This week I was on vacation so I had to take a break from Persona 5. Fortunately I had a ton of time to read manga.

First up was 愚者の星 vol. 1, a sci-fi action series that I picked up for no other reason than it had just come out. I thought it would be fun to be an early adopter and try out a brand new series with no English presence (indeed, even though the author has had work translated before, I can’t find anything about this new series at all). I guess I might pick up the next volume in four months, but I wasn’t honestly too impressed — the pacing felt really rushed and the MC is super uninteresting (as opposed to a secondary character who gets killed off for motivation in the first chapter). It’s also kind of obnoxious in how it uses a lot of made-up katakana terminology and sometimes adds furigana to entire phrases to signify some kind of “ancient language”. So would I recommend it… probably not? The art is good and I learned a bunch of new words I guess, one of which (膠着状態) showed up in the next book I read too —

鬼滅の刃 vol. 7 and 8 comprise the Infinity Train arc, which is set to be adapted as a movie as a followup to the first season of the show. This arc was super great and I hope it gets distributed in the west. I love the way it takes advantage of established character traits to set up foreshadowing, as well as elegantly avoiding the problem of hamfistedly jamming in a flashback for a new character before something happens to them. This arc also includes カナヲ’s backstory, which was shuffled back for the anime — I noticed that the coin she flips to decide what to do is a 銅貨 (どうか) which I feel sure must be a pun.

A lot of the reading this week was really smooth and just happened to have a fair amount of word reinforcement. Three volumes in one week isn’t a new record but it feels good.