Honey Hunt 6

Honey Hunt 6 by Miki Aihara

I sometimes feel like a lonely apologist for Miki Aihara, because I think of Hot Gimmick fondly due to the insane soap opera of it all, despite the horrible potentially abusive relationship the heroine ends up in. Any manga where the best match romantic for the heroine is her adopted half-brother. I don’t expect good endings from Aihara, but it is a little disappointing that Honey Hunt is on hiatus and this is the last volume that we’ll get unless she starts up the series again.

Overall, Honey Hunt is perhaps a little less irksome than Hot Gimmick, just because the main character Yura slowly seems to be moving towards standing up for herself. She’s caught between three men – her pop idol boyfriend Q-ta, A-ta’s brother and her fellow actor Haruka, and her manager. Part of the reason why I enjoy Honey Hunt so much is for the train wreck quality as Yura’s potential partners are all horrible for her in different ways. Q-ta is essentially selfish, wanting Yura to give up her promising career as an actress just to spend time with him. Haruka is much more supportive and seems to like Yura, not an image he’s projecting of her. But his inability to express his emotions causes Yura to assume that he hates her. Yura’s manager Mizorogi is the one she trusts the most, but his underhanded manipulations threaten Yura’s emotional well-being. One of my favorite moments was seeing Mizorogi’s silent and lonely agony as he realizes that Yura’s consummated her relationship with Q-ta. He slumps down in a chair with his hands to his face and says “It hurts…more than I imagined.” Then he pulls himself together and proceeds to lecture a half-clad Yura about the necessity of studying her scripts.

Haruka tries to warn Yura of Q-ta’s flightiness but she assumes that it is because he doesn’t approve of her. Mizorogi tells Yura that he approves of her new relationship only to engineer a horrible blow to Yura in order to try to get her to stop seeing Q-ta. All along, Yura’s been afraid that Q-ta is more in love with her composer father than her, and when Mizorogi gets her father to invite Q-ta over during one of the few times they’re able to go out on a date, Yura’s worst fears are realized. She’s left alone while Q-ta rushes to talk about music with her dad. Despite these setbacks, Yura does seem to be coming into her own a little bit. She’s determined to pursue a relationship with Q-ta, even when warned off. She confronts her scheming evil bitch mother when her show beats her mother’s in the ratings. She refuses to see her father when he comes back to Japan, with the reasoning that since he abandoned her, there’s no reason for her to see him now. In many ways she’s acting like a rebellious teenager, but that seems to be a fairly good mode for Yura. After coming out of the shadow of her famous parents and finding some success on her own and fulfillment in acting, it seems like she’s made some progress. But as you might expect from an Aihara heroine, any tentative steps towards self-realization are thwarted by the innate stupidity of a teenager experiencing first love.