Thursday, 21 February 2013

Bakuman S3 20 – Proposal & 1st Volumes


Aoki's manga is cancelled and Hiramaru tries his best to her girlfriend up. Later, the first volumes of Reversi and Zombie Gun are now on sale. The question is which manga will do more when it comes to first volume sales?


Just like the previous episode, it is divided into two parts with an eye catch dividing the two. The first part in the episode is focused on the love story between Hiramaru and Aoki featuring Yoshida. No seriously, that's how it felt like. Yoshida is there since the very beginning of this relationship as Hiramaru's wingman. He wants what is best for his author, and that includes his eternal happiness with Aoki. It's kinda sweet considering that he even actually followed Hiramaru and Aoki during their date in the amusement park just to make sure he will not screw this up!

At the end, Hiramaru screwed up for a bit during their date since the engagement ring went missing for some reason. If there is one thing that I like about this scene is how Aoki figured out what's happening around her. Heck, she even asked the guy who is operating the Ferris wheel to give them another ride so that her boyfriend can do a proper marriage proposal! The marriage proposal scene is really sweet, though it didn't went smoothly, the thought of wanting eternal happiness with Aoki is there. It's sincere, it's sweet and it didn't end in a rather cliché manner. It ended in the manner that I expect Hiramaru to do.


Yoshida's presence in this date also added up the magic of this scene. This part showed us the closeness between the two that even if there are times that Yoshida has the balls to blackmail, give him false hopes and promises just to make him work, at the end, they are like a father and son team. Now that Hiramaru is about to tie the knot, let's go to Ashirogi!

So basically, Zombie Gun sold more volumes compared to Reversi. It's kinda understandable considering that Niizuma is an established author and that Ashirogi's PCP didn't reach the same success like that of CROW. The group analyzing other factors such as that is what makes this part of the episode interesting. The analysis also gave me a better idea about the content of the manga; this made me conclude that Reversi is indeed Death Note 2.0 less the notebook with more demons in it. Speaking of Death Note, I can't help but notice that the Death Note manga displayed in Ashirogi's shelf is only until volume 8, the last volume of the manga's first half. This made me conclude that Reversi is basically telling us that the authors wanted Death Note to be just Light vs. L.


Meta stuff aside, the duo where invited to a Tezuka awarding party kind of thing. Basically we learned that Azuki is already one popular voice actress, there are talks that Zombie Gun will have an anime, which is not surprising thanks to the success of CROW and lastly, Niizuma is a big fan of Reversi. What's interesting about it is that he said that he will not lose when it comes to volume sales. To put it simply, Niizuma's basically said that Reversi has a chance to make a comeback when it comes to volume sales and thus, the fight between Reversi and Zombie Gun continues.