Manga Review: Basara
So as we wrap up Gaim, how about checking out Basara? Like Gaim, the Basara features a story about war and the overthrow of tyrants. The characters are interesting and the complexity of their relationships are one of the main selling points for this series. If you want to see a story about how the Child of Destiny fights a war across Japan to overthrow tyrants in a post-apocalypse pre-industrial civilization, then you'll probably like this story.
It was a 27 volume manga (available on Kindle), an anime TV series, and even has a live action play.
Trigger warning: The story takes place in a lawless society where the strong do terrible things to the weak.
If that's not enough to convince you, here's some minor spoilers for the first volume:
So everyone expects the Child of Destiny to be a boy, but he's killed off super early. The actual Child of Destiny is his twin sister Sarasa. Because of this, there are a lot of situations where she has to pretend to be a person who she isn't, while also playing up this overhyped messiah figure.
Her main enemy is the Red King, who destroyed her village and had her brother killed. The main clicker is that they meet one day while outside their roles and they start to form a relationship. So you spend the series watching to see how their paths cross and where their path of battle takes them. Oh yeah, it's a shoujo manga, did I mention that?
But yeah, I really like it. Even without the romance and Elizabethan subplots, it's fun to watch Sarasa grow from a naive girl into a military commander. She's not strong or a mighty Jedi warrior, so she has to rely on her education and brains to get herself out of conflicts. Like real fucked up stuff happens and she gets depressed by it, like a normal person.
