Loveless volume 1

Title: Loveless volume 1

Author: Kouga Yun

Genre: Shounen ai, slight fantasy

Summary: While most manga artists choose to depict girls or females as having cat ears and tails, Kouga Yun draws ears and tails to show a sign of 'immaturity' or as a way of showing that one is not yet an adult (ie. one has not has sex before. -.-''). When one becomes an 'adult', he or she loses their ears and tail. This is a very interesting and a rather new concept on the old method of using cat ears and tail to emphasize sexiness.

The story starts off with Aoyagi Ritsuka, the main character of Loveless. His older brother has recently died in an 'accident' – burnt to death while sitting in Ritsuka's very own seat in school. Seimei was a very polite and clever person – or so everyone else says during the funeral. What had really happened to cause his death? Was it an accident?

Or was it murder?

Ritsuka first starts unraveling the mysteries when he meets Soubi, who claims to be Seimei's Fighter unit. As explained in the manga, Fighter units fight and protect their Sacrifies – in Soubi's case, he is the Fighter, and Seimei was the Sacrifice. However, Ritsuka soon finds Seimei's last will – he hints at a murder conspiracy and tells Ritsuka (via the will) that Soubi, who once 'belonged' to Seimei, would now be passed on to his little brother, Ritsuka.

Opinion: I know, my summary sucked. I bet I got you all confused, didn't I? ^_^'' I'm not very good at explaining (which is why whenever someone asks me, “What's that book about?” I just shove the blurb under their noses. XD).

Yes, Loveless is a shounen ai themed manga, and although it might not be as explicit as Gravitation, I still believe this is much much better than Gravitation is. The art is neat and messy at the same time – it looks slightly messy, but it's a coordinated mess, if you get what I mean!

Ritsuka is adorable with his flattened ears and tail that sticks out. Apparently, there is some issue within Ritsuka – he has little to no memories of himself beyond the two years he has with Seimei (hence making Seimei a very important person in his life) and is slightly obsessed with taking pictures in order to retain those 'precious memories' that he has.

Another character that appears frequently in the manga include his friend, Yuiko. Yuiko is tall for her age, and likes Ritsuka very much, despite her once telling a would-be boyfriend that she would never date someone shorter than her. ^^ (Ritsuka is shorter than her!) Yuiko had a habit of referring to herself in third point of view, until Ritsuka made it a condition that she had to refer to herself as 'I' if she really wanted to be Ritsuka's friend.

Loveless also has an element of fantasy that includes spell battles. This is where the Fighter/Sacrifice pairs come in. They initiate and fight a battle using words. The more complex and well-strung words the sentences are, the more effective the spells. This is a very unique sort of battle indeed, and extremely interesting. See? You need more intellect than brawn to fight properly in Loveless!

Sacrifices take the damage for the team while the Fighter tries his or her best to protect their Sacrifices while using word spells to restrain the other team's Sacrifice. For every damage the Sacrifices receives, he or she is dealt a 'restrain' (read, in other words, kinky bondage! ^^) and once the Sacrifice is fully bound, the battle is lost. A team can only consist of two people who share the same 'name' (ie in the beginning of the manga, you will be meeting teams named Breathless, Sleepless and Fearless). Seimei Aoyagi and Soubi's 'name' was Beloved, but after Seimei died, Soubi joined Ritsuka (whose 'name' is, apparently, Loveless, the complete opposite). It is unheard of for a Fighter whose Sacrifice has died to join up with another Sacrifice. Their two 'names' clash with each other, thus effectively halving their power, but since Soubi seems to have almost unlimited power, they win most of their battles. =) ~rage-chan

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.