Day of Revolution 2

This volume was a little better because they worked really really hard on Mikoto this time around.  The focus was on just that one character, and although the rest stayed pretty flat, it was nice to see that Megumi picked one and stuck with it.  The author mentions that Megumi didn’t pick one of her four male friends because the fans of the series all liked a different one and she didn’t want to alienate a majority of the fans by picking one.  My response to that was… huh?  They all have a slightly different personality, but they were also all basically treated as one character.  You COULD pick one, and it would be just like picking them all, plus you’d get the added bonus of a drama-tacular split from the main group.

The story that takes place two years after the main one is a little weird.  It features a completely new character, and although it is comedic… it doesn’t quite pull anything off.  There’s also another side story that disappointed me in the extreme because I peeked at the last pages before I got there and thought that they were having sex.  Boo, too big a tease.

So yes, not a series for most, I think.

Day of Revolution 1

I think I need to stop blind-buying gender swap series.  I’ve learned enough times that this is not necessarily an ingredient for good manga.  This was yet another lesson on this.  Day of Revolution starts off rather serious-minded, looking at how Kei actually feels about living like a boy, but really being a hermaphrodite/girl.  I respected this for several pages, then realized the only person I want to see do this is Jeffrey Eugenides.  It felt really BAD as a drama at the beginning, but then quickly degenerated into a comedy about halfway through, which was better.  However, nothing saved this volume from being intolerably boring.

It’s main problem, I think, was that it tried to be character-focused without developing any of its characters.  At all.  Including the main character.  Somehow Kei remained rather generic through the entire volume.  My hate spiked a little bit when they decided to change his name to “Megumi,” that also being the name of the main character in my biggest lesson in gender-swap-gone-bad, but that really had nothing to do with Day of Revolution.  The other problem is that they kept introducing generic character after generic character.  I understand that there needed to be a female companion (and she was actually decent), and I figured it’d come back to the three friends he hung out with in the beginning, but somehow the class rep got drawn back in, and the three thugs they fought against also got drawn in at the end too.  TOO MANY CHARACTERS.

Another problem was that it also often took itself too seriously in confronting the “real issues.”  somehow it didn’t occur to Megumi that she would have to have sex with boys if she was to marry them, it had to be pointed out to her.  And to drive the point home, one of the characters tries to rape her in one scene.  I am not kidding.  It was too much.  The only scene in the manga that I actually liked was when her three male friends bullied her into confessing her identity.  I thought it was picking up from a slow beginning after that, but of course immediately after she confesses, all three along with the class rep come onto her and propose.

One of the other problems was that the author had originally intended it as a one-shot, but there’s no resolution at the end.  I suppose it ended okay, but it really did nothing to explore the character relationships, and she was talked into doing the second volume.  Maybe… maybe the second volume’s better.  Somehow I doubt it.