Manga Match 51 Koori no Joou

You know how Manga Rock always tries to recommend you series? A lot of times I'll look through those trying to find some gems in the rough. I think this was one of the gems.

{Spoilers}

Honestly this manga is super short so there's not a lot of room to really flesh out the characters, but within the eight chapters that this manga series encompasses, it's a pretty well executed story. Perhaps if it was longer it would go more into the two pairs that it features as well as maybe some more depth to each other their backstories. But you know with sports anime it boils down a lot to "I love this sport and I want to be the best at it." And this is understandable.

And I think you get this traditional kind of story from what I initially thought was the "main" story when this timid girl named Nika sees her classmate Nanao on the ice and gets absolutely swept away in the beauty of the sport. Then we've got the usual kind of thing where she almost quits, but finds it within her the love of the sport and the fuel to keep going.

Listening to this standard story you might be thinking to yourself like "how could this be any good when it just seems like all the things we've seen before?" And to answer that I would point you to the second half of the series. Kiwako. She's kind of gap moe haha. In the best way. She has this on-ice persona of being haughty and overconfident, when in reality she's kind of an airhead with nothing going for her except her ice skating. And according to herself, she has the face of a villain. And with all of this in mind, she becomes easily the star of the manga. Perhaps from outside influence she became the star of the manga, or perhaps the mangaka also realized Kiwako's potential, but it turned into a manga focusing around this gap moe character and her short, but sweet journey through love. And it's a bit clumsy and comical at times, but it was overall endearing in a way that I didn't expect from such a short manga.

I definitely recommend you try this manga out. At first you might find it a bit cliche and overdone, but I think the second half might surprise you. And it's so short that you wouldn't lose out much even if you didn't find it very enjoyable. Just try it and maybe you might be surprised as well.