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I volunteer once a week at a nonprofit social-enterprise bookstore, which carries the simultaneous dangers and perks of being constantly surrounded by used books for which I have a 50% volunteer discount. Most of the time I stand strong - I live in the city! I have limited space and budget! I DON'T NEED MORE BOOKS no not even for super-cheap noooo don't tempt me - but a few weeks ago I was shelving in the graphic novels section and I realized that someone had donated the first ten volumes of Claymore, and that given the pricing and aforementioned volunteer discount I had an unprecedented opportunity to acquire all ten volumes for a total of twenty bucks.
And virtuous resistance is one thing, guys, but this was fate.
So now I have read the first ten volumes of Claymore! Claymore works on a fairly familiar premise - in a world where demons prey on humans, the only person who can fight them is a blonde girl who is part-demon herself, created for this purpose by a shady organization - except instead of just one girl there are about forty or fifty women, called Claymores because they use hella big swords and I guess it's as good a distinguishing factor as any. The inevitable fate of a Claymore is to go all-the-way demon, but most of them manage to get their friends to kill them before that happens. (At least such is the setup, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it eventually gets more complicated.)
(I should also say that it was very weird reading this manga at around the same time I was watching Puella Magica Madoka Magi.)
Claire, our protagonist, is a fairly young, quiet, stoic Claymore with a suitabaly angsty backstory. The first few chapters pretty much follow the "lone gunman rides into town, cleans out evil, rides out" model; fairly rapidly she acquires a small-boy sidekick who follows her around and makes shiny eyes at her. The story starts getting interesting with the addition of other Claymores, all of whom have their own individual personalities and tragic backstories and SUPER SPECIAL ATTACK, and the whole almost-entirely-female cast is pretty awesome, I won't lie. It also gets more interesting once we get to the more powerful villains - the ordinary demons kind of flail around and monologue a lot ("You can never defeat me! - ACK, you chopped off my arm! Why did you do that? Gah, gah, gah!" is a fairly standardish line of demon dialogue) but the super-extra-hardcore demons are fascinating characters in and of themselves.
I keep trying to pick out who my favorite Claymore lady is and having a hard time! Is it Miria, the queen of long-term planning? Long-suffering Ilena, the ultimate in stoic mentorly hardcore? Undine, the hilariously shouty super-muscly one? Deneve the calm and snarky one, and her BFF Helen, the lulzy one?
(Helen keeps throwing me off because whenever she makes :O or :D-faces she looks unnervingly like Haruna from High School Debut. I mean, look at these twin shocked faces:
And now I want someone to write fic swapping them out. LET'S SEE HOW LONG IT TAKES ANYONE TO NOTICE. Does this make me a terrible person? PERHAPS. But you have to admit Haruna is too much of a shonen hero for her own shojo manga anyway! Let's loose her at some demons, it would be awesome.)
In other notes, I would like to formally submit an apology to Hiromu Arakawa for ever having laughed about the number of severed limbs in her manga. I'M SORRY, ARAKAWA. FMA's wanton deployment of limb-loss-as-plot-point is a model of decorum and restraint by comparison with Claymore!
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/242886.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
And virtuous resistance is one thing, guys, but this was fate.
So now I have read the first ten volumes of Claymore! Claymore works on a fairly familiar premise - in a world where demons prey on humans, the only person who can fight them is a blonde girl who is part-demon herself, created for this purpose by a shady organization - except instead of just one girl there are about forty or fifty women, called Claymores because they use hella big swords and I guess it's as good a distinguishing factor as any. The inevitable fate of a Claymore is to go all-the-way demon, but most of them manage to get their friends to kill them before that happens. (At least such is the setup, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it eventually gets more complicated.)
(I should also say that it was very weird reading this manga at around the same time I was watching Puella Magica Madoka Magi.)
Claire, our protagonist, is a fairly young, quiet, stoic Claymore with a suitabaly angsty backstory. The first few chapters pretty much follow the "lone gunman rides into town, cleans out evil, rides out" model; fairly rapidly she acquires a small-boy sidekick who follows her around and makes shiny eyes at her. The story starts getting interesting with the addition of other Claymores, all of whom have their own individual personalities and tragic backstories and SUPER SPECIAL ATTACK, and the whole almost-entirely-female cast is pretty awesome, I won't lie. It also gets more interesting once we get to the more powerful villains - the ordinary demons kind of flail around and monologue a lot ("You can never defeat me! - ACK, you chopped off my arm! Why did you do that? Gah, gah, gah!" is a fairly standardish line of demon dialogue) but the super-extra-hardcore demons are fascinating characters in and of themselves.
I keep trying to pick out who my favorite Claymore lady is and having a hard time! Is it Miria, the queen of long-term planning? Long-suffering Ilena, the ultimate in stoic mentorly hardcore? Undine, the hilariously shouty super-muscly one? Deneve the calm and snarky one, and her BFF Helen, the lulzy one?
(Helen keeps throwing me off because whenever she makes :O or :D-faces she looks unnervingly like Haruna from High School Debut. I mean, look at these twin shocked faces:
And now I want someone to write fic swapping them out. LET'S SEE HOW LONG IT TAKES ANYONE TO NOTICE. Does this make me a terrible person? PERHAPS. But you have to admit Haruna is too much of a shonen hero for her own shojo manga anyway! Let's loose her at some demons, it would be awesome.)
In other notes, I would like to formally submit an apology to Hiromu Arakawa for ever having laughed about the number of severed limbs in her manga. I'M SORRY, ARAKAWA. FMA's wanton deployment of limb-loss-as-plot-point is a model of decorum and restraint by comparison with Claymore!
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/242886.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.