Ever since I finished finals, I thought like I should start something that I could finish pretty quickly. During finals I started and caught up with Cross Game and Negima. I really liked both, but I felt bad after catching up because I need to wait for them weekly now.

Why shoujo? Well, there were a bunch of stuff that I’d wanted to read for a while and most of those are a lot shorter than the shounen I had on my list, so I guess you could chalk it up to laziness.

Kimi ni Todoke

The first one I took a look at was Kimi ni Todoke. It’s not finished yet, but there weren’t that many scanlated chapters. It’s about a girl who looks like that girl from The Ring and really bad social skills, so everyone’s afraid to talk to her. She meets a really nice and popular guy and bla bla bla, predictable stuff happens. I would have thought about keeping up with it, except it appears to have been abandoned by the scanlators.

Lovely Complex

Lovely Complex is about a short guy and a tall girl who aggravate each other and are the butt of their classmates’ jokes. Guess what? They get together. What a surprise. I did like that their relationship didn’t suddenly change and that the guy didn’t immediately reciprocate feelings. I didn’t like the art very much. Oh well.

Special A

I picked this up back when I’d heard about the anime and I’d just finished catching up in the Ouran manga, so I was looking for another shoujo thing to get into. I guess it wasn’t that bad and was kind of amusing up until the last quarter where it sort of got dragged out and ended weakly. Special A is about this girl who’s always competing against the main guy, who is the best at everything and who she can never beat. Turns out they get together.

Koukou Debut

This one is about a girl who sucks at getting guys to hit on her and asks a guy who knows everything about what guys look for in girls to coach her on the subject. He says he’d only do it if she doesn’t fall in love with him. Well, of course she does, but what surprised me was how quickly it happened in the story and how receptive he was to it. I’d say out of the bunch, this was my favourite, because it didn’t contain any situations or characters that annoyed me like in Lovely Complex and it ended pretty well, unlike Special A.

Time to ease myself back into blagging. So recently, if you’re following me on Twitter you’ll have noticed that I have not been shutting up about Special A. Special A is a shoujo manga that I decided to pick up while waiting in between chapters of Ouran. The setting is a lot like Ouran: everything takes place at a high school for the rich and elite, except the rich factor isn’t done as over-the-top as Ouran.

Because of this though, we see a lot of similar situations. We have the students trying to please their parents and grandparents, doing things like maintaining a certain rank, doing work to prepare for when they take over the company, getting into arranged marriages and so on or screwing around at one of their many private villas. We also have the typical Japanese high school scenarios: athletic festival, cultural festival, or the Golden Week holiday.

What makes S.A. different from Ouran is the focus on the characters. Understandably, Ouran focuses on Haruhi and her relationships with the rest of the Host Club and especially the romantic development between her, Kaoru (well, not really anymore), Hikaru, and Tamaki. As of the last manga chapter, this still hasn’t been resolved. But the other characters have been receiving very little development as they are reduced to simply being helpers to the main players.

Special A has a more even gender ratio among its cast of characters. What ended up happening is that pretty much every major character is now in a romantic relationship and we get chapters that focus on the development of each one. It’s still clear that the main relationship is the one with Hikari and Kei, but it’s nice to see some focus on the other characters. And with all of this development of the side characters, they’ve changed from slightly boring to fairly interesting and fleshed out. There are some characters in Ouran that I really don’t care about. This has not happened in Special A.

Finally, a word about the anime adaptation. It is pretty terrible. I was halfway through the published chapters when I decided to take a look, so I had a pretty good feel for the characters and the story. The first thing I noticed was the awful OP. Ouran’s OP made me think twice before watching because of all the flowers. This OP was just bad. The second thing that I noticed was that the voices for Kei and Hikari did not fit at all. Kei is far more laid back than Lelouch NIPPON Lamperouge and Hikari should sound much more aggressive than Mi-mi-miracle Mikurun-run. The third thing was the terrible insert song, in the same vein as the OP. And finally, even in the first episode, the anime was already cutting and pasting the manga storyline all over the place. And from what I hear, the ending of the anime is not going to be very satisfying at all.