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mahou-furbies · 1 year

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Closing thoughts on Time Stranger Kyoko

It's a short series, so I ended up rereading my first ever magical girl manga. I remember not really liking this back when it came out in the 2000s (or actively disliking it with the strength of a teen pissed at a piece of media), and if now was the first time I read it, I'd probably find it middling at best due to its many flaws. However now I surprisingly liked it a lot more than I expected, because I do have some nostalgia for it, and it’s not quite as bad as what I wanted it to be back then.

The story is about princess Kyoko, who gets the power to control time. Her mission is to gather 11 other magical girls and boys to help her move a giant clock, which should wake up her twin sister who has been in an enchanted sleep since birth. Let's get the obvious complaint that every TSK review must mention out of the way first: the manga was cancelled, and the ending is incredibly rushed (Kyoko finds one Stranger in the first volume, three in the second, and the third begins by introducing six of them in one page). There's really nothing that can be said about it other than that it's incredibly awkward when several volumes worth of story is crammed into four chapters.

Then there were a lot of shall we say wacky story elements I don't think I really paid attention to back when I originally read this. Like how Kyoko's BFF is in a relationship with an adult man whose only characteristic is "sells underage girls in human auction", and after things implode, the end note of this arc is "it's a shame things didn't work out for her". And then there was the mermaid girl who was a homophobic brocon. And this one guy sexually assaults Kyoko while she's sleeping because he knows he'll get a death penalty for it, which guilts Kyoko into lying that their feelings are mutual, and in the end he's just forgiven for everything (including a little mass murder he committed earlier). There's a lot packed in these three volumes I tell you!

In addition to all this buffoonery TSK also contains my least favourite Tanemura trope. Which is when a bad guy is revealed to secretly have been a good guy all along (like they were just acting and always had the good guys' best interest in mind, or deep in their heart never stopped loving a main character). Or alternatively this comes up in scenarios where a character reveals that they did something terrible that hurt someone really bad, only for this victim to reveal that they knew all along and made peace with it a long time ago. In both cases it's like, first you set up a conflict, and then reveal that the conflict wasn't there to begin with? I hate this trope, giving the characters a second chance is fine, but I'd much rather read about them working to earn forgiveness than speedrunning to the happy ending.

That is a lot of complaining, but as I said in the first paragraph I actually had a fairly good time. The premise is intersting and the characters are fun, and most importantly it turns out I like Kyoko a lot. She is delightfully assertive, adaptive and confident, and actively goes out her way to move the plot forward. And! Reading the wikipedia it turns out! This was the reason the series got canned! """Kyouko wasn’t accepted, because she was maybe too headstrong""" my ass... Japanese girls have terrible taste it seems.

Finally a shoutout to series Best Boy, Widseek, who is this honorable thief/lovable rogue type character, he was a lot of fun. And also another shoutout to the flip phones the characters use in the 2900s.

#Time Stranger Kyoko #review I guess

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