Enter: Side-pony Sensei
Creative Staff:
Story and Art: Yui Hara
Translation: Amanda Haley
Lettering: Rochelle Gancio
What They Say:
Alice, Shinobu, and the rest of the girls are entering their second year of high school… but now they’re in separate classes! Can Aya cope with not having Youko by her side? And just why is Karen’s new homeroom teacher, Kuzehashi-sensei, always scolding her? It’s a brand-new spring—and a brand-new opportunity for intercultural hijinks!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Kiniro Mosaic is the kind of moe series where there isn’t all that much of a twist applied to the genre for it to stick out that much. So even with as much love as I surprisingly gave it in its first volume, things have honestly gotten a bit average come volume 3. Not awful, mind you. Just… average.
From the volume’s cast introduction page, Shinobu’s name was noticeably misspelled as “Shinobi,” which wasn’t exactly the best way to start things off. With that flub in mind, reading the rest of the volume gave off the overall feel that a second read-through for better readability would have been beneficial. While translations in general don’t stand out unless you’re comparing to the original Japanese text, I will say that they should at the least feel like more than a simple direct translation. Especially with something like Kinmosa that occasionally dips into cultural humor, some clarity and a more thorough context via the Translation Notes section would have helped a lot.
The main game-changer this volume is the cast moving on to their second year in high school, but even that is used mainly as a means to introduce a new homeroom teacher and nothing more. Regardless, older characters in school manga have always been interesting to me, and Kuzehashi-sensei is no exception. Her casual side-ponytail in combination with her very serious business suit is so inherently oxymoronic, but works so well for her tsundere personality that I’m willing to let it slide. On top of that, her different interactions with Karasuma-sensei and with her students are enjoyable enough, and give a different flavor for teacher that Karasuma alone couldn’t deliver. Where Karasuma comes off as the loving older sister when the cast is at school, Kuzehashi comes off like an actual authority figure, getting on student’s cases whenever she spots one of them slacking. The two work well as an odd couple, but are equally efficient in holding their own separately, which is key especially for a series that relies heavily on self-contained one-shot-style gags.
Other stand-outs this volume is a noticeable increase in shipping between the timid Aya and the sporty Youko. While earlier volumes treated their one-sided relationship as more of a one-off gag to bridge longer-running stories, volume 3 seems to have taken quite the liking to the pair, taking a stab at Aya’s demeanor whenever she’s put into the spotlight. And while the gags themselves begin to wear after a while, it is interesting to note that at the least author Hara has gotten more comfortable with playing those romantic undertones off for comedic effect.
Inversely, a gag I enjoyed this volume but didn’t get nearly enough of was Alice’s over-enthusiasm to the point of screaming nonsense. On two separate occasions this volume, Alice both barks unintelligibly, and roars in an attempted intimidation power-move. Hara’s standby gag of mocking Alice’s height has already been played out to near boredom by this point, but these occasional dips into the weird and visceral were an unexpected treat I wouldn’t mind seeing more often. From volume 1, Alice has been the cast’s more unabashedly cute members, so I’d love to see how Hara can lead readers on with those preconceptions, and then immediately turn them on their head. It’s one of the few rays of hope in an otherwise very standard volume.
In Summary:
Kiniro Mosaic volume 3 is a standard “cute girls being cute and having fun” volume. There isn’t all that much in the way of variety, and the slight new additions don’t do all that much to help. That said, the series as a whole continues to keep on keeping on, towing the line of average to occasionally hilarious, which is all I can ask for from a moe series.
Content Grade: C+
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: June 20, 2017
MSRP: $17.00
