Love Celeb – RANT

So, Love Celeb was on my hitlis… I mean review-list for sometime now, mainly because of those high-scores it constantly gets. For some strange, unknown to me reason. The author goes by the name of Shinjo Mayu, I don’t want to sound like a misogynistic pig but this woman is a prime example of how an artists obsession can negatively influence his/her work.

As you probably noticed from the picture above, this is a shoujo manga. I don’t want to go all nazis here but I find shoujos inferior to non-shoujos. Well, maybe not “inferior”, they just that have a “worst starting position”.

I want you to look at the tags under this manga (go to Baka-Updates or something)… ready, good.

The tag in question is “Smut”, it is given to series that are considered profane or offensive, particularly with regards to sexual content (in short, when it deals with rape… you know, the stuff you see in doujins), right? Well, NO… and shut up. In reality when I see this tag I’m informed that the only thing that will get offended is my intelligence. Presumably with some cheap-ass drama, situations that would not happen in any partly sane world and characters that are more thick then a brick.

Let’s get started then.

So, once upon a time there was a girl that wanted to become an Idol/Celebrity very much. Of course being clumsy and pretty much talentless did not make the her objective easier to achieve. So here cunning manager decide to “push it to the limit”… or rather “her”. He set up our wannabe Idol on a party where she was supposed whore herself out to the people from the industry, of course she did not give consensus to that. There she meets this silver hair hunk who helps her. What she didn’t know was that the person who saved her was in fact the son of the Prime Minister of Japan, which means power and money. What she also doesn’t know is that her dream will soon come true… for a price.

I was actually very positive about Love Celeb when I first read the summery, a rich playboy teasing and abusing this defenseless girl – what can I say, I like this sort of a thing. If this would be a simple romantic comedy I really wouldn’t have anything against it, but we really can’t have that when this woman writes the story, oh no.

We will now make a small experiment – go find a list of Shinjo Mayu works, pick randomly three titles… I can guarantee that at least two of them will have Smut in them (I did this and my result was 3 on 3, go figure). The author is obsessed with their female heroins trying to get raped by every guy including: her-best-friend, manager etc. Sometimes it’s so idiotically done that I just can’t help but bang my head against the desk.

She also has this tendency (when the drama kick in) to make some characters powerless or even non-existing. It especially sticks out in Love Celeb. At one point our Playboy can block off a whole shop with guards just to sexually harass his “perverted bunny” (as he calls her), but on the other hand he won’t assign any guards to protect her… and believe me, this would make his life a lot easier (Beckham knew what he was doing when he hired 5 ex-SAS operatives).

I would really want to describe all this nonsense in more detail but that would be spoiling, although one moment is truly memorable. At one point the situation for our “Richie Rich” gets really bad, then we meet his brother (around the same age as he is). For something like 5 pages he whines how he fucked up the situation with one signature, not to mention he behaves like someone who still sucks his mothers breasts. After that he leaves never to be seen or mentioned again.

Overall this manga is not worth your time (read: “it’s shit”), it’s inconsistent beyond human understanding and the ending is rushed. If you want to read something that is shoujo and has proven itself then re-read “Mars”… what? You never read it? Get the fuck of the dance floor!

Follow up:
After some time I still had this feeling that I was to negative, so to give Shinjo Mayu a last chance I picked from her works a manga that was NO labeled as “smut”. Actually, this is a oneshot that was published along with the 7 Vol. of Love Celeb – “Darenimo Ienai”. I started reading… and somebody tried to rape the main heroine.

I rest my case.