HANA YORI DANGO this review will most definitely contain spoilers but ill do my best to make sure i can hide most of the bigger plot points but read at your own discretion lapslock incoming 330http://nikoniko.net/hana/title.jpg first off i wanted to list off some potential biases i may have going into this just so you dont expect anything from me. biases: i like romance anime/manga. it is probably one of my most favoured genres. im not a person who shies away from romance so certain tropes and plot points may be weird and annoying to you they are not for me. i like them a lot. i also have watched about half of the kdrama from 2009 so there may be a BIT of nostalgia very unlikely since i hated the kdrama lol hana yori dango is a manga from the 1990s to 2000s that has largely impacted a lot of romance manga and anime. it was incredibly popular in its time and a lot and i mean a lot of tropes come from this manga. not only was there an anime adaption and a season 2 basically just a whole new set of characters but for the 2010s which i have not yet read but there were various live action dramas from not just japanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanaYoriDangoTVseries but koreahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoysOverFlowersTVseries taiwanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeteorGarden chinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeteorGarden2018TVseries and thailandhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F4Thailand:BoysOverFlowers which has yet to come out isnt that crazy?. but i shouldnt go over too much about its crazy influence over the romance genre. basically hana yori dango or boys over flowers is about a girl by the name of tsukushi makino who gets accepted into the prestigious academy of eitoku. she is a pretty poor girl that comes from a poor family so her family has her go there for her to get a good education and well marry a rich man. she learns about the famous group within the school by the name of f4 lead by tsukasa domyouji heir to the incredibly rich domyouji enterprises. they do this thing where if you upset them or get in their way by any means they red tag your locker which opens up for students to bully you and even teachers to turn a blind eye and pick on you so that you end up leaving the school within a month even teachers arent immune to this red tagging. everyone is scared of the f4 but also totally at their feet. one day makinos friend ends up falling on tsukasa. he is about to throw a fit but makino jumps in and yells at him to save her friend instead. she ends up getting bullied but through her strong might she stays at the school and endures it. if you havent noticed tsukasa is her love interest. the two start out as enemies rivals but through someway and somehow they fall for each other. but do you think it ends there? of course not this is a 244 chapter long manga after all yes it is actually that long. so how do i feel about this series? 330https://i.pin.com/564x/59/ba/c0/59bac0e5b872a244f527c81e2a090bc0.jpg things i really liked about this series. it was SO entertaining. as i said above i hated the kdrama and i think the reason why is because i find the love interest tsukasa to be much more likeable than his kdrama counterpart junpyo. the kdrama took itself WAY too seriously at times while the manga was super fun and had a lot of funny and slapstick moments that live action cannot do properly. tsukasa wasnt perfect in the sense that his flaws included being mean no he was quite stupid at times and it made for some good laughs. not just tsukasa was entertaining though all the side characters were fun to follow. i also found makino to be way stronger and again more likeable than her kdrama counterpart jandi. for a lot of this manga i was on the edge of my seat eager to just keep reading. i stayed up incredibly late some nights just reading and reading because i couldnt get enough of this dumb story. here are some more iffy things about this story. considering this manga is from the 1990s its no secret that there will be some issues regarding misogyny. not to say the artist is by any means sexist but... it does show its age a lot. if you look on my profile youll see that i have both this series and the love interest in my favourites list. but i cannot condone what tsukasa did to makino. the side characters didnt seem the matter all that much. this isnt a everyone grows up together and we see how their friendship strengthens and evolves sort of romance story rather its primary focus is the main couple. they do explore a few side characters and a few side relationships but its very far into the story and in the case of rui its related to makino. 330https://i.pin.com/564x/9b/57/d6/9b57d6dff3d41e9d8601baea01e278e2.jpg if you want something thats stupid but enjoyable i would really recommend this. its not GREAT even though i love it. its quite bad it shows its age a lot. not only are the plots bizarre and a neverending loop of will they wont they and even when they DO i wont count that as spoilers since... i feel like its obvious they do get together theres a 15 foot tall leap in order to continue. it can get quite hard being so bizarre and unrealistic its not a feelgood romance that you read when you want to feel happy. makino gets abused tsukasa nearly gets killed theres betrayal bullying all of that. to add to the tsukasa nearly gets killed is probably the craziest plot this entire manga pulled out. to be frank i feel like the author was just pulling things out of her butt just to squeeze out 1020 more chapters. if you arent aware of this tsukasa nearly gets killed its the dumbest plot but i found it so funny. this happens near the end of the series so if you havent read that far please ignore the spoilers. i still love this manga. i like it a lot but i can see a lot of other people not really liking it. i am definitely going to be watching the anime adaption before the end of this year and while i doubt itll be any better than the manga i still really like this story and i hope to like its adaptions. 330https://i.pin.com/564x/b4/1e/cd/b41ecddba1e8fab8332ea250bbf6b427.jpg