Tag: hitomi-chan is shy with strangers

The Year in Manga

TiberiusLeave a comment

What I’ve been reading this year

Right before we get to the crux of this post, I had a second look at my notes and noticed a gap between November 28 and December 12. I forgot to fill that in in time so before we properly wrap it up, next week will be something of an intermission discussing a controversial video game even by RockStar’s standards. Here’s a few vague hints: Jack Thompson tried to have it made illegal, it was banned in several countries, including the US at first, and the real kicker, it’s primarily a stealth game, so you get rewards when you knock skulls around without people noticing. Now for the real focus of this post.

The end of the year is on the horizon and before we close out the Year of Cordis Die, let’s recap some of the manga I’ve been pirating. I’ve talked at length about manga I’ve been pirating and recommending for as long as this blog has been up, some series I’ve recommended and others I haven’t mentioned yet. So for this post, there will be updates on what I’ve been reading this year, coupled with some looks at manga I’ve yet to mention on the blog. Here’s some series I have lined up, unordered:

  1. Dosanko Gyaru wa Namaramenkoi/is Mega Cute/Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable
  2. Torako, Anmari Kowashicha Dame Da Yo
  3. Shihai Shoujo Kubaru-chan
  4. Redo of Healer (T^T)
  5. Hitomi-chan is Shy Around Strangers

Some of these are familiar to the long-timers, others I haven’t spoken a word of once on this blog, even in passing. Take these as holiday recommendations to get you through the time-honored tradition of repeating yesterday’s Christmas songs until Boxing Day.

    Having finished the anime adaptation last year, along with its stellar opening soundtrack, I wanted to continue into the manga. The last episode of the manga covers chapters 31 to 32.5 and right after that the rest is saved for the next season set to air sometime in the distant future when apes walk upright again after millions of years subservient to the superior human and AI starts thinking about installing an emotions software (and those electric f[dial-up]kos can keep dreaming because I want my clankers to be as unaware of the outside world as possible), so after October 2026 or April 2027.

    Now, animanga taking us away from Tokyo because everyone goes there and letting us see the rest of Japan like Hokkaido in this one and Fukuoka historically in Excel Saga (that series doesn’t tell you explicitly that it’s Fukuoka but the mangaka is from there so who else but him, right?) is a neat little tradition when the lights of the world’s largest metro start to get blinding. We’ve still yet to see a mainstream series go to Shikoku (Matsuyama is right there) and until the prefectures on that island band together and spit out a series for us, we’ve got to make-do with RNGesus Japan edition.

    So what has happened ever since Tsubasa charmed these Minnesota-accented Hokkaidoans with his rich boy Tokyo Prefecture charm? Well, I’m still in the middle of that arc but we finally see Tsubasa’s mother, Renka. Hospitalized from running herself ragged trying to raise the perfect Japanese son, it’s a good thing she’s already bound to a hospital bed because knowing a son of hers is besties with a trio of gyaru-tachi would give her a heart attack. Also, it’s interesting that the grandmother, Kaede, is healthier than her own daughter, but that’s the thing about that RNGesus character, he’s a funny guy. Less of a downer than Buddha, all things considered.

    As it happens, Tsubasa was brought to Hokkaido largely to prove that he can excel even outside his comfort zone and on the friends and family front, he has passed, but Renka being the type of mother who’d disown her child on her deathbed for getting an A and not an A+ while also being captain of the chess club and the like concludes that frolicking with the popular girls has led him astray and will return him to Tokyo no questions asked to return to his former glory as a golden boy.

    Not that one.

    Until Kaede, Hirotaka, and Minami herself show Renka that this level of control over the boy’s future and lifestyle is utterly unnecessary, releasing a weight from his shoulders (sort of) under the condition that she be allowed to witness his growth in real time. I’m still reading the manga online and expect to report back either when the second season is announced or around the same time next year, whichever comes first.

    • What the f[punch]k are you lookin’ at, jackass?!

    Japanese subcultures come and go over the years and the subculture that had its halcyon days in the 1970s through 90s was that of the bancho/yankii, the delinquent of sorts. Numerous characters fit the mold from Jotaro Kujo, who was in his element in 1989; to Taison Maeda, who was conceptualized right in the middle of this era at the same time Stardust Crusaders started serializing; from Eikichi Onizuka, who represented the progenitors as they were growing up even at the time, to Josuke Higashikata, who Hirohiko Araki knew would be seen as dated even by 1999 as gyaru were starting to emerge and become more popular.

    Even now as Japan has crossed over into the cholo era (yes, really), some mangaka and anime dedicate characters to a bygone era because nostalgia for an earlier era is not just a time-honored tradition, but a worldwide phenomenon, if fans of pre-revival Doctor Who are anything to go by.

    !EXTERMINATE!

    And I’m not immune to that myself with how often I look for content from the early 2000s, when immediately following a geopolitical tragedy the decade chose to be edgy and serious and smiling was against the law, but I digress.

    Mangaka Nujima got a kick out of introducing East Asian folklore and horror stories in Mysteries, Maidens, and Mysterious Disappearances, but next to that we were given another series, this time about a shy tomboy who gets moved to a rough and tumble high school where the most ferocious girls challenge her… and get humbled at every step. Even the boss Sukeban girl was utterly embarrassed in the first chapter after having her breasts exposed by accident and she hasn’t been able to forget it.

    The translated name is Torako, Don’t Break Anything, and when you’re built like you were supposed to accompany Arthur, King of the Britons on the quest for the Holy Grail, trying not to break s[porcelain]t gets harder and harder, especially when the school you’re in has it as official policy to be a delinquent. Most of the student body looks like it could take on Jotaro Kujo, not necessarily successfully.

    Protagonist Aiko “Torako” Torasawa transfers to a delinquent school and without consent must dodge attacks from the main delinquent girl group that gradually accepts her as one of their own. This manga being an older work of Nujima’s some of what he put in the East Asia version of Urban Legends can be seen in this one. So are there giant boobs in this one as was the case for Whereabouts Unknown? Yes, and multiple… but this is a short series that ran for 20 chapters in 2016. I couldn’t find any associated wiki pages for this series and MangaDex is not the most reliable regarding this information, so I’m adding a pinch of salt to this timeline.

    This series doesn’t take itself as seriously as the other one so funny fanservice is more prevalent than in the other one. Be mindful though that before we got Sumireko’s Oppai of Truth, we have Torako-chan’s Premium Mediums. Would help if we had a medium with premium mediums, but I so far haven’t seen a manga about a fortune teller lady with an average chest size.

    • Before you think about killing yourself, you wanna be my puppet and fall in love with a random chick?

    The official title translates to Ruling Girl Kubaru-chan and the plot of the manga lives up to that ideal with the main male protagonist submitting himself to his female classmate’s whims not by force but by coercion. Given the state he’s in after the first chapter, the poor boy doesn’t have much of an opportunity to resist; he was already driven to ending it all anyway, so the man feels like has nothing worth living for until Kubaru tries to play him like a chess piece. Which fate do you consider the worst? Well, looking at it, no one is playing with a full deck and everyone has problems. The characters all feel real but just about every chapter has a giant layer of what the f[siren]k attached. Someone should go ask Nujima if he can lend some of those Mysterious Disappearances warning signs to this manga instead; the tone of the manga makes it very unpredictable.

    What makes it interesting is that the mangaka’s forewords are always humorous little comments. For example, the main character could be bracing to be a disgusting rape victim and then the chapter ends and the mangaka’s like, “check out this butterfly I found in my backyard.” Dude, your own MC is about to get molested, the f[alarms]k is this??

    The manga starts with Yuto Kiba about to toss himself off the roof, due in large part to a series of misunderstandings that have made him a bad bedfellow to his classmates. Then spunky, eccentric Kubaru proclaims that she can change his life for the better… after he breaks his arm trying to kill himself.

    Alive if not exactly well he may be, that was just the beginning. I’d spoil some of the chapters here, but I don’t believe even some of what’s been going on in this damn manga. Still ongoing, still on MangaDex, and I might dedicate an individual post to the series in the future (gotta move some stuff around for that). Just got to wait and see.

    • (ಠ_ಠ)

    I… was curious… to see what else the source material had in store and, uh… this is a job for the big book of reaction memes.

    (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

    There’s two versions of the anime and both of their showings are polite. Why do I say that knowing this screenshot exists in the uncensored version?

    Because the manga holds nothing back. I’m serious, the anime was, for lack of a more appropriate term charitable to its cast with all the raping and blasting going on. Visually, it could’ve been even more shocking and the interview between the Rui Tsukiyo and The Anime Man reveals as much:

    Channel: The Anime Man

    (ノ _ <,, )

    I think, if it’s all the same to you, I’m not so sure if I’d like to explore what women consider edgy and dangerous. For a guy, it’d probably be a reading off of every slur and every offensive gesture in every language and culture; groups like the National Socialist Movement and the Klan would have to reconsider their lives having been outdone by the least racist 4channer. A woman’s fantasies–if the internet isn’t completely full of s[honk]t–are being waited on hand and foot by a smartly dressed bison or wolf or lion by day and being bred like the females of these respective anthropomorphic animals…

    Maybe I’ve been watching too many reactions to Shoe0nhead’s video about a certain dark fantasy romance novel that I refuse to name or allude to. Barely counts as romance (and the author needs to reassess what age millennials are, just saying), and that’s the most I’ll ever touch on the subject for the foreseeable future.

    For the finer details of what the manga entails passed the adapted chapters, well, there’s some changes between what got greenlit and what needed to be changed. So dark themes and imagery alone isn’t a deal-breaker, but explicit use of degrading language and BDSM clothing with emphasis on the SM is, especially when a spare-ess princess orders the servant (read: sex slave) to wear it under penalty of death… or worse: unanesthetized castration, and I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that the Jioral Kingdom is familiar with such a tactic, but I’ve yet to prove it.

    (>_<) (~_~)

    Once again, I’m in strong recommendation towards the gender-reverse isekai and the sexual deviant isekai for the simple fact that these two have a lot of fun with the concept. We here in the west have done sex comedy before and animanga shows that it’s not to be outdone. Ecchi is the proof.

    • For such a tough-looking face, she’s actually just really shy.

    Finally, and for a tonal cleanser, back to high school romcom between a short king and his tall, shy, athletic wife. I haven’t been able to keep up with this series as closely as I used to, but I occasionally check in. With the news that it wrapped up serialization in Spring of this year, my excuse trough has gotten lighter with only work and several more animanga series I have saved in, like, 250 other tabs across all my devices and browsers.

    My muscle memory hasn’t evolved past 2005 Internet Explorer

    From the series’ inception until its conclusion, it’s managed to keep a relatively small fanbase over the years, so it doesn’t attract a lot of newsworthy controversy if at all. On the one hand: great, that means less weirdos barge in and try to change things or “literally me” the characters to death; but on the other hand: dang, how do I know what kind of news is going on with the production of this series? Chorisuke Natsumi doesn’t seem to need the media buzz to get his manga off the ground with social media posts from both fans and himself doing that much of the heavy lifting, but as I said ages ago with the creator of Mysterious Girlfriend X, readily available footage of Natsumi are hard to come by, but at least we know this guy is still alive. He just finished a manga this year.

    Still, Scrutinous Saliva Sucker got a little 12 episode anime and there aren’t any hints that that’s next for Sharkboy‘s Shy Sister. If it happens, neat. If not, alright then; numerous manga don’t get an adaptation for ages if at all with some getting greenlit from the cutting room floor. I don’t have any hard and concrete predictions to make for this, short of what I wrote about in a different post covering it at length. All that’s left to say is that it maintains its cutesy, slice of life, wholesome goodness from start to finish with hints that Hitomi and Yuu become more at the end.

    (^v^)/

    Muscle waifu in wedding attire with friends in attendance, the thing that riles me up the most about the genre is that it ends after the couple ties the knot. Can’t we see Yuu as a dad or Hitomi as a mom? Come on now!!

    But at least there’s something to chew on compared to this:

    And again, ecchi is always stellar, but it can shine even brighter with a strong plot. But that’s true of everything in fiction.

      The Shy Shark-toothed High School Tomboy with Resting Bitch Face

      Tiberius1 Comment

      That… could’ve been shorter

      Stop me if this sounds familiar in, not just animanga, but in media on the whole. A short guy way in over his head takes chances with the taller, at times stoic or stoic-presenting girl. By way of his bumbling charm, he wears her down and she agrees to one date. Turns out shortman is a charmer beyond all and the two are an item. Maybe they have a family and live on a tropical island with a talking turtle.

      Admittedly, she made the first move, but Krillin won out in the end, so why split the hairs that Krillin has now been able to grow out?

      Even if you weren’t thinking about a specific pairing, you may have seen it enough times to consider its frequency in media. I definitely have… if only just now. There’s quite a few of these in the trope that come to mind right now

      • Fix-it Felix and Sgt. Calhoun from Wreck-it Ralph: aside from the villain walking away from villainy, the protagonist finds his way into the arms of a top soldier woman, and by the end of the movie, he’s her groom.
      • Krillin and 18: the very picture above clearly didn’t happen overnight. Being the last one left standing when the remaining Z fighters were pummeled by Gero’s Androids, 18 was the one to proposition Krillin with a kiss on the cheek, when she was strong enough to fold Vegeta like a gyoza while 17 punched Piccolo’s and Tien’s spines out. Why the short bald one of all people? Perhaps Toriyama was feeling merciful on our favorite monk.
      • Mario and Peach: there’s probably better couples from the Nintendo Universe, but going to what’s easy, the Italian plumber working in Brooklyn gets suckered into a strange world where mushrooms are enemies, flowers let you throw fireballs, and a giant firebreathing turtle kidnaps a princess. Doing this for over 40 years (happy anniversary, Mario!!), I doubt they’re the progenitors of the trope, but they’re an early example, or at least Mario is from the Donkey Kong days.

      And now the subject of this week’s post: Hitomi-chan is Shy with Strangers

      Japanese name: Hitomi-chan wa Hito Mishiri

      The plot of this manga is that a second-year high school student, Yuu Usami, is taking a train to school and gets the most menacing glare from a scary looking taller girl. He figures out pretty quickly that that’s just her default face (many such cases), and noticing that he’s wearing the same uniform as her, once Usami gets off the train, the girl follows him. He’s expecting some kind of beat down, but she simply walks over to him, looks him straight in the eye… and asks for directions to the high school, seeing as she’s a new student and first year. She eventually introduces herself as Hitomi Takano.

      Sounds awkward in retrospect, doesn’t it? Cold hard truth, I relate to this very much. I’ve been the shy guy and the introvert involuntarily adopted by the boisterous extroverts who have attention at their beck and call. The shy part is getting someone’s attention, whether they’re with someone or not — and the introvert part is choosing to be in another world than with people on average. Not like it’s hard for me to make friends; I do, but there’s only so much I can take before I feel like I ran from the southernmost part of Chile to the Aleutian Island chain. Those of you who absorb geography like Galactus the Planet Eater know what that means. Those who need that spelled out, over 9800 miles/15,800 kilometers.

      An exaggeration, sure, but it feels like this sometimes. This feature of Hitomi-chan is the most consistent aspect of the whole manga from start to finish, but overtime she gradually opens up. Originally, Hitomi only talked to Yuu, but then she met his sister, some delinquent girls, an American exchange student (because the good old red, white and blue needs to make a presence in animanga somewhere), and even introduces these lot to her older brother and little cousin.

      Seems even growing up with siblings can make you deathly shy, though Hinata Hyuga knows this by heart.

      For that matter, tall girl short guy trope also meets gentle giant(ess) trope seeing as she’s quite harmless. She’s a kind girl who hates resorting to violence, but her height (6’1″/185.4 cm), and her intimidating face at rest would usually be enough to scare someone straight, such as her first introduction to the delinquent girls who later became her best of friends.

      If you’re drawing comparisons between this and Komi Can’t Communicate, I haven’t seen or read that series, but from those who have, they claim that her “shyness” is more selective mutism, and there’s this reddit post that claims, she’s a silent extrovert more so than an introvert, and the premise of the series confirms that long before you read the first chapter. Wants to have a hundred friends, lacks the natural charisma necessary. Fortunately, she at least does things the old fashioned way unlike some others:

      Some artists pair her with Konata Izumi to contrast their personalities as otaku, and I say it works.

      Does the series suffer from any flaws? What series isn’t flawed? Even my beloved Max Payne and High School DxD have flaws and the flaws that accompany Shy Shark-tooth Girl are much of the same ones that accompany My Boss is Beautifully Busty. Based on the trope I started this post with, you can bet your sweet bippy it has romance, and like the other manga, it takes 20 years, a career, a marriage, and a divorce proceeding to gain steam, but is still Mercury-making-a-full-orbit faster than Takeda and Takizawa, Sitting in a Tree. Maybe the former is based on teens generally moving faster than adults for the simple reason that adults have more maturity and have more nuances to wade through before popping the big question of whether r/Animemes is really about anime. And in my life, I’ve seen both. High school romances reenacting the Hindenburg and adult romances advancing at the speed of ZZZZZzzzzz…… ah, whah?! Whozzat?

      Sometimes the reverse or a combination of these, and there’s a chance you have as well. Another mark against the manga may be the idealized, romanticized, unchallenged romance. For the most part, there’s few rough patches that test Hitomi’s and Yuu’s relationship, but examining the manga panels closely shows that it does get tested a fair bit. Not so much in the name of drama, but more so transitioning from casual to romantic dialogue, so to speak. The two acknowledge each other’s feelings and are hilariously led to believed that their dynamic needs to change and fit this arbitrary criteria, when in the real world if this happens, the most that’ll change is that the universe stops standing in the way and lets them hold hands.

      Not that adults can’t be this naive either, sheltered and dense adults will struggle with much of the same things teens do when they first start dating.

      To further compare and contrast Cute Shork with Well-Endowed Superior, one is a 4-panel/yonkoma series set in a professional work environment, the other is a typical high school romance. Both put the male and female leads together and have the balls to continue on even after they finally get what their friends and family have acknowledged for ages. AdoraShark has a slightly larger cast though like Russian demographics, the women outnumber the men. In contrast, the smaller cast of the 4-panel manga has slightly more men than women characters, but is still equal. It’s also suited to maintaining this small cast while Hitomi-chan can and has introduced new characters piecemeal, each newcomer melding well with the established cast.

      Even characters introduced at the beginning are given a chance to come back and get properly fleshed out, like the delinquent girls who were first seen antagonizing Yuu, until returning some 60 chapters later with more meat to chew on.

      Chorisuke Natsumi seems to have a type.

      12 volumes running from September 2018 to May 2025, the entire series is available for reading on MangaDex, being spared the grip of the Copyright Coalition in its most DMCA raid on the site. I haven’t heard news of anything in the way of any adaptation or OVAs as of yet, but like all the other times that’s crossed my radar, you can guarantee that I’ll post an update as news trickles out.