As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
A clash between two worlds
The author's got a wonderful gimmick going on here: protagonist ルル has just moved to her new school, 獄門高校, where she unexpectedly meets an old childhood friend of hers, 極楽寺・禅(ごくらくじ・ぜん), who refuses to acknowledge her. What really makes this special is the fact that ルル, her parents, and all of her friends from her old school are drawn in a very typical 少女-manga style: cute, bright, big eyes, and lots of sparkles and flowers in the background. 禅 and his cohort, however, are drawn in a 劇画-style: big, burly men with dark shading and an undercurrent of tension.
The author plays tropes from both styles straight, making for a wonderful mesh of very different priorities; it gets even better when those priorities align. There's a great undercurrent of humor woven in throughout as well; I absolutely didn't expect much to make me laugh, but I was happily proven wrong.
This is also a very easy read: text density is very low, to the point where it's not rare to have two or three pages with a single sentence or interjection. No furigana is given except for character names iirc, but the vocabulary only rarely strays from regular high school stuff. I don't even remember much slang popping up.
This is definitely a series I intend to keep an eye on!