By Dustin Cabeal

Go ahead and guess how many of the previous volumes of So Cute It Hurts!! I’ve read? Zero. Hey, they send them, I read them and do my best to review them. This volume is what I would call a payoff volume as it has a lot of reveals and storyline conclusions. It’s the volume long time readers have been waiting for.

This style of storytelling just isn’t for me, though. I understood everything going on and the importance of the reveals/story developments, but it was too cheesy for me. I can totally see why people would love this story and I can see the craftsmanship going into it. It’s drama to the max. I can even see why the creator would want to work in this genre of rom-com/shojo because you get to cheat everything with narration.

There’s a sequence of pages that contain narration that tells you exactly how you should feel about what’s happening in the story and you just accept it. No hard work of showing the characters feeling those emotions, nothing subtle, just cheesy narration that hits you like a bag of kisses. I was actually grateful for it. The idea of reading any excessively cheesy dialogue was not welcomed in my book.

The dialogue is cheese. The characters are all emotional idiots in that it probably took nine volumes to get to the point in which they’d just be open and honest and say what the fuck they meant. And hey, that’s fine. That’s why people are reading this, for that drawn-out drama and I’m sure some of them will miss it as the game entirely changes with this volume. A new status quo is established, and I’m sure there will be interest in it. Not from me, but from others.

The art is the shojo style. Two of the guys were so similar I had to wait until the story separated them to figure out who the fuck they were. One of the dudes wears an eye patch, and if he didn’t, there would have been three dudes that look the same. On that note, the dude that wears an eye patch was in a fire… how the fire only got his eye, and his shoulder/back is beyond me. How the fuck does a fire take just your eye… and not a lot of your face with it? Shojo. Drama. Beautiful men. Any of these could be the answer to my question.

Reading this was like watching a drama on the CW. It’s not terrible, but it’s a far cry from good. The kicker is, there’s a lot of people enjoying it. There have to be for it to make it to North America. With that, if you like CW dramas, any of them, then give this a read. It might just be the cheesy romance dramatiy that you’re looking for.

Score: 4/5

So Cute It Hurts!! vol. 10
Creator: Go Ikeyamada
Publisher: Viz/Shojo Bea