Part 65: Hatoful Manga - Focus on the Hawks
ChorpSaway posted:
At this point, I think that this sort of thing would be fine. Enough to give information and stuff, but not just giving out everything that it has to offer.
In that case, I think it's time to...
Focus on the Hawks!
(jfc guys this cover I just can't handle it wow)
Our first-reviewed manga is set way back before, well, before most of the things that went horribly wrong: Kawara Ryouji is still alive and kicking, the Hato House incident is still years in the future, and nobirdie is sad or broken. Except for Iwamine Shuu, or as he's still known at this point in time, Isa Souma. His brokenness is something you can set your watch by, a perpetual fact of life. Due to a childhood injury from a human terrorist attack that destroyed his family's compound, he lost his parents, most of the strength on the right side of his body, and the majority of his color vision: He can only see in grey and red. The two of them, Kawara and Souma, work together for the Hawk Party's research departments along with Tohri Nishikikouji, a golden pheasant who we all met here in HoliStar. Also, despite their modern (IE, game-era) appearances? Isa / Shuu is the youngest of the trio, by a great margin.
This manga, a bit over 30 solid pages (primarily 4-panel vertical comics, 2 to a page), is about 70% birdie and 30% human, in the author's own words. It opens as bird comics, covering the various random events of their research lives (none of them have much home life). I won't spoil more than one comic, but I will mention that particular outlier: During a break period, Ryouji decides to have a "Spectacular Phone-In Event" where children from nearby schools can call and ask him science questions. His first call is from a "kid" named Isa Souma (literally perched 5 feet away, at his desk, on the office phone line), who immediately opens by asking why Dr. Kawara is wasting time with this when he has a wife and child at home. The good doctor immediately declares question time to be over and runs off-panel to dodge the bullet.
There are blizzards, sleepovers, pizza parties, valuable research, useless research, and gratuitous acts of, I quote, "ooweewoo". The book transitions to humans right before the time that Kawara leaves on his fateful vacation. I refuse to spoil what happens after that, other than to say you will probably cry, and you will certainly sympathize with Shuu more than you ever expected or wanted to.
I give this manga 10 / 10 tear-stained Isa / Shuu faces, a forlorn visage found nowhere else in this wide world.
Focus on the Hawks! is 1.99 and can be purchased on Amazon here.