Three Empty Paragraphs

On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Three Empty Paragraphs,
Two Heroes Dueling
And a Bloodstained Euphie.

Three is a challenging number. My first thought was ‘Easy: three Minami sisters‘. And indeed, I would love to write about the delightful dalliances of the Minami household, but I want to keep my powder dry for an end-of-series retrospective when it finishes.

Then I supposed I could talk about the three manga which I delved into during ‘Shoujo Manga Week’, an entirely unplanned digression into an unknown world which happened to me around Easter time. Sometimes it’s good to experience something entirely separate from one’s normal tastes. The best of the three was definitely Hot Gimmick, which is a slightly twisted take on something approaching reverse harem (a reverse harem with three elements). While it works simply as a (again, I must stress, slightly twisted) romance, it’s also a meditation on passivity and bad faith.

Awww!

But Hot Gimmick and the other manga concerned are hardly something from 2007, and aren’t exactly a shared experience either. So that plan was no good. Ultimately I am faced with an absence – but then absences are an interesting study, especially when always already so. I shall leave you with the promise that my next entry will have more content, and the thought that much of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is driven by the absent presence of a certain significant character . . .