Love Hunter Akazukin

I read this as part of the MRC's One-Shot Roulette challenge and I'm disappointed. I'm not expecting every one-shot to be a diamond in the rough but this was just boring.

I wouldn't normally talk about translation and editing quality here, since that isn't something the author's responsible for, and because this is an older work back when the attitude towards translating works was to leave some Japanese-isms in the script, but considering this work will never get licensed I think it's only fair to include it in the review. In short, it's fine but not great.

For example, many times over it's mentioned in a TL note on the page that Akazukin (one of the groups in the story) means red-riding hood. They essentially function as hunters so it would have been much easier to just use that as a direct translation. I understand why the translator did this, since it's a play on the classic Red Riding Hood story, where this time instead of her and the wolf being at odds, she falls in love with one. It's still pretty awkward though. This isn't untranslatable by any stretch, I'm sure with some clever phrasing someone could mention the Red Riding Hood part at the very beginning and then drop it in subsequent lines. Or maybe just call the group "Red Riding Hoods" instead.

The team who translated this also keep on saying "wolf tribe" instead of just saying werewolf, which is sloppy, since when the love interest turns into a werewolf it did cause me to be a little confused for a second. I thought he was just an animal race kind of being, similar to catgirls or whatever in fantasy stories. I didn't know he could transform when the moon's out.

The story is pretty mediocre, it's just generic shoujo tropes. A forbidden love across two opposing sides? Check. A shy love interest who doesn't trust people easily and opens up gradually at the end? Yup. A story where the heroine falls in love over a small but not particularly meaningful interaction? Yup. All of these have been done to death before. Nothing in the manga brings anything new to the table.

We get introduced to the MC's partner where we get a shoe-horned backstory about how her whole family was slaughtered by werewolves, which causes her to be against the friendship between the two. The MC also says something to the effect of "Yeah, I can see where she's coming from, but it's cruel to assume he's evil, he hasn't hurt anyone!", right before he transforms a couple of pages ahead and hurts both of them... Going back to the partner, she gets injured in the fight, and then we don't hear anything of substance about her afterwards. It felt like the author added her just to let the MC make a big grand gesture about protecting Ren.

The author also mentions the MC's grandmother a bunch ("translated" as Obaa-chan rather than "grandmother" for some reason...) but we don't properly see her, or learn anything about her. We just know that Ren helped her out once when he was in the forest.

I know this is a one-shot and the author didn't have a lot to work with but they should have at least picked one aspect to hone in on. Either the conflict between the groups (fleshing it out and adding some more history), the grandmother (who could have briefly met Ren and the MC towards the end), or the partner (there could have been a scene where she gets over her prejudices and befriends Ren too).

Would recommend skipping this.