Author: Masazaku Katsura
Genre: Romance, Drama
Volumes: 15
Released: 1997 – 1999 (Western release March '05)
Seto Ichitaka is your average 16-year-old high-school student. As you might have guessed, just like in any other romance Manga, he is in love with the beautiful Yoshizuki Iori and is too shy to express his feelings when he's around her. In fact, when he is around her his attitude changes completely, and he comes across as cold and uncaring towards her. As you can guess, this hardly helps him spark up the most basic of interactions, let alone a relationship as girlfriend and boyfriend.
I''s follows Ichitaka's struggle to get together with Iori somehow, regardless of all the obstacles blocking his progress (including a childhood friend who's just returned from America), and his confessions never really seem to go as planned.
Okay so you have all seen the age-old method of getting a donkey to move by dangling a carrot in front of it with a stick, or using a similar method to get a hamster to run in a wheel. It's in constant use in many cartoons and I had no problem laughing at the situation when I was twelve. Hah! Stupid donkey, silly little hamster.
Yeah well right now I feel like an ass and my wheel is turning faster than the “bangin' alloys” on some boy racer's shitty little yellow Saxo at two in the morning.
Seriously, this series is chock full of situations that will pull you back, forth, left, right and straight into that lamp post you didn't see because you were too busy reading it. Yes, yes it's got most of the clichés you would expect to find in a romance Manga: the childhood friend, the lecherous classmate, an innocent and perfectly kind love interest, and a pretty decent but annoyingly shy main character who would get drunk after Rum Truffle (and then proceed to make an idiot out of himself in front of the girl he loves). Karaoke, hot springs and class trips also make an entrance in this series so don't be surprised when you see the same situation pop up here as you did in the other tens of romance Manga you might have read.
Don't expect the characters themselves to be different from the norm, either. They're your standard romance characters, with their standard features, personalities and reactions, although the lecherous classmate, Teratani Yasumasa, can say some enlightening things every now and again.
To be honest, there's a lot to I''s that would leave it with no individuality if that was all it had, but for all the cliché scenes like hot springs and class trips that creep in it presents new and fantastically different situations within these scenes that makes the cliché itself look more tried-and-tested than overused, and while the characters fulfil your usual run-of-the-mill romance/drama Manga roles, watching them adapt to these new situations is just as fun as it all being completely original, and there's less danger of screwing up something that's common as muck than trying something completely new.
Now where drama/romance is concerned, in my personal experience the most important thing the writer needs to develop in the reader is hope. If the reader doesn't care about the outcome of the romance then what's the point of reading? Hoping the character doesn't screw up on his first date, hoping she can accept his quirks. Hoping he isn't a complete fuckwit who speaks before he thinks. All of this rides on hope and without it the relationship is dull and uninteresting. There are, of course, points where a lack of hope can be made up using curiosity; while the reader may not care about him getting with one character over another, he may still be curious as to finding out the end result. Trying to invoke curiosity in a romance Manga is hard, though, as many series suffer due to the reader immediately being able to tell that the main character will indeed end up with his main love interest regardless of the badly done “Oh gosh, she fell on him and they accidentally kissed and she walked in. O...M...G!” scenarios that are launched at you from some horrible cannon made of mediocrity.
This series inspires both hope and curiosity, which to be honest is a first for me where romance Manga is concerned, as it's always either been one or the other, and having both in its arsenal makes this series more than worthy of attention than most, if not all other series of the same genre. This series has become one of my favourite where romance Manga is concerned, and believe me when I say I've read my fair share of those.
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