ごっどちゃんず 1 (MFC キューンシリーズ)

A quite interesting series from Yukio, the creator of Jashin-Chan dropkick that possibly takes place in the same universe. In some ways it's kind of the reverse setup, where Jashin-chan is about a demon coming to the human world, this series is about a human coming to the world of gods.

In this case the human is Daichi, who seems to be the same girl Lierre is roomates with at the orphanage in Jashin-chan (though she seems to be older here). Daichi comes to "God-chan paradise", which isn't explicitly stated to be heaven and we don't see any angels, so it seems to be a realm exclusively for gods, or at least a cordoned off area of heaven specifically for them.

What both impressed and surprised me about this series is that while it has a similar vibe to Jashin-chan, the execution is different and it doesn't feel like a rehash of the same concept at all. There's still lots of humor and zany hijinks, but what makes this really different from Jashin-chan is that there's an actual underlying question driving the plot and a larger mystery unfolding. For some reason, Daichi can't remember anything about her time in the human realm. We know she was summoned to paradise by Gaia who gives her different tasks to perform, but we also don't know much about Gaia and don't see her. Without spoiling, Daichi does some things that an ordinary human shouldn't be able to, so the question of what her true nature is and why she's been summoned to paradise.

The other characters are a lot of fun too. The main trio of gods are Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, and they all have unique personalities that bounce off of each other in amusing ways. I think Hades is the funniest for how low-key of a troll she is, but Hades is also interesting as another potential link to Jashin-chan. Hades looks almost identical to Lierre, who is the Jashin-chan universe's equivalent of God, except Hades wears black, and that similarity has me wondering if they're somehow related or otherwise connected. Hades has also been mentioned, but not shown a few times in Jashin-chan, though her form in this series does raise questions about Persephone 1 and 2.

Language wise this is actually a bit easier than Jashin-chan since it's generally less chaotic and there aren't any esoteric pop-culture tangents to get aside from some general mythology stuff.

Whether this is actually connected to Jashin-chan or Yukio is just riffing and playing with similar ideas and themes, it's a worthwhile story that stands on its own and has my interest sufficiently piqued. I was surprised how much of a mystery seems to be building given that Jashin-chan is mostly episodic and maintains a very slowly developing status quo, so hopefully volume 2 has some fun payoffs.