![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This time I headed for Boy Princes, a title by the same people responsible for Let Dai. How was it? Hmm.
This is light shonen ai set in a fantasy world that obviously owes a LOT to (my future bride) Sugiura Shiho's Koori no Mamono no Monogatari. The plot is an old favorite: Nicole is a 2nd (or was it 3rd? Or 4th...)-born prince in his kingdom. His sister is set to marry Jed, 2nd-born prince of the much larger, more imposing neighboring kingdom. Unfortunately she's eloped, so Nicole must secretly take her place. Will he and Jed end up finding true love together? Or rather, how many volumes will it take before they do?
Surprisingly, not even one. Jed quickly discovers Nicole's true identity, and without batting an eyelash at that. Nicole finds himself strangely attracted to Jed within a few weeks of his arranged marriage. Jed, however, is cold and distant. (No surprise there.) And what of Jed's menacing older brother and his strange liason with a young man from the land's tribe of apothecaries?
Well, your guess is as good as mine, as it's pretty hard to figure out who is who in this book, aside from dark-haired Jed. Like Nicole, most of the characters have feminine names, which makes distinguishing gender difficult. This is more important than one might at first suspect, because they all look the same. This problem is compounded by the fact that they all change clothing with alarming frequency, sometimes from panel to panel, so that readers can't use the outfit identification technique to distinguish them, either. I imagine this might not be such an urgent problem in the original, as speech forms differ in Korean based on age and social status, but the so-so translation doesn't capture any of this.
The translation is just middling, occassionally adhering overmuch to the Korean original and occassionally carrying no sense of it whatsoever into English. Overall, it's just bland.
The good things about this title are the outfits and scenery; both are ornate and gorgeous. (And very obviously influenced by Koori.) The author has also introduced a huge cast of characters within a relatively short space of time, and when precious little character development has been devoted to our main protagonists. This gives me hope that she's working toward a rather detailed plot, although I have nothing else on which to base that assumption.
End verdict: mediocre thus far, but with appealing artwork and with signs that it might improve in later volumes.
これで以上です。
This is light shonen ai set in a fantasy world that obviously owes a LOT to (my future bride) Sugiura Shiho's Koori no Mamono no Monogatari. The plot is an old favorite: Nicole is a 2nd (or was it 3rd? Or 4th...)-born prince in his kingdom. His sister is set to marry Jed, 2nd-born prince of the much larger, more imposing neighboring kingdom. Unfortunately she's eloped, so Nicole must secretly take her place. Will he and Jed end up finding true love together? Or rather, how many volumes will it take before they do?
Surprisingly, not even one. Jed quickly discovers Nicole's true identity, and without batting an eyelash at that. Nicole finds himself strangely attracted to Jed within a few weeks of his arranged marriage. Jed, however, is cold and distant. (No surprise there.) And what of Jed's menacing older brother and his strange liason with a young man from the land's tribe of apothecaries?
Well, your guess is as good as mine, as it's pretty hard to figure out who is who in this book, aside from dark-haired Jed. Like Nicole, most of the characters have feminine names, which makes distinguishing gender difficult. This is more important than one might at first suspect, because they all look the same. This problem is compounded by the fact that they all change clothing with alarming frequency, sometimes from panel to panel, so that readers can't use the outfit identification technique to distinguish them, either. I imagine this might not be such an urgent problem in the original, as speech forms differ in Korean based on age and social status, but the so-so translation doesn't capture any of this.
The translation is just middling, occassionally adhering overmuch to the Korean original and occassionally carrying no sense of it whatsoever into English. Overall, it's just bland.
The good things about this title are the outfits and scenery; both are ornate and gorgeous. (And very obviously influenced by Koori.) The author has also introduced a huge cast of characters within a relatively short space of time, and when precious little character development has been devoted to our main protagonists. This gives me hope that she's working toward a rather detailed plot, although I have nothing else on which to base that assumption.
End verdict: mediocre thus far, but with appealing artwork and with signs that it might improve in later volumes.
これで以上です。
Tags: