Manga Thoughts: Ao Haru Ride
Jan. 14th, 2024 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLast year, I admitted here how taking some mild and curious interest in being shipped two cartons at once from Right Stuf turned into surprise on opening the second box to find scattered volumes of manga I hadn’t ordered. I contacted the company but, after not getting back definite “please mail the unexpected items back to us” instructions, succumbed to temptation and kept the manga. I do hope that whoever actually ordered it got things worked out for themselves. It didn’t take long until I’d ordered the volumes of Asadora! I hadn’t been sent by accident; even this unconventional pointer to another series by Naoki Urasawa was quite acceptable. The other series sampled in the misaddressed box, Ao Haru Ride by Io Sakisaka, was just sort of there to begin with. From the “Shojo Beat” logo on the spine I could suppose it a “romance for high school girls” series. “Now what could I possibly have against that?” comments do bump up against an awareness I can’t think of much undeniable shojo manga I’ve read in recent years beyond having got to the forty-eighth volume of Skip Beat!, and the thought “that story isn’t set in high school” might mean a little more than it should to me. From there, the thought sneaks up on me sometimes that my next closest exposure to the genre is the core joke of the long-rambling Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, where a “generic high school girls’ romance manga” is being drawn by an unlikely artist and his just as unlikely assistants.
The volumes hadn’t sat around all that long, though, until I did start to think about all the warnings about how fast manga can go out of print regardless of time having passed and circumstances perhaps even having changed since then. I filled in the first gap between the opening volume of Ao Haru Ride and the next in the box by ordering from an area comics store. However, for all of that I did let what I’d accumulated sit for some time, and not with my regular “to be read” pile of manga. When Right Stuf announced a “so long and thanks for all the orders” final sale on in-stock items, though, along with picking up anime from Discotek and AnimEigo I worked out I could at least fill in my second and larger gap in Ao Haru Ride. Before that order of anime and manga had shipped, I started reading the series.
Starting off I noted the tale of Futaba Yoshioka, who starts to think she actually like a boy named Kou in her junior high, only for him to move away just as she’s resolved to try and do something more about it. When Kou shows up again a few years later at Futaba’s high school he’s not as pleasant as before, just a bit edgy and just a bit dangerous, and so the story is under way. I also noted how the art gave the characters wider mouths than those old, winking summations of “big eyes, small mouth” had it, even if in the painted covers and grey-scale interior illustrations the mouths looked more peculiar than in the line art. With all of that, though, I did sort of wonder to what extent I was assuming this series to “represent all shojo manga.” Impressions of certain dismissive comments offered over the years like “all mecha anime’s the same” or even “all anime’s the same” did come to mind for all that I hoped they were only similar to what I might be tempted towards.
I’d thought about trying to continue the series by ordering from the national bookstore chain’s site, and discovered my already ordered volumes had got me quite close to the end of the story. The thought “well, at least it’s not endless” was oddly heartening even if I was thinking to some extent of Skip Beat! I’d already taken note of how the Japanese copyright date at the back of the first volume had preceded when Viz’s English translation began by more than half a decade, and then I happened to notice there’d been an anime adaptation. Although this bumped into the assumption that “shojo manga doesn’t get a lot of anime made from it these days,” which just perhaps plays its own role in why I don’t read a lot of it to begin with, I was still left wondering if the anime had got so far and no further into the actual story you were expected to pick up afterwards.
The story did actually seem to do a deft job with “if these two can’t be honest with each other at last, they might end up with third parties.” I do just happen to say every so often how I try to be relaxed in the face of insistences on “how the pairings have to wind up” in stories that aren’t rooted in “romance”; as for this story that was obviously rooted in that, maybe I did toy with the thought that “if the conclusion winds up where this midpoint seems to be aiming, that would certainly be different.” As for what did happen, I think I dealt with it as well; the story had a bit of a lead-out to get used to things.
With each manga volume divided into a relatively small number of long chapters, I’d say I read through it at a good clip. I am a little conscious how I noticed the ads at the backs of the volumes for other Shojo Beat series without feeling much compulsion to start picking them up as well. So far as further fortuitous accidents might go, coming across multiple early volumes of a series at a book sale or something similar would of course be better for everyone than another accident in shipping.
The volumes hadn’t sat around all that long, though, until I did start to think about all the warnings about how fast manga can go out of print regardless of time having passed and circumstances perhaps even having changed since then. I filled in the first gap between the opening volume of Ao Haru Ride and the next in the box by ordering from an area comics store. However, for all of that I did let what I’d accumulated sit for some time, and not with my regular “to be read” pile of manga. When Right Stuf announced a “so long and thanks for all the orders” final sale on in-stock items, though, along with picking up anime from Discotek and AnimEigo I worked out I could at least fill in my second and larger gap in Ao Haru Ride. Before that order of anime and manga had shipped, I started reading the series.
Starting off I noted the tale of Futaba Yoshioka, who starts to think she actually like a boy named Kou in her junior high, only for him to move away just as she’s resolved to try and do something more about it. When Kou shows up again a few years later at Futaba’s high school he’s not as pleasant as before, just a bit edgy and just a bit dangerous, and so the story is under way. I also noted how the art gave the characters wider mouths than those old, winking summations of “big eyes, small mouth” had it, even if in the painted covers and grey-scale interior illustrations the mouths looked more peculiar than in the line art. With all of that, though, I did sort of wonder to what extent I was assuming this series to “represent all shojo manga.” Impressions of certain dismissive comments offered over the years like “all mecha anime’s the same” or even “all anime’s the same” did come to mind for all that I hoped they were only similar to what I might be tempted towards.
I’d thought about trying to continue the series by ordering from the national bookstore chain’s site, and discovered my already ordered volumes had got me quite close to the end of the story. The thought “well, at least it’s not endless” was oddly heartening even if I was thinking to some extent of Skip Beat! I’d already taken note of how the Japanese copyright date at the back of the first volume had preceded when Viz’s English translation began by more than half a decade, and then I happened to notice there’d been an anime adaptation. Although this bumped into the assumption that “shojo manga doesn’t get a lot of anime made from it these days,” which just perhaps plays its own role in why I don’t read a lot of it to begin with, I was still left wondering if the anime had got so far and no further into the actual story you were expected to pick up afterwards.
The story did actually seem to do a deft job with “if these two can’t be honest with each other at last, they might end up with third parties.” I do just happen to say every so often how I try to be relaxed in the face of insistences on “how the pairings have to wind up” in stories that aren’t rooted in “romance”; as for this story that was obviously rooted in that, maybe I did toy with the thought that “if the conclusion winds up where this midpoint seems to be aiming, that would certainly be different.” As for what did happen, I think I dealt with it as well; the story had a bit of a lead-out to get used to things.
With each manga volume divided into a relatively small number of long chapters, I’d say I read through it at a good clip. I am a little conscious how I noticed the ads at the backs of the volumes for other Shojo Beat series without feeling much compulsion to start picking them up as well. So far as further fortuitous accidents might go, coming across multiple early volumes of a series at a book sale or something similar would of course be better for everyone than another accident in shipping.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 06:06 pm (UTC)I have not read the manga, but I really liked the anime Ao Haru Ride – but of course I was disappointed when the anime stopped and was never continued.
In recent years I've been more interested in looking up manga for good series, so it might be that I need to go chase down the manga for this. It's not a high priority, though – and manga is an expensive way to go – unless my library has it. I'm lucky that my city/county library stocks a lot of manga series.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 11:03 pm (UTC)I saw a different comment just a little while ago about "manga being expensive," and must admit to how when I was just starting out as an anime fan (from the "VHS era," when I didn't buy any of it, into the "DVD era") I was tempted to think of manga as "poor man's anime." I suppose the per-unit price doesn't seem extravagant, but there's that matter of how many units a manga can run for...