Bunny Drop Vol #08 Manga Review

Bunny Drop Volume 8

Rin’s Daddy Complex starts to come out in the most frustrating way.

Creative Staff
Story: Yumi Unita
Art: Yumi Unita
Translation/Adaptation: Kaori Inoue

What They Say
Reconnecting with her biological mother and her new family has put Rin at peace with her unfortunate beginnings. Now, becoming a big sister is cause for happiness for the levelheaded young woman. But despite this closure, all is not roses. The world around her seems obsessed with romance-Kouki still vies for Rin’s affection, Reina jumps between relationships, a classmate shows his interest in Rin herself. Yet for Rin, love isn’t turning out quite the way it’s supposed to. Trapped between her head and her heart, will Rin be able to sort out her feelings before someone else picks up on them to disastrous effect?

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Volume 8 of Bunny Drop is where the long rumoured infatuation Rin has about Daikichi finally comes into play. Now, I’m not going to sit here and rail against the series simply for introducing a one-sided infatuation. It doesn’t matter how repellent this infatuation is, especially in U.S. society, because it is simply a plot point that is only starting to come into focus. No, I will instead rail against how the entire volume is poorly written, structured, and shoehorned making me get visibly angry while reading it.

There a quite a few things that happen in this volume. I honestly can’t remember most of them! The highlight, however, is of Rin meeting her mother face-to-face and even choosing to hang out with her on further occasions. Cool, we get a bit of closure on that arc and get to see how both characters have matured over the course of the series. But…

Every single story that is written in this book, whether it’s Rin with her mom, Rin hanging out with her friends, school stuff, all of it, is punctuated with Rin’s daydreaming and gushing over Daikichi. Rin sees her mom give birth to her new child: “ahh, Daikichi is the perfect man to have a family with.” Over and over again. This is not how you should be writing any kind of story! It halts all purpose from the tales being told and reduces them to mindless gutter trash that only boy-crazy 12 year old girls would ever think passes as quality writing and/or entertainment. It is dull and mind numbing. Not just because it’s all squishy and gushy, or that it’s Rin falling for her nephew/surrogate father; it’s dull and mind numbing because it is completely counterintuitive to every single piece of character development and series progression that we have seen since chapter one! This is not the Rin we have grown to love. Even after the timeskip in volume 5, Rin was still a good character that I enjoyed reading about even if the storytelling quality wasn’t up to standards.

I’m just baffled at the direction the author has taken the series. She was telling a coming of age story about a child and her surrogate father, and now it’s just bottom of the barrel rom-com fodder that contains no progression, not grounding in the world’s realizm, no enjoyment. You want to introduce the taboo love interest? Fine. But please structure your chapters in a meaningful manner that allows this plot point to evolve naturally; you know, like you’ve been doing since the first book. Don’t negate every single accomplishment you are trying to achieve by shoehorning this unnatural development into the series that just simply doesn’t work with all the groundwork that’s already been laid. Rin is completely not the same character here and it is endlessly frustrating and once we reach the end of the book, we simply just don’t care and have wasted 200 pages on what could be straight filler, except it’s not. So angry at this book!!

In Summary
There’s still one volume left and I don’t even care if the spoilers are true or not. If this is the way the author has decided to tell her story, by hamfisting the dumb romance in and creating situations that could be used for series progression but instead get thrown to the wayside as a simple excuse to present Rin with another dreamy reason why Daikichi is the best man in the world, I want no part in it! Volumes 1 – 4 are goddamn masterpieces. Everyone should read them ASAP. The anime, which is based solely on volumes 1-4, is also a masterpiece. Starting at volume 5 there was a dip in quality but it progressively got better as the author was becoming more comfortable with teenage Rin. And then BAM! It’s not offensive because of the story or what she’s doing, there’s even a realist view set by Kouki which is refreshing because it points that the author is aware of the taboo, it’s offensive because it’s just lazy, terrible writing!

Content Grade: D-
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B+

Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: April 23rd, 2013
MSRP: $13.99