Review:
Miroku Osaki is a 36-year old, fat, unemployed shut-in. He had a sales job at a health food company 10 years ago, but he was let go due to "unsatisfactory performance," which everyone knew was really code for "a fat salesperson makes our company look bad." He's finally starting to come out of his shell, though. He decides he wants to try dancing and joins a gym, where he meets Yoichi Kisaragi, the director of an entertainment company. Yoichi supports and encourages him, and before long Miroku is fit, attractive, and turning heads. However, he has no clue how charismatic he's become - all he knows is that he enjoys dancing, singing, and cheering people up. This volume follows his first steps towards becoming a middle-aged idol.
Ehhh. I generally try to avoid Tokyopop's post-resurrection releases, but this caught me during a late-night impulse shopping mood. It was not a great decision on my part.Ossan Idol! wanted to be a heart-warming read. Although it made several attempts to smooth over the more problematic aspects of its premise, it didn't really manage it. For example, even before Miroku's weight loss, Yoichi noticed how kind and charming he was...and told Miroku "if you can slim down a bit, you'd definitely be a hunk" (21). The moment with Fumi was a bit better (she witnessed him shut down an aggressive drunk prior to his weight loss, and he became the definition of "cool" for her), but I spent the entire scene distracted by how awkwardly Miroku was drawn. In general, Ichika Kino had problems with overall body proportions and hands (lol page 108 and Yoichi's weird hand lump) - the problems were just most noticeable during Miroku's fat scenes.
Half of this volume was pretty much just Miroku wandering from one "accidentally a naturally amazing idol" moment to another. Training at the gym magically allowed him to lose weight, become hot, and gain better lung and diaphragm strength/control. He also magically became awesome at singing and dancing almost entirely due to karaoke and playing dancing/singing video games. It's like he suddenly burst into the world as a fully formed idol, and everyone started noticing him.
It's rare to see anyone in manga or anime who's over 28 depicted as being attractive and appealing to characters, so one of the draws of this series should theoretically be that Miroku is 36 and the two men who join him on his road to stardom, Yoichi and Shiju (an unemployed former host who used to love dancing), are probably at least a few years older than him. However, other characters kept mistaking Miroku for a college student, and he'd spent that past 10 years living at home with his parents and playing video games, so it was easy to forget he was entering his late 30s. I could at least believe that Yoichi and Shiju were older, but Miroku was the focus, so it felt a little like the author was already fudging the series' hook.
There were signs that Miroku would eventually end up with Yoichi's niece. I assumed they had at least a 10-year age difference, but again, it didn't really feel that way. Miroku just seemed so...shiny and young. There was this one weird and awkward scene in which a gay coded producer asked Miroku to sit in his lap, and Miroku did it, no questions asked and no indication that he thought it was an odd request. I could just barely, with some effort, believe that a dumb young guy would do something like that, but again, we're supposed to believe that Miroku is 36.
This could potentially improve in later volumes, but I don't think I'll be reading more.
Extras:
A four-page bonus story (text only) in which the guys go out to celebrate after their dance competition, an afterword by the author, and a four-page bonus comic about the cover art. I didn't know until I read the afterword that this was a manga adaptation of a light novel series. There's no sign of it on Goodreads, and it doesn't appear to be licensed and translated into English.
No comments:
Post a Comment