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Manga Monday Ep 135: Tsuruko Returns the Favor / Weird Science Manga & Anime

November 13, 2023·53 min·3 clips

Fairyland Cafe greets him as "Prince Nico" and explains the whole concept-cafe story.

Cafes are back. Jim opens with Luke Hollywood and quickly lands on the concept cafe setup, which seems to require a calendar, a reservation, and a bit too much patience. The bit starts crooked. They enjoy the difference between a maid cafe and a concept cafe, then Jim starts roasting the decor because it does not feel committed enough to the premise. Suspicion shows up early. The first chapter already has them side-eyeing things, with Manga Plus comments and the flower-power line becoming the first detour. Then the search begins. The teacher heads toward the cafe ground, and the hosts cannot get over how slowly he handles a problem that looks obvious from the outside. The glasses gag works. Jim grabs onto the idea that the guy removes his glasses like a Superman disguise, except now he is wandering around unable to read anything. That image does a lot of work. A girl asks whether he is looking for a maid cafe, and the hosts turn that painfully obvious question into a mock-serious battlefield bit. Fairyland appears. Once he goes in, the welcome-home-prince routine drops him into a role he does not understand, giving the recap plenty of awkward fuel. Prince Nico sounds weird. Jim gets hung up on how the worker knows his name, since the later surprise makes that detail feel a little messy. The criticism stays casual. They are not throwing out the premise; they are checking whether the chapter is getting enough out of it. The rhythm keeps jumping from recap to cafe joke to disguise joke to character-logic complaint, then back again. The closer is pure house style: Patreon, Twitter, next-Monday rhythm, and the usual weirdos sendoff after treating a tiny manga setup like a suspicious incident report.

As heard by us

Jim and Luke turn a weirdly escalating manga setup into a quick, funny problem-solving session.

Jim and Luke get a chapter that starts plain and then swerves hard, which is exactly the sort of setup they seem to enjoy. They spend most of their time on the cafe hunt, the teacher's clumsy reasoning, the glasses-off disguise bit, and the welcome-home-prince reveal, and the…

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Why you'd press play

If you like manga talk that immediately starts poking holes in the setup, press play.

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