#mod merch

So, the standard checklist to start us off: this book came with no major flaws, it has a good proportion of fic to art, it's a reasonable size both physically and in terms of page count, and on a skim-through, I couldn't find any glaring typos or formatting gaffes. All the basic boxes are checked! Everything else is really just gravy.

Now, to get into the critiques.

Something I was really concerned about - as, I'm sure, were most Syo fans - was the promotion of this zine as a specifically Tokomaru zine, despite the prevalence of Syo. And for better or for worse, this truly is a Syomaru zine as much as it is a Tokomaru zine. I'm of the opinion that it's a better zine this way, and several pieces explore the dynamic between Toko, Syo, and Komaru as a unit which I wouldn't trade away; however, I wish they had marketed it as a Tokomaru and Syomaru zine. Marketing focused expressly on Tokomaru, which I think was a mistake.

The artwork in this zine is lovely. It was really hard to decide which page to get a picture of because they're all so good! The fics are a little more up-and-down in quality - one or two of them could have used another pass on basic characterization - but overall, the whole thing is very tight.

I have one main issue with the content of this zine, and it's one I never, ever would've expected to have: there's almost nothing set within the timeframe of UDG as a piece. This is especially stark in the fics. There are pieces set in the timeframe of DR3...there are pieces set in alternate universes...there are pieces set post-UDG...but yearning as they travel through Towa City? Not hugely present. Especially weird is that multiple pieces focus on Toko and Syo's relationship with THH specifically, with Komaru as an accessory to help her cope. It's just...a very odd decision, in a zine centering a pair so deeply tied to a single game.

In terms of merch, I had no issue with it and thought it was one of the strongest points of the zine! I particularly fell in love with the trading cards of Tokomaru in different popular manga AUs, which, although I have nowhere to put them as someone who doesn't collect, have inspired a wholly different zine concept for me that I'd love to put into practice one day. I also have Mini's print hanging above my computer as we speak!

That said, we're going to start with one of those few gripes: the cover. There's nothing wrong with the art actually used for the cover of Selfless Devotion, but the formatting - particularly, the position and effects on the text - is very simple. The words were clearly done after the fact, not planned as a seamless part of the piece. Compare it to, for example, the text on the cover of Tenko zine, and there's a real gap in first impressions. There's also no back cover at all, which, even in digital zines, is something I personally don't love to see.

Beyond that, though, I think there's very little to complain about in this zine! There is a difference in fic length by about 4 pages from some fic to 8 pages in other fics, but that size difference is common in zines, even if it isn't what I'd personally prefer. The actual proportion of art to fics is good - it never feels like I'm leafing through fics with art speckled in between, as some zines feel. It is a robust-feeling zine, with plenty of content for its mid-60s page count.

Another small critique I have is the proportion of other characters. There are, for some reason, two Kirumi and Leon pieces, despite Kirumi and Leon having exactly one interaction in UTDP; on the other hand, Shuichi doesn't feature at all, despite potentially becoming close enough for Kirumi to consider him her future master. It would've done the zine good to have slightly more oversight on how much each character appeared, proportional to their relationship to Kirumi.

One thing I will call out as an appreciative point is how easy to read the page numbers are for the fics in this zine. I always appreciate a nice, obvious page number for ease of leafing through, and I thought they did very well with it!

In terms of merch, the art itself is great. My only complaint is that it seems like the merch wasn't created with entirely standardized templates? Q and Nia's phone backgrounds, for example, are sized with two different proportions. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it is odd to do in a zine - normally, something like that would standardized.

Since there's no physical copy of the Tenko zine, we have no manufacturing and physical aspects to go over; and since there's no physical merch, we will be going over the digital merch.

The first thing I want to say is that the fic-to-art ratio of this zine is definitely skewed towards fic. There are about 2 pieces of art to every fic (not counting the cosplay photos, of which there were 3). Normally, the proportion is closer to 4 pieces of art per fic. I think that this is one of the places where they benefited from it being a free zine - without the pressure of a paying audience, they could play around with that combination a bit.

And, helpfully, all the fics are fantastic. There isn't a bad one in the bunch. If there's one thing I'd critique among the fics, it's that not very many of them take place during the actual game itself - several of them deal with pre-game Tenko, who is essentially 70% headcanon. Especially since there wasn't a theme to this zine, I expected a more evenly distributed draw from the canon timeline.

The formatting is very good. I especially liked how they chose to format fic pages, which is helpful since fics dominate the page count. There was one major flaw - one of the fics was missing an entire page, which was a huge bummer - but it was the only flaw I found on read-through.

The art in this zine is also really top notch! I couldn't find a piece I disliked among the bunch. The cosplay was also very impressive - it was very professionally done, and rather than just being a picture of the cosplayer, was edited to look more like a graphic. Some of it has an insane amount of detail put in - check out all the character writings on this Valentine's Day one:

In terms of merch, I think it's perfectly serviceable. The standout here is definitely the wallpaper by Bluejayboju, which I'll leave for you to find for yourself.

My major critique with the merch is the poor naming conventions. Some of these pieces include the artists' full legal names, while others are just "IMG_NUMBER" with no description of their distinguishing features. It makes the merch setup seem like it wasn't overseen with as much care as the rest of the zine.

So when I say this is a short zine, I mean it's a really short zine - as in, 23 pages, 6 of which are taken up by its only fic. Like with Sakura zine, there's a question as to whether there was enough interest to justify this zine being made. However, because it's a free zine, this is much easier to forgive here than in Sakura zine, despite this being about a third the length of Sakura zine.

My gut feeling - without knowing for sure, and as a neutral statement, not a negative one - is that this was a beginner-friendly zine that was in part published as a way to get people zine experience. This is true of free digital zines a lot of the time, but I think it's especially stark here because you can see a lot of choices being made that more seasoned zine artists wouldn't have - things like putting major details in the bleed area of the display, for example. Again, because of its nature, it can get away with this just fine! But it's something to note.

There are a couple really excellent pieces, including the Seiko pictured above. (Look ma, bisexual lighting!) There was also a very even distribution of characters in this zine - 7 Seiko, 8 Sonosuke, and 9 Ruruka pieces - which is something I really appreciated as a lover of OT3s! They each have art as duos, a trio, and individually, too. There's just a very good spread of content here.

The single fic is devoted to Sonosuke through time. As a Girl Lover, it didn't grab me the way it might've if it had been one of the other two, but I found it a perfectly nice fic that characterized the arguably least developed character of the three very well!

That does bring me to the discussion of the formatting, though. There are two big formatting gaffes in this: the page numbers are nigh unreadable (there is a page number in the Seiko piece, though you wouldn't believe me if I hadn't pointed it out - it's on her left hand); and one of the fic pages has...some very odd formatting.

I really don't know how this one happened except by plain old mistake. It is better than missing out on the text entirely, like Tenko zine did, but it definitely broke the flow of the piece for me as I did a double take on the contents.

Neither of these are unforgivable or makes the zine unreadable! But it makes me think this was probably the formatting mod's first or close-to-first time, as well.

The merch is fine! None of it stood out to me, but none of it turned me off, either. I was a little bummed that Seiko didn't get an icon like the other two did, but that's the nature of two of them having a canon romance, I suppose. It's worth some physical merch (a trio of standees and a trio charm) was released when the zine first came out, but they aren't available anymore. I've included images of them, since they're the only part of the zine that isn't immediately accessible unless you scroll through their X - they're very cute!

If anyone happens to know where to find some of this merch, send me a link and I'll buy it with the zine funds to add a review here, too! These were both made by @/merrymint on X, but their store is closed at the time of this review. I actually thought it was very clever to offer a couple small pieces of physical merch In Association With the zine rather than releasing them As Part Of the zine, to keep the zine itself free.

The first thing I noticed about Sakura zine is that it's a thin book. Like, a really thin book, compared to other zines I had. And opening it up confirmed why: not counting spot art or the doodles at the front thanking you for buying it (which were very cute!), this book only has 10 pieces of artwork.

That's not a bad thing in and of itself. But for a physical fanzine, I expected more to justify my purchase - especially considering they padded out some of the fanfics with an extra blank page. There's a lot of ground for the zine to make up in its fics. And it does!

...sort of.

The good: every single fic has spot art, including the poem that's only two pages long. That's kind of amazing. And some of the fics are long, and good enough to justify the number of pages they put in - Joltik's fic that explores Sakura's perspective throughout the murders stood out to me as a great one.

However, only some of the fics are long. The fic length throughout this is extremely inconsistent, even disregarding the poem. The first fic is 4 pages long. The next fic is 11. That's almost triple the length in pages.

There's also a lack of...I wouldn't call it quality, because all of the fics are technically good. But there's a lack of theming. Some of them take place in the THH universe; some take place in UTDP universe. One of them reads more like an Aoi fic that happens to be in Sakura's perspective. In a larger zine, like Unfinished Symphony, this made sense because you could group together similar themes and divide the book into sections. In such a small zine, though, you don't get that sense; instead it feels a little haphazard.

In terms of manufacturing, the book itself is great! I personally think the cover artist did a fantastic job as well. In formatting, the text didn't get quite enough bleed, so it can be really difficult to read the words towards the center of the book, which is a shame since fic takes up such a large majority of the pages.

The merch I got is also just fine - the art prints are a little bigger than postcard-size, which is perfect for my wall, personally. The bookmark did bend after being sat on by my cats only once, but then again, I have large cats, so it's hard to hold that against them.