Back to MorgantheFae's Profile MorgantheFae's Profile

Genghis Khan: To The Ends of the Earth and the Sea tells the story of Chinggis Khan’s early life and rise to power. (I use the preferred Mongolian spelling of Temujin’s title both out of respect and because it’s easier for English speakers to tell how it’s pronounced this way. It starts with a soft G like in ‘general’, not a hard G like in ‘get’.) So how does it do?

Honestly, not well. Chinggis Khan had a long and storied career, and even focusing just on his early life, it’s far beyond the scope of a single-volume manga. To the Ends of the Earth and ... Sky is centered on his relationship with his anda, his sworn blood brother, Jamuka, but in an extremely disjointed way. The manga hits the major events, more or less, but without any real attempt to connect them to each other in a cohesive narrative. If i hadn’t spent several years studying the Mongol Empire out of my own interest, i would have had trouble following the story.

In a similar vein, the characters are left undeveloped – there’s no sense of who they are as people, except perhaps for Temujin himself, and certainly no explanation of why they’re fighting. The idea to show their feud through the eyes of Temujin’s firstborn son Jochi and Jamuka’s son was an interesting one, and one i would have loved to see done well, but the way it was written is clumsy at best. The author’s note at the end of the series says that this was their first manga, and it shows.

Overall, this manga is one of those stories that was beyond its author’s ability to write. While the art was excellent and well-suited to the subject matter, i wanted to like this manga a lot more than i actually did. It’s worth checking out if you have an interest in the Mongol Empire, as i do, but i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read at least one biography of the real Chinggis Khan. (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford is a good place to start.) Those who are familiar with the history behind To the Ends of the Earth and the Sea might find Jochi’s perspective interesting, or they might be frustrated by the large gaps in the narrative. I felt both, so i’ll leave it up to your discretion.

Et Cetera is the story of a girl who dreams of becoming a Hollywood starlet, but in order to get there she has to team up with a shady missionary and fight her way through the American West using the magic gun her grandfather left her. It draws its powers from the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and the shots vary based on what animals happen to be around. It has a twin gun based on the Greco-Babylonian zodiac that operates in the same way; both are fairly standard shonen fare. After a few volumes, a crime syndicate based in New York, hunting for both ... guns, is introduced, providing an impetus and intensity the story might not otherwise have had.

Baskerville is not anyone’s idea of a missionary. He wears his hair long, he cheats at cards, and he has a decidedly unholy interest in Mingchao’s Eto gun. At first i thought it was because Mingchao is a Daoist that she doesn’t recognize how unlike a Christian priest he is, but she genuinely assumes that everyone around her is who they say they are and trusts them without question – Benkate is another character Mingchao really should be more suspicious of. I find her naivete endearing rather than annoying, but i can see other readers going the other way. Some of the supporting characters get a great deal more development than others; Fino and Alternate are great, while Benkate, Yaghi, and most of the other characters including the villains are little more than cardboard cutouts. Still, they fit together well in the story Nakazaki is trying to tell.

The art is very messy, in that patented early-2000s-shonen way. Mingchao is adorable, but many of the adult characters have weird and off-putting proportions. (Such as the women’s snakelike torsos. And the men’s torsos. Basically what i’m saying is this artist can’t draw bare torsos.) It does get ecchi at times, but it flows so naturally – you know those scenes are there for fanservice, but they feel like an organic part of the story rather than something that was shoehorned in.

Normally i’m a stickler for calling out historical inaccuracy, but the manga put a disclaimer in the first chapter acknowledging that Hollywood wasn’t founded until well after the time period depicted, and frankly, i could see a girl of Mingchao’s era wanting to be an actress; it would just be heading east to Broadway instead of west to Hollywood. I can forgive that, since it is quite a fun story. On the other hand, there are short stories like the one about a boy and his mother who raise cattle but don’t brand them, and then act surprised and offended when their cattle are claimed as mavericks. (By common consensus among cattle ranchers of this period, unbranded cattle were up for grabs.) Mingchao was right to tell them off for not “putting their names” on the cows. The geography of this series is difficult to keep track of; it took until the appearance of a map in volume five for me to realize that the entire story didn’t take place in California. Even when they start identifying settings, though, there is no strong sense of place.

There is one aspect of the story that quite bothered me, that i suspect the average reader would gloss right over. The second volume introduces a character named Luriele, a young girl in a group of traveling performers who used to be a dancer. She had to stop dancing after an accident lost her the use of her legs, everyone believes permanently, and Mingchao is quite supportive of her desire to one day dance again. That all is fine, but the way it’s ultimately handled is that the damage to Luriele’s legs was purely a mental block, and as soon as Luriele is given a strong enough impetus to walk without her crutches again, she has no trouble at all moving the way she did before. Her muscles didn’t even atrophy. It’s horrible and ableist and cheap, and i can’t get past it, even though she was only a minor character.

You may have noticed my complaints are focused on the early part of the story; this is because the first few volumes, about Mingchao and Baskerville wandering through the west, are meandering and make it easy to zero in on any problems. Once the manga introduces the syndicate and our heroes have to fight them, the story becomes much more focused and enjoyable, a smoother ride overall, though i think some of the penultimate-chapter reveals were also a bit questionable.

Don’t come here for a serious Western or historical accuracy, because this manga is silly as all get-out. But Et Cetera is a fun read if you don’t think seriously about it.

Shinigami Alice is the story of Masaki, a teenage girl who gets attacked while walking home late at night, and Hinageshi, the assassin who kills her attacker. Although Hinageshi is required to kill any witnesses to her work, she spares Masaki on a whim, and the two of them continue to be thrown together. When Hinageshi’s organization sets out to punish her for letting a witness live, Masaki shelters her, leading to the two of them ultimately protecting each other in different ways.

The setup to how they come together is slightly different than in the oneshot, and i find i prefer the series version. The ... emotions feel more real. Hinageshi doesn’t understand why she chose to spare Masaki’s life, and tries to figure it out. Masaki can’t forget the mysterious girl who saved her life, but unlike the oneshot doesn’t become instantly obsessed. She’s drawn in more slowly, and that gives Hinageshi a chance to develop her own feelings. While both versions ultimately have the same theme, the series does better at expressing that theme, having the time to build up to Masaki’s final line about Hinageshi’s viewpoint.

The characters are pretty great, considering that they only have two volumes to develop in. while Masaki seems like a normal girl on the surface, she carries her own darkness in her heart, which allows her to connect to Hinageshi in a way a truly ordinary schoolgirl would not. (I do appreciate that the author explains why she lives alone, something i’ve gotten used to other yuri leaving unaddressed.) Hinageshi has become an emotionless killing machine through her life as an assassin, but due to her contact with Masaki, she slowly regains her sense of humanity, and i enjoyed watching the two of them fall in love despite their better instincts. The third major character, Camellia, is a yandere. Like Hinageshi, she turned out warped due to growing up as an assassin, but instead of shutting down her emotions, she feels them too strongly. Her obsession with Hinageshi makes sense in the context of their shared past, and i found her wish at the end of the series quite moving.

Normally i don’t like the sort of cutesy artwork Shinigami Alice uses, but in this case i think it gives a lovely dissonance to the dark subject matter. Hinageshi in particular looks like a Victorian doll, and seeing that cute face splattered with blood makes for a great visual.

The author mentions in a note that they were asked to write something with a similar vibe to the anime Noir, and i have to say that they succeeded. It’s a shame MAL doesn’t allow you to recommend a manga on an anime’s page, because as someone who loved both series, i would recommend them to each other’s fans. This is a charming tale of murder and love, and honestly, anyone not afraid of dark elements in fiction should check it out.

Gorgeous Carat: Galaxy does not pick up where the first series left off, but an unspecified amount of time after the man characters’ return to France. There’s no reference to the North Africa arc at all, as if the previous two and a half volumes hadn’t happened at all. This was disappointing for me, as a great deal happened in those volumes (over half of the original series, for those of you keeping track at home); events that would have had a permanent impact on Florian, Ray, and their relationship. There should be no going back to the way things were before, but the only ... change appears to be the rumors going around society about the nature of Ray and Florian’s relationship.

The story itself feels more like an arc from an overarching series than an independent sequel. A relative of Florian’s going through hard times contacts him in the hopes that his sugar daddy (?) can help out by buying a few heirlooms. Florian convinces Ray to go check it out, and the two of them plus Laila travel to the remote mountain estate. They meet the daughter of the previous master of the house, Eleonora, who has developed a fixation on Florian since his last visit ten years earlier and wants to steal him away from Ray. Her story is without question a tragedy, so modern readers who want everything to be fluff will want to steer clear.

I think the main reason anyone would pick Galaxy up after the first series will have done so because they want to see the progression of Ray and Florian’s relationship. In that regard, Galaxy is absolutely a disappointment. It’s a pretty good mystery/action story, but with very little space to let the characters breathe or emote. Their relationship is still quite ambiguous, with no real character development for anyone other than Eleonora. Even the attempt to connect this volume’s storyline to the Black Hand plot from the previous series feels quite clumsy. I did like Galaxy, but i can’t help wishing for more; the pacing was too fast to develop properly. Even letting the same story spread out over two volumes would have let it breathe and better convey what these characters are going through. There’s still a couple more sequels after this, though, so maybe they will bring some closure to the overarching story of Gorgeous Carat.

The general summary of Gorgeous Carat you’ll find if you’re trying to decide whether to read it is that a phantom thief becomes enamoured of a young man’s jewel-like eyes, and determines to make them his at any cost. From that, it’s easy to assume the series is a trashy yaoi and write it off. That is the basic starting concept, and there is certainly a trashy yaoi element to this manga, but i don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of Gorgeous Carat as a whole. The story is much more complicated than that, and the story is far more important than the sex or ... fanservice.

One thing that threw me was that the story is not actually about Ray’s activities as the phantom thief Noir. I was expecting something like CLAMP’s Man of Many Faces but less lighthearted, or Maurice Leblanc’s short stories about Arsène Lupin, which were a clear inspiration, but this wasn’t that at all. After the first volume – really, after the first chapter or two – Ray didn’t pull many heists. The story was actually about a rival crime organization, the Black Hand, which has chapters across much of the world. Florian encountered them more or less inadvertently and dragged Ray after him, but in the second volume we learn that there’s actually a deeper tie to Ray, and the remainder of the story is about the villain’s obsession with him. It kind of feels like You Higuri wasn’t sure what kind of a story she was telling and found herself dragged around by the narrative. As a writer myself, i can sympathize, but typically you can go back after the fact, clean it up, and make it look like that was what you were planning to write all along. Not being able to do that is one of the shortcomings of serialized storytelling, and Gorgeous Carat in particular suffered from it.

Yes, this manga is dark. It has elements of human trafficking, physical and sexual abuse, drug addiction, and manipulation that may be hard for some people to read, and if you’re uncomfortable with those topics, i do not recommend you pick this series up. One thing i respect about the series is that You Higuri doesn’t shy away from the negative impact these actions have, and doesn’t romanticize them. Florian, who bears the brunt of the abuse, has trauma from it that doesn’t magically go away as soon as the experience is over. The power dynamics definitely need to be addressed, since it’s a common problem in yaoi manga for one partner to be abusive, the other to meekly take it, and for that to be portrayed as a healthy relationship. At the beginning, Ray does start out that way. He does essentially buy Florian off his family, who have fallen on hard times. He does whip him in an attempt to gain information about a jewel he intends to steal from Florian’s family. But after the first or second chapter, Ray stops mistreating Florian, and the two of them are able to develop a much better relationship (still not ideal, mind), to the point where it’s believable that they might fall in love. They don’t fall into bed with each other right away, as in so many trashy yaoi; in fact, they only kiss twice, in the fourth volume (i’m expecting more from the sequels). The main source of the darkness doesn’t come from their interactions, but rather the villain Azura’s obsession with Ray, and his using Florian in an attempt to get at Ray’s weak points. Again, this isn’t presented as fanservice as another manga might have done, but a logical progression of a dark story.

The supporting characters are also quite fleshed out. I’m particularly fond of Laila, as it’s rare to see a complex female character in yaoi. Every phantom thief needs a detective nemesis hunting them down, and for Noir that’s Solomon Sugar, who is kinda fun but not fully developed. It’s hinted that he has more of his own stuff going on that connects to Ray and the villain Azura, so it’s possible Solomon will be more fleshed out in the sequels as well. Other characters such as Noel, Louise, Fatima, and so on all feel like people in their own right, with their own goals and motivations.

Normally i talk about historical accuracy in my reviews, but i’m not familiar enough with the histories of early-20th-century France, northern Africa, or the Crusades to be able to judge that for this manga. Aside from one question that came up at the very beginning – why would Mughal rulers (who were Muslim, for those who don’t know) embed their precious jewel into the forehead of a Hindu statue? – and then never came up again, there was nothing that raised any historical alarm bells for me. That’s the best i can do with this aspect.

Gorgeous Carat is far from perfect; i’ll be the first to acknowledge that. The plot got away from the author, and some of the darker elements can be read as in bad taste. In spite of that, though, i found Gorgeous Carat to be impossible to put down, a story that gets its hooks into you and won’t let go. I enjoyed it immensely. It was just as dark and complex as i like my fiction to be, and the male-male relations served the purpose of the story, not the story serving the purposes of yaoi fanservice. This is a great historical adventure story featuring queer characters, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

Roid is about the members of a robotics club, one of whom builds an android so close to human form that AI technology isn’t well-developed enough to run it successfully. Yui sees this android as her ideal self, building it to be the person she wants to be, and even jokes about uploading her consciousness into it so she can use the robot body instead of her own – something highly illegal in this world and scientifically impossible in ours. But when another member of the club, Reina, disappears with a malfunctioning robot, she creates a duplicate of her consciousness to power the android and ... rescue her friend. Of course, having what are essentially two versions of Yui around creates a love triangle between the engineer, her android duplicate, and the programmer Reina.

What makes Roid really interesting is that the android, named Anna, is running on a copy of a living human’s personality and memories, so all her memories up to this point are of being human, and she has no idea how to define herself. She thinks like a human, not an android, but her body’s composition and capabilities are unquestionably mechanical. She finds herself relating to both androids and humans, with difficulty determining right from wrong because she can’t figure out whether she should be thinking from an android’s or human’s perspective. I truly enjoyed her moral dilemma, also experienced by the mysterious villain of the piece.

I also liked that the author chose to have Anna powered by an AI that was a copy of a human, since that’s how “uploading your consciousness into a robot” actually works, but i rarely see it explored in fiction. The way Yui becomes jealous of Anna, and for that matter the love triangle they form, feels very real to me. Keep in mind, though, that there’s very little in the way of romance going on here; if you’re looking for a good romance rather than science-philosophy with a gay twist, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

I’ve been dancing around the subject of Yui’s wheelchair, because i’m honestly not sure how to address it. I’m all for the combination of disability, scifi, and queerness in my stories, but i’m not sure how i feel about the way it’s handled here. On the one hand, the author doesn’t make a big deal of her disability, which is great, but on the other there are scenes where i wish they’d put a little more focus on her chair. For example, she’s often shown at the top or bottom of the stairs outside her apartment, with the implication that she just came down or went up, but doesn’t explain how she managed them. It’s not like After We Gazed At The Starry Sky, which always remembers to address accessibility in the places Subaru goes. I said earlier that she built Anna in the image of her ideal self and that she talked about moving her own consciousness into the android body; part of that is because she wants to walk again after an accident where she lost the use of her legs. Some disabled readers might take issue with that, while others will relate. I feel it’s worth taking into consideration when deciding whether to read this manga. I did appreciate the reasons Yui gave for not having her legs replaced by cybernetic prosthetics.

Personally, i enjoyed this manga. I dig stories that explore the borderland between AI and biological life, and Roid was all about that. It did a great job, and while it was disappointingly short, i’d recommend this to scifi fans.

The Mercenary & The Novelist is a story that tries very hard both to stand out in a crowd and follow the same pattern as the majority. The result was a fairly fun read, though it was a bit more generic than i would have preferred. The world is an interesting mashup of the American West with a medieval European theocracy. I will confess that my interest in the series dropped several notches when i saw it was based on the same “guilds and all-powerful church” theme that appears all too often in anime, manga, and light novels lately. Although that element is hardly original, ... blending the concept into a western was a unique enough take to keep me reading. The papacy provides a good villain, disbanding the mercenary’s guild in the first chapter and censoring the novelist’s works. Just what you’d expect from a theocratic government.

Although MAL lists this manga as “ongoing,” every other site and the manga itself seem certain it ended around twenty chapters. (Due to the way they’ve been posted online, it’s hard to determine an exact number.)

The story itself is pretty good, full of political intrigue over secret experiments meant to cause immortality. Again, the bad guy’s goals were too easily predicted by the novelist. Keeping the question of /why/ the priest wanted this information, why the mercenary guild was forced to disband, and what connection there is to a fallen tyrannical empire up in the air would have held reader interest better. The last-minute reveal that there’s something bigger going on didn’t help, and should have been elaborated on more. The political and science fiction aspects of this series are fantastic. Unfortunately, the characters feel like they were cut from a template and don’t carry the story as far as they should have. The story not going far enough will be a running theme in this review.

The novelist, Verda, started out as a fun charactera fun character. She’s haughty and eager to push people’s buttons, but her enthusiasm for storytelling and insistence on accurate information are strong. Her certainty that Sword should be lusting after her is kind of off-putting, but allos are allos i guess. It makes more sense knowing that she learned how to perceive the world through fiction – that’s always romo-centric. If a male and female character spend any time together, the expectation is that they will fall in love. She did begin to wear on me as the series continued, mainly because of how easily everything goes her way; though she wasn’t prepared to camp out, everything else plays out exactly according to her plan. It would be more interesting if things went wrong. Sword the mercenary is more bland; i can’t help but wish Verda had managed to hire one of his friends from the beginning instead. He could be the protagonist of any guild manga and brings very little to the story. The “twist” regarding his character was disappointingly predictable. His rival mercenary, Gordo, was far more entertaining, and i can’t help but wish the series was focused on him instead.

I also wish they’d gone into more depth of the scifi elements, the immortality experiments and the parallel worlds. The politics are likewise treated as background details, though the theocracy’s control of society, their censorship of Verda’s books, and even the underground LGBT rights movement could have driven the series a lot farther. Even the theocracy as a major player having a negative impact on the country is forgotten about as time goes on. To me, the author neglected the primary aspects of this story to make it unique and interesting.

That about sums up my feelings on The Mercenary And The Novelist. It had a lot of potential, but the author didn’t do nearly enough with it. If you like fantasy guild -type stories, you’ll probably get more out of this than i did.

In an attempt to broker peace, two feuding families of assassins arrange a marriage between the daughter of one family and the son of the other. The bride-to-be, Lilithia, throws both families into turmoil when she rejects the marriage in favor of pursuing her fiancé’s sister, Lu Die. Lilithia is willing to throw away everything for love, while Lu Die is torn between her feelings and her loyalty to her family.

This is a one-volume manga, which means that there’s not a lot of room to expand on the story. The central story of Lilithia and Lu Die is handled well, but the supporting characters are ... underdeveloped, and the background context is largely unknown, for example why the families are enemies, or what the culture of the world is like. All we know about that is that same-gender marriages don’t appear to be recognized, or else that would provide a simple solution to the drama. There’s certainly a potential for tragedy in this setup. Lu Die and Lilithia don’t expect to get a happy ending, and another character compares their relationship to Romeo and Juliet, but our two leads find a solution that works for them. Some readers may find the ending too ambiguous for comfort, but i believe our heroines were happy.

Overall, i don’t think Marriage Black had much of an impact on me. It wasn’t a bad story, but i’m not sure it will prove to be particularly memorable. The art was the same way, neither especially beautiful or spectacularly bad. If you’re looking for a way to spend the time, or a yuri manga that doesn’t take place at a school, this is worth a shot.

This is one of those rare BL manga with a worthwhile story attached. It revolves around Fran, a former outlaw who found that life unfulfilling and became the sheriff of a small town in the middle of nowhere, his chance encounter with a Native American man, and his difficulty in escaping his past. Secondary protagonist Toto saves Fran from a slow death in the desert, despite not particularly wanting anything to do with him. (One element that i particularly appreciated was Toto’s fear that associating too much with Fran would cause him to lose his own culture, something that Native people struggled with in this ... time period.) Unable to get Toto out of his mind, Fran goes looking for him again, and the two develop a bond.

As far as romance goes, the romantic element is low-key – we don’t really see any of the common romance tropes – but the connection between Fran and Toto isn’t. Fran is able to open up to Toto about his past, something he could never do with the people he works for as sheriff. And while it’s never addressed why Toto is on his own, he too keeps coming back to meet Fran, rather than spending time with his own people. The question of why he’s alone is one i really wish had been addressed – are they gone? Is he an outcast? What happened in his past? But the question of his background and circumstances is the only problem i had with this story. There’s a poignance to these two lonely people coming together that is going to stay with me for a long time, and when they do have sex, it’s more about the emotional charge than the fanservice appeal.

This is hands down one of my favorite gay manga i’ve read, and one of my favorite Westerns (in any medium) that i’ve ever encountered. I would love to see this story adapted into a movie – it certainly has a happier ending than Brokeback! The art is fantastic, and i would definitely recommend this series.

Macaroni is the story of an orphan on a journey, who is being hunted by persons unknown. He doesn’t know why they’re after him, and in fact at first doesn’t even seem to realize the danger he’s in. When the priest who raised him is unable to continue the journey, he hires a bounty hunter to act as main character Robin’s bodyguard. A gunslinger who happens to be around and looking for some action joins up, and the three of them travel together, dodging pursuit all the while. It’s a fun story, though the mystery has the potential to be a bit frustrating for a ... while. At first, i was dubious about the storyline – i didn’t understand why Robin was being hunted, and wasn’t sure it could be suitably resolved in a 2-volume manga. Without any spoilers, i will say that the last two chapters wrapped up the plot to my complete satisfaction. The reveal makes complete sense in the context of a western, and the pacing was perfect for the length of the series. It all ties together.

I hate to say it, but the art is not good, very early-2000s yaoi, with the blocky faces and awful lips. It gets the job done, but it’s not a selling point. The female characters are pretty, though, and the clothes are better than in some manga westerns that i’ve seen. There are plenty of female characters, unusual for both a western and a BL, and they’re all quite likeable. I was particularly fond of Ted’s sisters. As for the main characters, Robin doesn’t seem to quite fit into the world – his personality and thought processes feel very Japanese. Which is fair, the writer is Japanese after all, but the other leads Sydney and Ted, along with the supporting cast, blend much better into the world of a western, with the exception of Ted’s katana. A U.S. cavalry sword would make more sense, though still a bit unusual. The villains are believable and the cast all play off each other well.

Now let’s get to the part i’m sure y’all are looking for: the gayness. Although MAL has this series tagged as erotica, there is no sexual content and even the romance is lowkey to the point where it can almost be ignored. In fact, i would argue that this is more a case of “homoerotic fanservice” than “gay romance.” I’m not sure i’d go so far as to call it queerbaiting (i’m honestly on the fence about that), but it definitely wasn’t what i was looking for as a queer who enjoys westerns. Not everything has to be Gemma Files’ Hexslinger trilogy, but putting a little effort into developing a plausible relationship would have been nice.

Overall, this was a pretty fun read. The characters were likeable, and the story enjoyable. Its only flaws were that the art was lacking with regard to men’s faces, and the “romantic” elements left me with a bad aftertaste. I think it would have come off better if the author had written it as a basic western with no romance whatsoever, rather than trying to shoehorn in some BL. Ted had the right idea, shutting down any attempts at romo that happened on his watch. Fantastic aro representation, right there. So i guess there is something for the queer community after all. Macaroni isn’t what i wanted it to be, but it wasn’t a bad way to pass an hour or so.