Guest Reviewer has been found and approved, but thanks to everyone for jumping right in!~
Hi Okazu Readers! I am in desperate need of a Guest Reviewer and I hope one of you can help me.
As you know, I do my best to bare my biases here on Okazu when I have them and explain why I don’t and do like manga when it’s relevant. Every once in a blue moon, I come across a manga or anime that just really makes me unhappy and I can’t find a civil word to say about it. Last year for instance, the Sakura Trick anime just made me deeply uncomfortable and I didn’t want to have to watch it.
I understand that many of you love Citrus, by Saburouta. So much so, in fact, that it is currently selling as the #1 Romance Manga! Congrats to Seven Seas and Saburouta-sensei on that.
But, you see, I have been reading it since the beginning and..I really don’t like it.
For the several people who are super jazzed about reading a review by me on this series – notice I have never once reviewed it in Japanese. That ought to be a clear indication of my feelings. To be honest, I haven’t even bought the Japanese volumes. I like it that little.
I don’t like either Mei or Yuzu, I don’t find their attraction appealing. It reads like just another incest story to me and I honestly to do do not care if they live happily ever after or get hit by a truck and die. Reading Citrus has, since the day it debuted, made me deeply unhappy. I don’t like reviewing things that make me unhappy. And, I know from experience, many readers get personally offended when I have the nerve to not enjoy something they like.
So…I’m turning to you, my readers. If you have 1) Purchased a copy of Citrus, Volume 1 and 2) enjoyed it, I invite you to be a Guest Reviewer on Okazu. Please read the Okazu Guest Review Guidelines first and follow the instructions there. (You don’t have to convince me that the series is worth reviewing, only that you should be the one to do it!)
And, please, I beg of you, do not comment here attempting to convince that Citrus is awesome. I’m glad for you that you enjoy it, please respect that fact that I have actually been reading it in Comic Yuri Hime and I just don’t like it. Thanks very much. ^_^
Thanks again to all you amazing folks who volunteered! We’ll have a review up shortly.
I intended to offer when you asked on Twitter since I feel like I could do a balanced critique, but I’m not actually a customer for the English version >_>. I see enough in Citrus to justify buying the tankoubons, but not enough to buy it a third time over!
I totally understand. If you’d like to review the JP editions, I’be glad to have you! We have at least one person who has offered to handle the English, but I am not familiar with her work.
I’ll give it a reread and see if I feel inspired :)
I’ve mentioned before that I think Citrus is really two manga. One of them is a reasonably charismatic story about two young women slowly and painfully coming to understand that the barriers to their love are arbitrary and artificial; the point of the forbidden love story is that it is in no reasonable sense forbidden. I can see why people are drawn to that, it’s why I keep buying the tankobon myself. And some genuinely good moments emerge.
Then there’s the other manga, that treats incest-baiting as a reasonable marketing target and pads the whole affair out because it’s selling. While this is occasionally amusing (Trollmom is pretty funny), the work generally suffers when it’s in this mode. And of course this is how the manga presents itself externally.
The effect is less charming than ChouChouNanNan’s cute-girls-doing-cute-things/Nao’s real life flip, but it’s worth examining the divide.
That’s a valid point, if only I could stand either of the protagonists. I loathe mopey characters.
It’s really kind of comforting to me that I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Citrus. The characters’ relationship just comes across as so unhealthy that it became completely unappealing to me.
Ditto.
Thank you. ^_^
Yes. Neither of them are made happier by it. I want them to grow up, move far apart from each other and develop healthy relationships with other people.
Look at 10’th place of the list Best Sellers in Romance Manga http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/7421479011/ref=zg_b_bs_7421479011_1
“Service: A Navy SEAL at War” must by the great romance manga XD
Hahahaha!!!!! That’s fricking hilarious. Amazon rankings – up for the highest bidder.
I have actually been meaning to email to ask if I could write a guest review for Citrus as I just received the first volume this week and read it.
(and I did email earlier, by the way, from the email as listed on this comment)
Replied. ^_^
I really am at a loss to explain my own fascination with, and fierce love for, Citrus. I think Jye makes a very good point. Amid the laughable amounts of angst and generic drama devices – I really did actually guffaw just now while skimming back through it at the ridiculousness of some of the “twists” – there are moments where the manga manages to convey, in a deeply compelling, empathetic way, the awkward struggling of an intense yet continually frustrated desire between two very different young women.
I won’t give spoilers, but the end of chapter 8, for example…that scene struck me as one of the most electrifying scenes of that kind I have seen in manga in recent memory. The sudden spark, the mutual welling up of each responding to the other…there have been other moments like that in the manga too, but for now that one continues to stand out for me as the best example of why I am hopelessly hooked.
(Full disclosure, I was completely addicted to a soap opera back during high school. I guess I’m just that type.) Actually I also continue to adore Strawberry Panic despite its similar trashy nature, so there you go.
In short, while I would never, ever demand anyone like Citrus, my own investment is, for better or worse, unambiguous. :P
Yes, that moment exactly. I’ll spoil a little in noting that for a series that shows its leads kissing so damn often without a tenth of the passion Takemiya-sensei would draw, it absolutely nails it in a frame that shows nothing but their hands. You can make a good case for Chapter 8 being a microcosm of the alternate universe Citrus we all would have loved; as if the mangaka unfurled her wings for a single issue.
And then Matsuri saves us from the terrible fate of an unambiguously good Citrus :)
Hahahaha!!! Matsuri. UGH.
I feel like Saburouta-sensei has rented all the plot complications from Marmalade Boy, a few decades of use, they are faded, tired, a little worse for wear.
I was thinking about “what I like”. I adored Murcielago, with it’s horrible ugly art, massive gouts of violence and really ugly unrealistic sex. There is just no way I can read something like this. It’s not for me. ^_^ Murcielago isn’t “good”, but I liked it.