Jul 29, 2021
I decided to give Boys over Flowers a go considering it is the best selling shojo manga. The story starts with Tsukushi Makino, a high student from a lower income background, struggling to fit in at an elite school for the ultra rich. She ends up drawing the attention of the most popular boys in the school, the F4. Unfortunately for Tsukushi the attention is all negative and focused on trying to get her to leave the school. At this point in the story I really enjoyed Tsukushi as a character; she is determined, stubborn, and holds her own. Tsukasa, Rui, Sojiro, and Akira of
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the F4 are arrogant, have a playboy aura, and come across as spoiled from Tsukushi’s perspective. Kind of the traits I expected in a manga about rich boys from the 90s.
As the manga goes on each character seems to become a 2 dimensional representation of a couple traits and they lose anything that once made them unique. We never get much depth from Sojiro or Akira so their main focuses are being playboys or trying to get Tsukasa to lose his virginity. Rui fades into the background once the story shifts towards Tsukushi and Tsukasa’s relationship. Tsukasa has glimmers of a strong, brooding protagonist that constantly are overshadowed by his extreme violence. Tsukushi devolves into a naive girl who feels like she lost her spark.
Speaking of extreme violence, this manga sure has a lot of it. Perhaps that’s just due to its age, and while it doesn’t bother me that much, I don’t think it will sit well with every reader. These instances seem to be one the big ways the author creates drama within the series, but after a while it gets stale. At a certain point the story become so repetitive that I sped through the chapters as quickly as I could read just to finish the manga so I could read something else.
There were things I did enjoy about BoF though. The art at the beginning was so unique and detailed, especially the outfits and accessories of the F4. Rarely were there any outfit repeats which was so impressive. It has a great nostalgic style that I love. The art starts to lose detail and interesting backgrounds as the series goes on, but I’ve noticed that happen with other works as well. Some of the interactions with Tsukushi and Tsukasa were totally relatable and cute, and those became my favorite parts of the manga. I just wish the manga had a more satisfying ending considering its length. At the end I was left wanting a larger payoff after sifting through much of the bloated storylines.
Overall, I think Boys over Flowers is a great work of its time. However this is one I wouldn’t have felt guilty about looking up the ending once I got bored of the story.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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