Yuri Manga: Battle Club, Volume 1 (English)

March 25th, 2008

Women’s crotches are endlessly fascinating. Or so I assume from the variety and sheer number of crotch shots in Battle Club, Volume 1.

Interestingly, while women’s crotches are absolutely riveting, men’s are apparently unworthy of scrutiny and are therefore pixelated or avoided at all costs.

Even more interestingly, while it is perfectly acceptable to look at women’s crotches, it is unacceptable to become aroused by doing so. If you are aroused, you are labeled as a pervert.

The conundrum appears obvious to me – why torture yourself with something that you can’t enjoy? Sounds like some kind of self-flagellating, mortifying of the flesh thing. In a way, it sort of does explain alot about why prostitution is illegal and why you guys seem to like your fun on the down low. I’ll leave it to others to delve into how sad that is.

Instead, I’ll cover the plot of Battle Club: This manga is about two members of a high school wrestling club, one male and one female, both of whom believe they are the protagonist of the story. The female protagonist, Tamako, is a clumsy, zealous and kind-hearted girl who is impossibly strong and getting stronger, by taking regular beatings from her even more impossibly stronger sempai. The male, Mokichi, is a mealy-mouthed asshole who gets beaten up a lot because he’s an asshole. And, we are assured repeatedly, (although we never see it, see above) he has a teeny dick.

Each chapter follows one or the other in their completely absurd, panty and crotch-shot filled shenanigans which include…not really all that much. Fighting, mostly. Including fighting with a “confused” shark. Lots of service, obviously.

Yuri comes in two flavors in Volume 1. The first is the Vice-Captain of the wrestling team, Higuchi, who is (totally incorrectly) labeled a lipstick lesbian when she first appears, and who openly gropes Tamako at every opportunity while they wrestle. (Like a lipstick lesbian would *ever* wrestle. Pfft. Another manga company that is fail when it comes to properly translating something lesbian-related. ALC is still the only company who can identify a lipstick lesbian and tell the difference between one and a Yuri character.)

The second flavor of Yuri is Shiba, a member of the Karate club whose impossibly strong attacks have no effect on Tamako. She finds herself sexually fantasizing about Tamako (which immediately makes her a pervert, by the rules set out in fanboy-land,) and even making lunch for her. Shiba’s thrown off the Karate team for failing and when they ruin the love-love lunch she made, she’s completely unable to cope with Tamako’s kindness towards her. She runs away, “unable to face her first crush.”

This series is by Shozaki Yuji, the creator of Ikkitousen/Battle Vixens – the story here is thinner than Tamako’s panties. This is absolute 100% crap. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the 15 minutes it took me to read it, because it is such *utter* crap that I found it amusing. I think it makes a fitting beginning to “crappy crap” week here at Okazu.

Ratings:

Art – 7 creative, in its own pervtastic way
Story – 1
Characters – 3
Yuri – 6
Service – Infinity

Overall – 5

Don’t have high expectations. Don’t have *any* expectations. Then lower that a little and you’ll probably find Battle Club not so bad. ^_^

5 Responses

  1. neo_hrtgdv says:

    I’m really glad you get to crap before we do oO’

    I can’t help notice it is “volume 1” ..does that mean there really is volume 2!? anyway, it seems it’ll be an interesting week

  2. bettynoire says:

    Oh man this was totally my exact reaction to this series. Unfortunately the series lost my last shred of “respect” for it when it starting blatantly tracing/copying frames in the second volume. I say “respect” because hey… a grasp on anatomy still deserves some amount of respect, even if they probably learned it through dubious means, and use it for even more dubious purposes. Haha.

    Trashy manga is fun to read sometimes.

  3. Rin says:

    I was always bothered by the fact that the english manga versions for Battle Vixens and Battle Club are ‘adaptations’ rather than ‘translations’.
    Not that I’m amazing at Japanese or anything, but even I can tell how loose the adaptation is for Battle Vixens.
    Still, B. Club takes itself even less seriously than B. Vixens, so it works a little better.
    It’s trashy fun, and at least they don’t look 5. :D

    -Tsu

  4. neo – There’s something like 6 or 7 volumes so far.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Hi there, I’m John Biles, a friend of Sean Gaffney’s.

    The key thing to understand is that the whole panty thing is about the lure of the forbidden. Some people eroticize forbidden things, which in the Japanese context often means ‘panties’ / women’s crotches. (Since the target audience of this work doesn’t get off on male crotches, it doesn’t get eroticized.)

    The lure of the forbidden, however, is counter-balanced by the internal judgement for looking at and wanting to look at the forbidden. Thus, if the male gives obvious signs of seeing such things, he must be punished to relieve the psychic strain.

    Which may be in some cases what he wanted in the first place…

    How’s that for rationalization?

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