Paradise Kiss
a review by isahbellah
a review by isahbellah
For starters, yes, I'm the odd one out here. I didn't like Paradise Kiss as much as I initially thought I would, but I didn't exactly hate it either. In Summation: it has its problems and in the end I decided to give it 6/10. Which, in my opinion, is pretty fair. There WILL be spoilers in this review, so beware!
Yukari then cross paths with the Paradise Kiss crew, a group of teenagers from a fashion school who were in desperate need of a model. Yukari is a lean, tall and beautiful young lady, so naturally, she's a match. But here is where one of my major problems with the story begins:
George is one of ParaKiss and probably is considered its leader. He is an excentric boy and quite frankly, not at all a good "hero" for this story. Before meeting George, Yukari was (supposedly) "in love" with Tokumori-kun:
(Okay, yeah, CLEARLY the good choice is Tokumori-kun. But! I'm getting ahead of myself here. a-hem)
Only a few chapters in and suddenly, she's all about George! And okay, this is a shoujo (even though many consider it to be josei) and there's a love triangle tag ~~(that I didn't check beforehand but that's on me)~~, but I kind of expect love triangles to... make sense?
As in: I expected her to take a little longer to uh, "switch" sides. I expected her to show more love towards Tokumori, considering that she had a picture of him on her wallet. I wasn't expecting her first love to be so... shallow.
But okay, she immediately gets smitten by George, and I was hoping that George would be a good person, but...
he's a terrible person.
0 emotional availability or responsability, never calls her (waits for her to call him, ALWAYS), unavailable for serious conversations and only really available when he's kissing/having sex with her OR dolling her up with his outfits and makeup.
The amount of times he makes her cry in this story is abysmal. The amount of times he does something to rectify that (or even just say that he's sorry) is, literally, ZERO.
He's a terrible person and a terrible boyfriend and I'm nowhere near done with this review yet.
Meanwhile, Hiroyuki Tokumori is a hardworking student from the same class as Yukari. He's honest, he's reliable and he's... actually in love with one of Parakiss' members, his childhood friend Miwako:
Who's actually been dating their childhood friend, Arashi:
And hey, we got ourselves... a love sextuple?!?! I think that's the word. It's basically two love triangles, but they're interwoven together. (And utterly unnecessary, but ANYWAY).
Those three were childhood friends and have had issues since then. Miwako has admitted to loving both of them, but since Arashi gets insanely jealous, she decided to stop talking to Hiroyuki altogether. (Also, mind you, this stuff happened BEFORE THE EVENTS of Paradise Kiss, I think this is better explained in Gokinjo Monogatari).
As unhealthy as this is, he complied with her wishes and we only find out through Yukari, who arranged for a meeting of the two without them knowing. Upon finding out about his feelings for Miwako (who became a very dear friend to Yukari), I expected... drama. I expected a little bump on the road of their friendship but, THANKFULLY this time, I was happy to be wrong. Miwako stays strong with her choice of Arashi and even said that she'd be happy for Yukari if she ended up with Tokimori.
But.
Yukari immediately deflects that by telling her she actually thinks she's in love with George. Sigh.
And here's another problem I have with this manga: clearly, since the beginning, Ai Yazawa was planning for Yukari to end up with George. Tokumori was supposed to be a "mentor", just a good male friend. Which is a shame to me, considering he'd be a fantastic male lead, but then the story gets worse.
Out of NOWHERE, Tokumori says he's in love with Yukari (but by then, she was already in a toxic relationship with George). You'd think this would make me happy, but it didn't. Even though this story only has 48 chapters, I think there should have been enough room for things to happen in a natural progression. The way that things happened in Paradise Kiss were way too fast, with little to no time to develop its own characters, let alone a satisfactory relationship between them.
One chapter she likes Tokumori, the next she's madly in love with George. One chapter she's in love with George, the other she decides to tell him to fuck off, then she's back to being on her knees begging for him again. We see Tokumori being a nice friend and being worried for Yukari, but I don't think the little we've seen of him was enough for him to develop romantic feelings for her (especially since he was hung up on Miwako for so, so long). George is a dick to Yukari again, but the next minute he's being a slightly decent person. Really, I think the timing of Paradise Kiss was a huge mess and it got on the way of my enjoyment.
Another (perhaps minor) complaint I have is with the 4th wall breaking. If it was fun and/or had any plot reason for that, I'd like it, but...
Instead of laughing at the times they break the 4th wall (which are many), I was unamused. And I think it got in the way of the "flow" of the chapter. Here I am, trying to take this story seriously, and suddenly the characters are acknowledging they're only characters in a manga. And they just gloss over that fact, like it was no big deal.
Moving forward to other problematics, there's Ai Yazawa trying to bring LGBT characters to the story but without further fleshing out them. They're... George and Isabella.
George is Bissexual, and at first that made me REALLY excited because 1) I hardly ever see bi characters in anime/manga, or at least it's handled poorly and 2) I happen to be bissexual myself.
Sadly, what we got was this:
This isn't flirtation, this is harassment. Arashi is clearly uncomfortable, but all these situations are played for laughs. Instead of laughing, I was also uncomfortable. This is a caricature of what most straight people think being bissexual is like.
And then there's Isabella.
She's a lovely trans woman who acts as the mother of the group. Too bad she barely shows up.
She's such an underused and underappreciated character. Whenever she shows up, it's always in the background and/or being nice, rarely did we get more insights on her thoughts and her character. There was ONE flashback chapter with her but that was it.
I can't help but think about the chapter amount. If only we got more chapters. If only Ai Yazawa knew how to properly manage those chapters. I know that Isabella is a supporting character, it's natural that she gets less screentime than the MCs, but out of all the supporting cast, she's the one with the very least amount of screentime. The only characters showing up less than her are the parents, who naturally weren't that important for the plot to start with.
There's also a hint of her maybe having feelings for George, but I couldn't say for sure due to her being severely underdeveloped.
she does go with him to Paris, though. Lastly, I'll be complaining about the ending of the manga, but it'll be in a long spoiler bubble so don't worry.
Not what I expected to happen, but not why I'm complaining either. This was a smart move. What I didn't like was this:
there's a timeskip and then we're presented with Yukari being engaged to Tokumori. OUT OF NOWHERE.We didn't see her getting over George nor him getting over Miwako. We didn't see either of them going on a date or confessing. We didn't see a kiss. We didn't see anything about their relationship and how they got together, we just got the aftermath of that.
Even me, who liked Tokumori since the beginning, who saw that he was the best choice, didn't like this ending. Yukari even blatantly asked him if he ever got over Miwako and he said he didn't!
To me, this feels like Yukari never got over George and Tokumori never got over Miwako. But they couldn't be with their loved ones, so they decided to get together. And that's bullshit.
Through the entire time I was reading, the story felt rushed. So I should accept this rushed ending, I suppose. But I can't get over the fact that Paradise Kiss had a lot of potential and it was all wasted.
Overall, I can't give this a worse rating because I did have some moments of fun while reading. And I did read worse things before lol trust me. But yes, Paradise Kiss was a huge disappointment for me. Thank you if you read this review till the end :)
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