Manga Notes: Harukana Receive 10
Jun. 6th, 2022 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile part of reading manga to the point of thinking “I could take in more fiction off paper in different formats and from different places” is commencing new series on a whim, those series actually ending sooner or later has had its own appeal for a while. After reading the first volume of a manga adaptation of the 86 light novels, I realised I could finish something next, and picked up the tenth volume of Harukana Receive. I’d commented on its initial volumes and the volume that continued where the anime had left off, and I did wonder if I might say something to wrap all of this up.
If one thing has kept coming to mind with these later volumes of the manga, though, it’s the thought something still doesn’t look quite right about the artwork. That sense might seem strongest with the waistlines of the swimsuits worn when playing the beach volleyball that’s been the point of this series, even if I am aware that opens me up to “you pay a little too much attention to those drawings, don’t you?”
As for the actual plot, its final showdown, anticipated from the beginning, surprised me a bit when it steered past “we’ll prove how much we’ve improved since starting out together” and stretching things out as far as they can go. All the same, I could easily accept it steering to themes of friendship outside the two-player teams that kept being introduced and developed. (I suppose one moment that sticks in my mind in between the last volume I commented on and this one was when the title team of Haruka and Kanata and their court mentors Claire and Emily “swapped partners” for a practice match, but that does get back to the artwork too when Haruka put on the plaid swimsuit she’d sported at the beginning of the series.)
With one series closed, my thoughts do turn to the one just opened. I’d bought two volumes of the 86 manga adaptation pretty much on a whim when I’d taken the chance on going to the area bookstore a few months ago but with just a few trip-justifying titles on my shopping list. As for beginning to read them, I had just finished the third light novel and the material adapted into the anime, if without quite getting to the point of posting about that. Through long experience I’m inclined to not expect too much from “manga version of something else,” but this particular manga didn’t seem all that bad. It did adapt the first novel’s opening a bit more closely than the anime did, and I was a little struck how it had worked from the illustrations of the original novel but made up its own designs for a few secondary characters that were distinctive from the anime designs.
Something that much rarer than “a reasonably impressive manga version of something else,” but still tangentially connected to the apparent point of this post, showed up when I was told about a new “anime MSTing” by two people who didn’t just pack it in when the rest of the community faded away. What really got my attention, though, was that the fanfic being “riffed” on wasn’t about one of the properties that had been big in the late 1990s, but about the “fanservice” show Keijo (which I’ll admit to having watched, even if something about its “fanservice” hadn’t seemed that compelling; on the other hand, I’d come to enjoy the absurdity of its “fake sport.”) I can’t quite say MSTings were the only thing that contributed to my hardly glancing in fanfiction’s direction these days, although there was a moment a while ago when I asked myself what anime franchises might have attracted takes skewed enough to make for MSTing fodder.
If one thing has kept coming to mind with these later volumes of the manga, though, it’s the thought something still doesn’t look quite right about the artwork. That sense might seem strongest with the waistlines of the swimsuits worn when playing the beach volleyball that’s been the point of this series, even if I am aware that opens me up to “you pay a little too much attention to those drawings, don’t you?”
As for the actual plot, its final showdown, anticipated from the beginning, surprised me a bit when it steered past “we’ll prove how much we’ve improved since starting out together” and stretching things out as far as they can go. All the same, I could easily accept it steering to themes of friendship outside the two-player teams that kept being introduced and developed. (I suppose one moment that sticks in my mind in between the last volume I commented on and this one was when the title team of Haruka and Kanata and their court mentors Claire and Emily “swapped partners” for a practice match, but that does get back to the artwork too when Haruka put on the plaid swimsuit she’d sported at the beginning of the series.)
With one series closed, my thoughts do turn to the one just opened. I’d bought two volumes of the 86 manga adaptation pretty much on a whim when I’d taken the chance on going to the area bookstore a few months ago but with just a few trip-justifying titles on my shopping list. As for beginning to read them, I had just finished the third light novel and the material adapted into the anime, if without quite getting to the point of posting about that. Through long experience I’m inclined to not expect too much from “manga version of something else,” but this particular manga didn’t seem all that bad. It did adapt the first novel’s opening a bit more closely than the anime did, and I was a little struck how it had worked from the illustrations of the original novel but made up its own designs for a few secondary characters that were distinctive from the anime designs.
Something that much rarer than “a reasonably impressive manga version of something else,” but still tangentially connected to the apparent point of this post, showed up when I was told about a new “anime MSTing” by two people who didn’t just pack it in when the rest of the community faded away. What really got my attention, though, was that the fanfic being “riffed” on wasn’t about one of the properties that had been big in the late 1990s, but about the “fanservice” show Keijo (which I’ll admit to having watched, even if something about its “fanservice” hadn’t seemed that compelling; on the other hand, I’d come to enjoy the absurdity of its “fake sport.”) I can’t quite say MSTings were the only thing that contributed to my hardly glancing in fanfiction’s direction these days, although there was a moment a while ago when I asked myself what anime franchises might have attracted takes skewed enough to make for MSTing fodder.