Princess: Volume 5

Well, it's bye-bye to our three beloved Princesses, but I wish it wasn't so. I liked the fact that Mikyo changed the focus of the last two volumes to Akira, because I'm really fond of him too. It's weird how the new character ends up though... LOL! ^.^ The princesses put on a very nice last show too! \o/ All in all, a nice buy and a very good series, but I do wish it hadn't ended and that we got to see more of Akira's "destiny"... LOL.

To be honest, when I started reading this manga series I didn't understand what all the hype was about. It's a BL title without the BL. The most interesting part of the first volume was the insight we got from Tsuda's alter ego, Tsuda-bear and her friend Eiki Eiki's, Eiki-bunny. While I have continued to enjoy the snippets of Tsuda-bear's adventures in sucessive volumes, I absolutely fell in love with the manga story the more of it I read. I completely understand now why Tsuda decided to take away the BL aspects of the series and release it as a gender-bending shojo series instead: the story didn't need romance, it was served perfectly well in character development alone, even though I wouldn't have minded seeing Tohru and Yuujirou end up together. In the final volume, the student council elections heat up. Tohru and Yuujirou are on Akira's side while Mikoto falls down on the side of the challenger, Mitaka. The princesses' plotting ultimately has little effect on the outcome, as Akira's own personality and methods serve to guide the election to its foregone conclusion. What is fantastic about the outcome, however, is not who wins the election, but how Akira and Mitaka's relationship develops because of it. This is actually one the most humorous aspects of the whole volume. Also in this volume, Tsuda finally and much more satisfactorily (for me anyway) resolves Yuujirou's issues with his family. This was the one aspect from previous volumes and the anime that I was not satisfied with. It just seemed incomplete and Tsuda managed to fix that for me here. At the end of the volume we see the princesses final farewell performance and their closure about their year as princesses, but, fear not, Princess Princess fans! There is a short spin-off series called Princess Princess +, where the princesses that Tohru, Yuujirou and Mikoto select in volume 5 to take over have their run. Let's hope for a successful English localization of that series in the near future.