As Christmas approaches, Natsuki finds himself incredibly unlucky in love, but a chance encounter has him head over heels. And to achieve his wholesome goals, he’ll get by with a little help from his friends… or not…
High school boys of a certain type have the enthusiasm and excess energy of a chicken coop in a lightning storm. These are those boys and, as the manga helpfully states early on, this is the story of them and also how they’re kind of dumb.
And this is, consequently, one difficult story to review. Let me be clear, I like this book and it has an energy to it. Said energy can be a lot to put up with, however, which in a way makes it the most accurate simulacrum of high school boys I’ve seen in some time (also I am old and crusty and have been since I was 18). Accurate, but it can be tiring.
The boys in question run the gamut from the generally nice Natsuki to the S&M loving Katakura (minus the jokes this is treated better than I expected it would be), the five-timing Matsunagi, and otaku Tsuyupon (who might be the most adjusted of them). Minus some important caveats, they are the essence of the friendship where, when the chips are down, you have one another’s backs, but that back is also an awfully tempting place to lodge a few daggers.
Playful meanness is the order of the day and if the story is not necessarily hysterical (okay, I laughed at the chocolate Gunpla), it tries its damnedest and if you like dialogue that runs like an electric current, you will be well served as these clowns repeatedly dunk on one another like they were the Hokkaido Globetrotters.
And amidst all that, Natsuki just might find himself chasing the quiet Kobayakawa while abetted and abetted by everybody around him. Kobayakawa is so quiet she’s just this side of boring, although I’m half tempted to call that a commentary on all the thin as paper male leads in most shojo.
A majority of the jokes are of solid quality; the way it flips some tropes on their head, especially the ‘guy coming to the rescue’ one, is pretty amusing. How they managed to fit in a Valentine’s baking scene despite it being all boys is just clever enough too.
And while the guys start out fairly irritating, this quickly turns into an excuse to dump on them as they so richly deserve. While it seems they may sit atop the heap, the reality is far, far from it and that’s a fun contrast.
The problem comes when the lads are at their bro-iest, which unfortunately makes Matsunagi a super problem in this volume. He’s a player who gets played easily enough, but becomes way too forceful when Kobayakawa’s man-hating friend enters the picture.
She’s very over the top as well, in a way I don’t think you’d see in a more modern series (despite the release date here, this was initially published in 2011). But that doesn’t excuse Matsunagi deciding that consent is something that happens to other people when he kisses her out of nowhere (consent comes up in the S&M stuff, so it’s even more odd how this plays out).
Again, a different time, but I’m not gonna pretend that didn’t happen and it really soured me on the story a little bit. When they’ve got their sights set on aggravating one another, the guys are fine, but having it spill over to something like that is less so.
Overall, however, it is a mostly positive experience that I’ll give another couple volumes to in order to see where it lands for me. Missteps aside, it’s a pretty unique take on the genre. That all said, if the above stuff is an emphatic ‘no’ for you, fairly warned be ye, says I.
3 stars - strip Oh Maidens in your Savage Season of its messages and flip the genders and you’d basically have this examination of romance and mating in high school. It’s not off to a bad start, but I will keep my eyebrow raised for some of its less savoury concepts as it moves forward.