Posting about some of the manga I read. I read manga in Japanese.


Title: アクロトリップ Acro Trip
Creator: 佐和田米 Sawata Yone
Books: 5 volumes, Apr '18 - Jan '23, Ribon Mascot Comics, Shueisha

This is a spoof of the magical girl genre in which the protagonist joins the bad guy. That sounds potentially edgy or world weary, but in this case it's just a fun shoujo gag manga, with a tone that's far from jaded. An anime was announced, apparently coming sometime next year.


Date Chizuko is a middle school girl and a commited fan of Berry Blossom, a magical girl in her town, but Chizuko gets recruited by Commander Chroma, Berry Blossom's enemy, who would like to be a cool antagonist who can put up a fierce battle, but he's too bumbling and he's not making effective use of the strange, magical bear monsters he can summon. Chizuko agrees to advise him as a more competent opponent will make Berry Blossom more impressive.

Chroma and Chizuko become two good buddies goofing around for the sake of childish fun. Berry Blossom is naive and earnest enough to treat Chroma's silly pranks as wicked deeds that need to be stopped for the safety of the town, and she gets kept in the dark so as not to spoil the fun, but even she will quite often put aside hostilities and treat Chroma like a friend. Most of the characters in the series will look out for each other whenever there's real trouble.

The chapters are short and usually episodic. According to an afterword, it was originally planned as 6 chapters, but ran for 70, and a bunch of unnumbered side chapters. As it went along an overarching plot and backstory was revealed, but it's one of those cases were it's clearly retroactively trying to reframe the early jumble of ideas, such as the bear monsters, into a more coherent story. Sometimes spoofs can end up quite close to a genuine instance of the genre they spoofed, and to a limited extent Acro Trip moves in that kind of direction, but the chaotic comedy always takes precedence.


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