Tales of sav­ing the world usu­ally involves adven­tur­ing and con­fronting dif­fi­cult adver­saries right? Well, what about sav­ing the world by befriend­ing a lit­tle girl and savor­ing cakes, stars, and the joy of every­day life? Momo is rather unique in this, and despite being a shoujo slice-of-life which usu­ally falls to extremely slow pac­ing, the series quickly sucked me in with its plot hooks, rapid char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, and some light drama that touches the com­mon inse­cu­ri­ties and issues in real life.

It’s also nice to read a shoujo manga where fawn­ing over guys is the last thing on the heroine’s mind, where she is not only inde­pen­dent and strong, but also very level-minded. Com­bin­ing a lack of unnec­es­sary angst and no per­fect bishies steal­ing spot­lights goes a long way to adding real­ism to the char­ac­ters and their actions.

Momo’s premise is sur­pris­ingly sim­ple: Oda­giri Yume, an unmo­ti­vated six­teen year old com­mon high school girl with an unfor­tu­nate back­ground, was hav­ing the worst birth­day any­one could ask for. Just as she thought that ‘every­thing should just end’, a lit­tle girl named Momo, whom she had met ear­lier, offered to grant her wish. Con­trary to her child­ish appear­ance and behav­ior, Momo is a Destroyer of Worlds with Earth as the next item on her cleanup list. She offers Yume a res­o­lu­tion: show her 7 suf­fi­cient rea­sons why the Earth should live on before Yume’s eigh­teenth birth­day, or she really will destroy mankind.

The story is about Yume jug­gling the heavy bur­den of being Earth’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive on top of all the life-searching issues every­one has through dur­ing high school: the desire to become some­one spe­cial in a soci­ety of nobod­ies, the wish for a nor­mal life, the guilt of aban­don­ing old trea­sures and dreams, the greed that sep­a­rates third-person ide­al­ism from first-person involve­ment, etc. The con­cepts aren’t con­vo­luted, and any­one who went through the phase of step­ping into adult­hood can sym­pa­thize with the char­ac­ters in the fast-paced sto­ry­telling. Then, wrap­ping all of this together is Yume’s most notable issue: should she befriend Momo or treat her as an antag­o­nist? Is it pos­si­ble to change this by-the-book World Destroyer into a kind and gen­tle soul befit­ting of her exter­nal personality?

I guess one could say Momo feels like a mahou shoujo series, with the befriend­ing, the col­lec­tion quest, and the com­ing of age themes.

My only com­plaint about Momo is that due to the goal (and Momo’s per­son­al­ity), the story takes a lot of side-arcs and some­times it feels like the reasons-collecting isn’t really mov­ing for­ward. Although all of these 1~3 chap­ter arcs have been really inter­est­ing thus far and con­tributes pro­foundly to char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, so I’m not really com­plain­ing much.

Plus, Momo is just too cute.

All scan­la­tions can be found at Starry Heaven’s forums.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Arakure and the Yakuza Shoujo
• Black­mail­ing for Love: Watashi ni xx Shinasai!
• Seiz­ing Shoujo Com­edy once again: Obaka-chan

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 13:21 and is filed under Manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.