And I'm the Mouse: Cheese in the Trap Manhwa Review

  A promo for the Cheese in the Trap drama CD.
I discovered Soon Kki/순끼's manhwa Cheese in the Trap a while ago, and I have no idea how. All I know is that I had approximately 60 tabs open in my web browser, and that the first one featured Baka-Updates Manga's page on this webcomic.

Yep! A webcomic. It's a format that I think Cheese in the Trap utilizes well, which I'll go into in a little later.

But first, the story. Cheese in the Trap follows Sul, a college student who is returning to school after taking a year off. The circumstances of her leave aren't immediately clear, but they seem to have to do with an upperclassman, a handsome guy named Yoo Jung. Not only is he super cute, but he's apparently very polite, smart, and rich. Despite the fact that the ladies line up for this absolute heartthrob, Sul isn't so taken with him.

Now, doesn't that sound positively boring and cliche? A female protagonist who has a love/hate relationship with an impossibly perfect guy. Never seen that in EVERY SINGLE CHICK FLICK EVER MADE. But that's where the cliches stop.

At first Sul's reaction to Yoo Jung seems typical of a female protagonist in a romance comic. She's highly skeptical of him, and perhaps too immune to the charm that has managed to affect every single girl except her. It seems as though she'll end up learning to love him as his sudden, mysterious interest in her slowly wins her over. However, as the story progresses, partly through flashbacks woven throughout the present narrative, the reader discovers that Sul's disdain isn't so unfounded.

The End of Tokyopop Manga

This is the fourth post I've written tagged with Marmalade Boy, by the way.

If you're savvy on manga publishing in America, you might already know that Tokyopop shut down its US manga publishing operations on May 31.

I became obsessed with manga when I was about eleven. One of my friends, older and more informed than I was about the medium, took me to a Waldenbooks at a local mall. The manga section only took up one small shelf, crammed next to the cash register. I didn't know too much about what I was looking at, since while I was a comics reader, it was mostly of collections of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side. I had read a little manga at the beginning of the whole Pokémon craze, a flipped version of Ono Toshihiro's Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu, when I was about six, but I never went too much beyond that and some dubbed episodes of Sailor Moon. I did draw a lot of Pokémon fan comics, but we don't need to go into that.

She suggested Wataru Yoshizumi's Marmalade Boy to me, licensed by Tokyopop. The cover was pretty unassuming, featuring a smiling girl looking at some unknown thing in the corner, but the story intro hooked me in the minute I skimmed its pages in that store, and I bought it.

The Search for Otome: SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER SEQUEL!

RE: Alistair++, a free, full-length otome game.

Since the summer's begun I've had lots of time on my hands. Thus far, I've rewatched almost all of the episodes of The Office (US version, if you care to know) available on Netflix. One would think I'd have done more than that, but sitting in front of a computer marathoning a show I've already watched takes up a significant amount of time.

So there's that. And I've also been playing a lot of Chain Factor.

Despite my packed schedule, I've been doing research on one thing I haven't looked at in a long time: Otome games! Free ones, specifically. It seems like there have been quite a few new English options to be released since I last did a post, though that also could mean I didn't do a good job researching them in the first place.

I was originally going to do another big post, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that it didn't make sense to put it all together in just one entry. So in the coming weeks, look out for reviews and other opinionated pieces on just otome games! It'll be really swell, and hopefully a little different from what you'd typically find on blogs dedicated to otome. It's not what Manga Meditation's about anyway, and those blogs already do their job way better than I could.

Speaking of which, here are a few links to games, developers, and other otome miscellanea:

Manga Review: Library Wars

DISLCAIMER: To help give some insight behind this review, I'm going to preface it with this: I want to be a librarian. I plan on going to graduate school for library science and I am aiming to be a public librarian (location TBD). As such, my review of this series may be somewhat colored by this fact. Or maybe a lot colored.

"Keanu Reeves Won't Take on Akira"

Anime fans around the world...rejoice! The anime world has received its deliverance in the form of Keanu Reeves' rejection of a lead role in Akira (click for the article). Perhaps the Rapture that was scheduled to happen on Saturday decided to exert its divine influence in other areas of life for the benefit of all. By faith, I am most grateful that it did.

This headliner was a shocker for me, as I was only peripherally aware of a live-action version of Akira was in the works. My initial reaction?

Romance Novel...Manga?

So besides being well versed in all things manga, I am also a bit of an expert on romance novels. And by a bit, I mean that I have read probably hundreds of romance novels. I'm an addict, I'll admit. Though since college, I've been more or less forcefully weaned off them due to lack of time, there's something about them that always has me coming back for more. Could it be the purplish prose used to describe the love-making in which both characters magically attain orgasms that "make time suspend and the heavens shatter (no joke, direct quote) "? Or could it be the Fabio-esque men that adorn the covers, showing off whatever naturally ripply and hardened muscles they have? Whatever the reason, the point is that I enjoy romance novels, and I was quite thrilled to find a new manga genre - the romance novel shoujo manga adaptation.

A Most Penitent Post

A few days ago, the following conversation took place:

Polecat: Remember that blog we had?
Blackbird: Oh yeaaaah!

Polecat/Blackbird: ...

(Starfish was not present for that conversation, but she would have certainly joined in with us on the ellipsis)

Though it may not seem as such, dear readers, we do remember the existence of this blog. And it is all too clear as to how negligent we have been with the updates...or lack thereof, as it were. It has been more than a year since we last posted, and we are rife with regret, shame, and all other emotions that are appropriate for groveling purposes.

But! Summer is upon us! And unlike the last year and half, which proved to be fallow in terms of blogposts, this summer will be REPLETE with blogposts. Such abundance as you have never seen before! The world will runneth over with sagacious words pouring from our cybernetic hands.

So please, dear reader, bear with us and continue to grace us with your presence a little longer. We will certainly try to make it worth your while. :)

~Manga Meditation


PS: Random aside, here is a picture of an ice cream plant in honor of summer, the ice cream season.

This is what true happiness looks like.