This manga is for those who are already familiar with Boogiepop, otherwise you won’t understand anything.
Story
(Skip to the next section if you don’t want to be spoiled)
The story itself is told in a convoluted way, so I’ll simplify it.
Boogiepop inhabited Igarashi Tomoka in her time in senior high. Tomoka was in a relationship with her teacher, but he died in a gas explosion incident triggered by a heartbroken student. The person who turned that student violent was Kanou, another male student in Tomoka’s school. Tomoka/Boogiepop was defeated by Kanou, and Tomoka forgot about what happened but remembered Boogiepop.
Flash forward to the present, Boogiepop is in Akazuki Takaya’s body, and Tomoka is a teacher/nurse working in his school. The two were involved in a series of violent adolescent crimes, and finally tracked Kanou down as the cause why the students and kids are going violent.
Kanou was working as a math teacher, and he seduced many students then exploit their weaknesses with his superpowers or something. Kanou almost defeated both Tomoka and Boogiepop Takaya, but in the end Boogiepop Takaya managed to win and get rid of whatever the heck disbeat/disrupt is, and all is well again.
Review
This manga had many teacher-student relationships, many of which were sexual (not Takaya and Tomoka, though, but I think it’s quite ambiguous). These two volumes used to be in a school library so I don’t know what’s the deal with that.
The manga managed to pack a lot of content into only two volumes and it was quite interesting. It’s cool to see two Boogiepops together, which I assume is not something this series would usually do. I’m not that familiar with the Boogiepop series so I don’t claim to understand what’s going on, but it was quite fun to see the story cut back and forth between the two’s time as Boogiepop.
Tomoka-sensei really reminded me of Misato from Evangelion. She drinks canned beer and has this ambiguous relationship with a younger male (whom she is taking care of). Her issue mostly just involved Kanou being the cause of her sensei/lover’s death, which was pretty interesting since Takaya is basically a young version of her sensei and that makes their relationship very complicated.
The Thai translation (the version I’m reading) made this manga unnecessarily confusing. It’s not machine-translated, but the phrases were so awkward they were nigh incomprehensible and the speech bubbles were switched around a lot. This is an issue with this publisher’s older works (and also some more recent works), and I see it in many of the older manga. The story is already convoluted, and the translation just made it worse for me.
Another thing was that the manga is short but there’s a lot of content, so many things were not explained or just brushed over. There is a sense of finale when it’s all over, but I’m just sitting there scratching my head.
All in all, if you’re really curious and really craving to read some Boogiepop, you can give this a try, but otherwise, don’t.
bonutzuu 