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Manga Thoughts: Hayate x Blade
"Other people are talking about it" is of course a familiar enough reason to take in something for yourself. Every so often I get around to that myself, and of course there's always the chance I'll like the recommended work too. Growing to understand some of the more notable posters to the "Anime on DVD"/"Fandom Post" forums took their "screen names" from one particular manga series, I bought the omnibus volumes of it. With lots of other series to work through, though, I'd never quite got around to reading them until now, when at last I opened up "Hayate x Blade" (or "Hayate Cross Blade"). Perhaps I'd been a little too sure of what I'd find in the series, but as it turned out there were some surprises.
The start of the series seems heavy with setup, as the invincibly simple-minded Hayate Kurogane takes her sister's place at an all-girls high school that just happens to have pairs of students compete in sword fights across the campus and gets involved in the fights much less for glory than to pay off an orphanage's debt. On seeing the "pairs" angle, I was sure that was what had caught everyone's attention, especially with half of the pair having a distinct role in the fights; as the back cover claims, there are "hints of yuri" (or "girl's love"), and I've grown to expect the forum regulars to look at anime and manga series obligingly heavy with girl characters with an eye to pairing them off with each other... Where other overt series I'll admit to taking in seem to divide between the poles of "dignified yet with a slight, careful blandness" and "gleefully exploitative," though, Hayate x Blade seemed to me lively yet almost carefully steering clear of any prurience labelled with the harsh term "fanservice" in the artwork. One of the characters, Jun Kuga, is always popping up with suggestive dialogue, and in her invincible simple-mindedness Hayate is prone to that sort of thing too, but this mostly seems played for laughs with Hayate's sword partner Ayana Mudo inclined to beat them up for it.
With all of this, though, I suppose I did find myself coming straight back to my awareness of having "underdeveloped shipping glands." It was easy, as in other cases, for me to get what we're being invited to imagine but just not really imagine it. I suppose "romance" of most sorts works better for me as an undeniable sauce (or even a gluttonous main course) than a subtle spicing; as others dwell on it I'm just sort of bolting down the "obvious" meat and potatoes of a series.
Once "this particular permutation of the sword-fighting rules will get Hayate out of her latest predicament" in the early chapters was past, I supposed Ayana was the core character of the series, but that mood didn't last long either as things came to seem more a matter of exploring the psychological connections between the members of various pairs in a genuine ensamble cast. It's possible, though, that as the pairs piled up I began to wonder if I was getting ready to accept how the series left off over here because it had transferred to a different publisher in Japan with an exclusivity arrangement with Viz over here, which doesn't quite seem to need to stay on the good side of fans. I suppose I'm still quite capable of thinking I've read "enough" of a manga series and don't need to see what comes next. Still, what I had got around to at last I did generally enjoy.
The start of the series seems heavy with setup, as the invincibly simple-minded Hayate Kurogane takes her sister's place at an all-girls high school that just happens to have pairs of students compete in sword fights across the campus and gets involved in the fights much less for glory than to pay off an orphanage's debt. On seeing the "pairs" angle, I was sure that was what had caught everyone's attention, especially with half of the pair having a distinct role in the fights; as the back cover claims, there are "hints of yuri" (or "girl's love"), and I've grown to expect the forum regulars to look at anime and manga series obligingly heavy with girl characters with an eye to pairing them off with each other... Where other overt series I'll admit to taking in seem to divide between the poles of "dignified yet with a slight, careful blandness" and "gleefully exploitative," though, Hayate x Blade seemed to me lively yet almost carefully steering clear of any prurience labelled with the harsh term "fanservice" in the artwork. One of the characters, Jun Kuga, is always popping up with suggestive dialogue, and in her invincible simple-mindedness Hayate is prone to that sort of thing too, but this mostly seems played for laughs with Hayate's sword partner Ayana Mudo inclined to beat them up for it.
With all of this, though, I suppose I did find myself coming straight back to my awareness of having "underdeveloped shipping glands." It was easy, as in other cases, for me to get what we're being invited to imagine but just not really imagine it. I suppose "romance" of most sorts works better for me as an undeniable sauce (or even a gluttonous main course) than a subtle spicing; as others dwell on it I'm just sort of bolting down the "obvious" meat and potatoes of a series.
Once "this particular permutation of the sword-fighting rules will get Hayate out of her latest predicament" in the early chapters was past, I supposed Ayana was the core character of the series, but that mood didn't last long either as things came to seem more a matter of exploring the psychological connections between the members of various pairs in a genuine ensamble cast. It's possible, though, that as the pairs piled up I began to wonder if I was getting ready to accept how the series left off over here because it had transferred to a different publisher in Japan with an exclusivity arrangement with Viz over here, which doesn't quite seem to need to stay on the good side of fans. I suppose I'm still quite capable of thinking I've read "enough" of a manga series and don't need to see what comes next. Still, what I had got around to at last I did generally enjoy.