#vol one

By the way this is her right here! This is Noriko (The main character):

I don’t have strong feelings about her yet. As for the first book she has to be chaperoned by other characters. Which is not her fault, and you can tell she makes an effort in her own way. But I feel it will take a bit of time to see if she grows into a character that helps Izark over just being someone who is dead weight.

Her design, and by extension everyone else’s, looks as if it were a mix of Sailor Moon and Inuyasha. Which is very pretty in my opinion. In the art you can see the artist has taken care to make sure not everyone had same face syndrome too (artists like Arina Tanemura tend to have this problem despite how much I love her work). Characters are designed to be identifiably different.

The beginning feels very rushed for both the good and the bad. Good because we get right into the meat of the story we’re here for. Do we truly care about Noriko’s friends that we’ll likely never really see again? Not really. It would be better to call them set dressing over actually being fully fledged characters. Which is fine. Some characters are meant to just be set dressing.

But at the same time this also distances us from her connection from those people. The short time dedicated on friends and school over the family itself was also a bit of a strange decision. As to most people our familial connections make or break us. One might even infer her life with the MOST normal. Not quirky in any regard other than her strange dreams.

Speaking of which: It goes from her talking about having strange dreams to 💥 BOOM! Explosion and she was gone faster than a toupee in a hurricane! Thanos snapped away so to speak. She leaves in a literal explosion and there’s not even a body is left behind for police to pick up as her friends try to explain what happened. The manga implies this is purposeful.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eventually we meet this man who rescues Noriko when she is initially exploded into the new world:

This is Izark (the deuteragonist), a travelling warrior who came to find The Awakening (For reasons unknown the the reader at this time). Izark is very classically 90s shoujo handsome. (And totally my type at tough, calm, cool, distant, but still empathetic to the plight of others.)

He’s also logical and tends to use that logic in a flat dead pan cheeky way. It’s a nice juxtaposition.

Despite Noriko being painted as a literal catastrophe he is kind to her and very considerate of her position and feelings. (And this is reciprocated by Noriko. It feels genuine on both sides.)

The way the long dark hair is drawn is ✨ perfection ✨. Chef’s kiss 💋 .

The first thing the manga truly tackles socially between Noriko and Izark is the language barrier. They don’t have it hand-waved away with magic or happenstance. These two characters truly cannot effectively communicate and it’s being set up that this will be a real barrier for Noriko.

I think a lot of material either don’t know how or straight up don’t want to tackle the difficulty of having two characters (romantic ones at that) unable to communicate. Which I’m going to argue is fair, but it can be a missed opportunity for interesting character/story development. I wish more manga attempted to cover this. As it makes our character Noriko feel so much more alien and alone in this new world she finds herself in.

There’s also something incredibly humbling about having to learn a new language and culture as well. Izark repeating he can’t understand her and her continuing to gab away anyway is also very funny. The language barrier was also used narratively to cover up that she IS The Awakening. As she cannot blab her life story to those who can’t understand her. Genius cover. I love it.

Noriko and Izark seem to immediately have some pretty good chemistry. Though Izark is obviously not only aware but wary of Noriko’s status in his world. He comes off incredulous that The Awakening is as little and meek as she is.

He remarks that he will have to kill her. Which leads me to suspect he planned on taking her off to kill her somewhere? But that can’t be entirely it, because he proves he’s a powerful warrior and the logic doesn’t add up. He would’ve just killed her right then if that had been the goal? There were many opportunities for her to get killed off.

Unless he felt bad about it, I guess. But that seems like a misread on who he is too. (Though undoubtedly he seems to like her.) There simply is not information at this time.

Izark suddenly collapses at the end of book one leaving a nice enticing cliff hanger.

And then there’s this guy, Keimos:

He gives off big Sephiroth vibes. And maybe it’s the black and white coloring, the long hair, the thin eyes, the haughty sounding attitude, and how other characters talk about him, but yeah. It’s hard to think of him as anything else.

He seems like he’s going to be a main first antagonist, but not the final antagonist. We’ll see.

Both side and main characters are fun to interact with. Villainous characters are fun too, no one holds back in the fighting. For a shoujo this has excellent action sequences and they’re done by a talented artist.

I appreciate that the monsters aren’t generic. The artist tried to make something interesting. I liked the toothy worm things that immediately attack Noriko on arrival.

I can’t wait to pick this series apart more. I have high hopes for this one. I like near everything about it so far. It’s interesting and I want to unravel the mystery as to why Noriko is this great Awakening to wreck the world.

Next: “From Far Away” vol. 2.