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Apr. 20th, 2011 10:36 amA story about reading High School Debut: impatient with the library's pace of delivering volumes, I went to the bookstore to sneakily read ahead a little. I sat down in one of the armchairs, volume in hand, next to a tough-looking middle-aged guy in a baseball cap, and glanced over automatically to see what he was reading . . . which turned out to be an earlier volume of High School Debut.
SO IT SEEMS this series has a pretty universal appeal!
On the face of it the premise isn't something that would much interest me - athletic girl goes to high school, decides to dedicate all her energiesto getting a boyfriend, and asks a cool guy if he'll be her tutor in the ways of attracting dudely attention. The magic makeover plot often gives me hives, but I heard this recommended so many times that I picked it up anyway, and you all were right - the execution is kind of ridiculously charming. Haruha, the heroine, is SUPER STRONG AND DETERMINED AND ENTHUSIASTIC IN EVERYTHING; she takes shojo manga as her instruction manual (which leads to the story affectionately skewering most of the standard tropes) and gives ONE HUNDRED AND TEN PERCENT TO THE EFFORT OF BEING A GOOD GIRLFRIEND, so much so that instead of embodying romantic tropes, she ends up totally inverts them. She wants to protect her boyfriend! She'll beat up anyone who talks smack about him! Meanwhile, Yoh may be good-looking and sarcastic, but he's mostly cool by way of apathy; once he gets in a relationship, it turns out he's pretty much completely clueless (he too secretly starts to read shojo manga for the purposes of instruction!), which made him tremendously endearing to me.
After the first few volumes some of the plots get a bit more standard, but it's still awfully sweet and fun to read. However, I did end up with sort of a problem: in the first few chapters, I started noticing that Yoh's expression of perpetual apathy bore an unnerving resemblance to that of Shin from Gokusen, and then I couldn't unsee it. And Haruna is clearly an experiment to see what would happen if you cloned Yankumi in an attempt to duplicate her energy and freakish strength, and then had her raised by a nice normal suburban couple instead of BY THE YAKUZA.
So basically in my head High School Debut is now a Gokusen AU. Which is both good and bad, because on the one hand it's really not fair to compare the two - High School Debut is adorable, but Gokusen's setup is so much more inherently interesting to me, and the way Shin and Yankumi's relationship plays out due to the unusual age difference and the yakuza thing is also so much more interesting and subversive, that High School Debut can't really compete in my heart. On the other hand, IMAGINE HARUNA RAISED BY THE YAKUZA.
SO IT SEEMS this series has a pretty universal appeal!
On the face of it the premise isn't something that would much interest me - athletic girl goes to high school, decides to dedicate all her energiesto getting a boyfriend, and asks a cool guy if he'll be her tutor in the ways of attracting dudely attention. The magic makeover plot often gives me hives, but I heard this recommended so many times that I picked it up anyway, and you all were right - the execution is kind of ridiculously charming. Haruha, the heroine, is SUPER STRONG AND DETERMINED AND ENTHUSIASTIC IN EVERYTHING; she takes shojo manga as her instruction manual (which leads to the story affectionately skewering most of the standard tropes) and gives ONE HUNDRED AND TEN PERCENT TO THE EFFORT OF BEING A GOOD GIRLFRIEND, so much so that instead of embodying romantic tropes, she ends up totally inverts them. She wants to protect her boyfriend! She'll beat up anyone who talks smack about him! Meanwhile, Yoh may be good-looking and sarcastic, but he's mostly cool by way of apathy; once he gets in a relationship, it turns out he's pretty much completely clueless (he too secretly starts to read shojo manga for the purposes of instruction!), which made him tremendously endearing to me.
After the first few volumes some of the plots get a bit more standard, but it's still awfully sweet and fun to read. However, I did end up with sort of a problem: in the first few chapters, I started noticing that Yoh's expression of perpetual apathy bore an unnerving resemblance to that of Shin from Gokusen, and then I couldn't unsee it. And Haruna is clearly an experiment to see what would happen if you cloned Yankumi in an attempt to duplicate her energy and freakish strength, and then had her raised by a nice normal suburban couple instead of BY THE YAKUZA.
So basically in my head High School Debut is now a Gokusen AU. Which is both good and bad, because on the one hand it's really not fair to compare the two - High School Debut is adorable, but Gokusen's setup is so much more inherently interesting to me, and the way Shin and Yankumi's relationship plays out due to the unusual age difference and the yakuza thing is also so much more interesting and subversive, that High School Debut can't really compete in my heart. On the other hand, IMAGINE HARUNA RAISED BY THE YAKUZA.
