Fence #3

Oh boy, what a train-wreck... I will avoid spoilers for volumes 1 and 2, and the spoilers for volume 3 will be marked appropriately and hidden (note, the spoiler HTML does not work on mobile, which is why I also warn beforehand).

Is this comic really about fencing?

In my review for volume two, I mentioned that I think all matches were unmotivated. Guess what? Volume three flushed that down the toilet.

So we had A fence B. B won for reasons that made sense in the story, plus he is said to be a good fencer. They lost 14-15. A fenced C and won by a landslide (14-4). And then, in volume 3, B fenced C and lost 9-15. I'm sorry, what? I know it's confusing, but stay with me:

> B defeats A with a small difference (B wins due to mind games, really, but he is said to be a good fencer).
> B loses to C with a significant difference.

So, does that mean that C is a good fencer, close in technique to A? Nope, cos

> C loses to A with a huge difference.

I understand what the writer was going for - you can mess with someone and make them lose focus, etc, but why make the huge? If A is such a monster fencer and B so inferior to him in technique, mind games alone wouldn't have helped B win!

And this is my main criticism of this comic - it's about fencing, but not really. We don't get to see actual techniques they use; the fencers don't SHOW us their skills. We see a collection of panels where one or the other gets poked with his opponent's épée, we see their thought bubbles, the audience's reactions, and then - the final score board. Dramatic tension is built by people talking about the match, not the match itself, which I think is poor storytelling.

Nicholas and Seiji

We get even more romantically coded dialogue between Nicholas and Seiji, i.e. they talk about being opponents, but it's phrased as in they're a quarreling couple. YES, WE GET IT. THEY'RE THE END GAME COUPLE, UUUUUUUUUUURGHHHHH..... The reason this annoys me so much is because this is supposed to be a slow burn. I mean, it's rivals to friends to lovers - that's a slow burn by default. Yet it feels like the writer just wants to give the reader instant gratification, by throwing in some shippy material on the way. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting old and can't keep up with the trends of romance fiction?

How does their relationship progress throughout volume 3? Well, it's a SPOILER (not a very exciting, though).

Seiji is concentrated on defeating Jesse (who defeated him in the nationals prior to the story) to a point that he notices that Nicholas uses a technique similar to Jesse's. In the spirit of this comic, the technique is verbally described rather than shown, but it rattles Seiji up enough to demand answers from Nicholas. The latter never admits being Jesse's half-brother, but gets offended (and jealous! That's exactly what he says in the comic!) that Seiji thinks of his brother as his opponent and not him. Seiji is still annoyed that Nicholas isn't telling him why his technique is similar to Jesse's, so they have a fight. In the good spirit of old Roman homoerotic wrestling kind of fight. Or the Kirk and Spock fighting in Amok Time kind of fight. And then? Then they because friends! Why? Boy, do I wish to know the answer to that question! So yeah. Now they're friends, in chapter 10, with no real reason, because f*ck you, slow burn romance!

END SPOILER

Time for some good things!

Firstly, one of the reasons I didn't give this book 1 star is because there is some character development. Or, rather, we get to know certain characters more and they reveal their more three-dimensional side. I'd like to avoid spoilers, so I'll keep it vague. A character whom we saw to be rather mean shows a more selfless side, and it's done in a believable way that makes sense in the framework of the story.

The art
The art keeps deteriorating to a point that we see more chibis and dot faces. We do get more varied backgrounds, as the plot forces the artists to leave the training hall, but you can see that it's either not her forte, or she was in a rush.

The verdict
Even though the volume ends on a light note, full of future possibilities and new challenges, this story lost me somewhere in the middle of volume 3. I know I've criticized this series a lot, but it was a very engaging read in the beginning. I heard the creators have gone on hiatus, and perhaps the comic will improve once they're back, but I don't think I see any point in continuing this story.