Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Things No One Cares About:Punch!







Love can make a person act somewhat crazy,do activities they may otherwise despise,or cause them to hatch extremely convoluted plans,such is the case with today's main event Punch!. It's one of those stories that is actually not that bad but has nothing really special about it either. There is some great comedic moments that aren't that memorable which perfectly compliments the forgettable story . There is effort put into to it but it ultimately fails to leave any impact on the reader

The female lead is Elle,who comes from a family that is involved with boxing and lives in a gym ran by her grandfather. She rejects her arranged marriage based less on the guy being terrible and more on the idea she views him as a brother. A concept neither her grandpa nor her fiance can understand and write off as her being a brat. Which is not surprising because she acts very childish,from her speech to bringing home a street punk archetype who serves as our romantic lead,Kazuki. He's the more mature of the two even if he takes a shine to her because she looks like his family dog. His love for fighting boarders on the fetishistic and he has that jerk with a heart of gold schtick going too. That is really about it for him personality wise,and it's not that interesting. By extension this makes the main romance really uninteresting,as the two leads have no chemistry at all.

Once they start formally dating it's the “I'm a jerk but I love you” routine that doesn't work. They even take the time to flesh out his back story with his blind sister and all these things he's seen and it's still not interesting because he lacks a personality outside of stoic. Elle is a childish idiot but still has personality. The struggles she faces are more relate-able ,i.e trying to forge your own path. However once she starts dating Rugged Mcbland, her desires to leave the gym go clean out the window as now she has a sexy fighter boyfriend to keep her interest as opposed to genuine enjoyment. It's insulting to say the least and kills any chance that Elle had for character development.

The rest of the cast is a collection of idiot meat heads and female shojo archetypes. Her fiance does have a jerk side that shows more as the plot goes on that becomes over the top. He gets his own side plot where he decides to get back at Kazuki by wooing his sister. It's really enjoyable watching this guy try to be sinister while paying for this girl's eye surgery and leads to a really funny title drop. There is also this nice twist to the crazy admirer's trope in that Elle promptly curb stomps them because she remembers she actually is a great athlete.

The plot itself acts like a shonen sports manga but focusing on the lead character’s girlfriend instead. This has potential to be rather funny but it forgoes that in place of shojo melodrama. The events these characters get into are not boring and stay with in the realm of plausibility but because the charters are bland and uninteresting you don't care what happens to them. The latter half of the plot deals with Kazuki potentially not being able to box ever again but Kazuki is a poor character so I couldn't give less of a darn. Then the story has the guts to time skip to a completely bland match up between the main two boys in Elle's life that no one was asking for.

There is a rather well paced and decent plot barring that time skip hiding in these pages but alas it also has terrible characters hiding with it as well. As stated above there was genuine effort put into this series but it's not enough to make up for it's problems.


Till Next Time: Stay Positive

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