the mechanics of it, but I’ve seen Scarface. Wait, is there a difference between the mafia and a gang? There is, Google says so. Anyway, this one has a variety of characters. All are easy going and except for a few that are mostly very two dimensional but others even with a small glimpse into their lives we start to like and charm us with their eccentricity but mundane dialogue. Yume is a nice girl. Protected by Roko almost her whole life, she’s so extremely naïve she still believes in Santa Claus. You have to hand it to her she has this annoying thing down pat reminding me of Itazura na Kiss’s Kotobo, only worse. She is deluded at first, she went from just seeing the guy of my dreams to saying that he saw me crying and consoled me? It’s always interesting to see lead girls get treated like dogs by the guy she likes but in all fairness she was the one acting like one. She’s too nice, she’s an idiot. So so stupid but she’s the heroine so being a nimrod works out for her in the end. Roko is funny and ballsy. She had her very own chapter in this one and I can gladly say I enjoyed her take on it immensely. Tough girl exterior and sweet and cry baby inside, is better and easier to handle. Shoubu and Yuuji, the two owners of the affection of the girls mentioned above are what you’d expect male leads to be. They bring a little spice to the mix with their dedication and passion to motorcycles and their jobs. They’re not just after girls and acting aloof, not all the time anyway. The art is average. The girls are bubbly looking while the guys are easy on the eyes and the scenes are average. It’s this mangaka’s style to make the males dreamy as oppose to the plainness of the females. I enjoyed it more in H3 then here in Heart. I’m biased so the art scores higher just for Shoubu. I would have finished reading this manga DAYS earlier had Yume not been there and made it painful to read. In this one I have to hand it to Roko and Shoubu for keeping me interested enough to finish it. The the end was worth it and deserved a standing ovation, not because it ended (not entirely) but because of something else… Overall, I partly enjoyed it. It’s not one I’ll re-read, even I have my limit to how much of a masochist I am.