The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Spring Storm and Monster

What's It About? 

High school freshman Ranko Haruno's sole desire in life is to keep her head down and just get by with as little human interaction as possible. It's working well, until a random guy is literally hurled into her path (and knocked out when his head hits the wall). The responsible party? A guy she later finds out is her new stepbrother, Kaya Amamine...How exactly is she supposed to live with such a creepy jerk who seemingly has a penchant for violence?!

Spring Storm and Monster has a story and art by Mitsubachi Miyuki, with English translation by Emma Schumacker. This volume was lettered by Chiho Christie. Published by Yen Press (September 17, 2024).

Content Warning: Off-the-page sexual abuse

Is It Worth Reading?

Stepsibling romances are difficult. In part, that's simply down to the premise, and for some readers, the concept will always be anathema or a too-neat way to get out of writing real incest. That's true for this book, but it adds an extra dollop of trickiness by making Ranko and Kaya even more tenuously linked than your average stepsiblings; Kaya isn't Ranko's new stepfather's biological son. In fact, the two had only just started living together right before he married Ranko's mother, making Kaya's transition into the household even more awkward for him. That's something that Ranko needs to understand before the story can get its feet off the ground. While this does eventually start heading down Romance Boulevard, it takes its time to make sure that we understand what's at stake for both teenage characters.

Neither of them has had it easy. Ranko is clearly anxious in a clinical sense, and this has led to her developing agoraphobia as well. She tells us early on in the book that she tries as hard as possible to remain unnoticed at school, deliberately distancing herself from everyone because it's so difficult and exhausting for her to be friendly, and she learned in elementary school that it simply wasn't worth the pain of trying. (And if you know this form of anxiety, it really is almost physically painful to go outside your comfort zone.) Now the only place she feels safe is at home, in her room with her pet miniature pig Magosuke. She knows her mom is remarrying, and she wants to be happy for her, but it's clear that this isn't something she's at all comfortable with. She's utterly aghast when Kaya shows up with her new stepfather, and she promptly moves herself and her pig out to the storage shed.

But because sometimes it's easy to recognize another person in pain, Ranko quickly realizes that Kaya's had more than his fair share as well. We don't know a lot about his past, but what he lets slip involves being sexually abused by other relatives he's stayed with. That makes Ranko stand out to him as someone whose earnestness and care can't be fully hidden behind her anxiety, and he responds to her trying to accept him and treat him like family even though she's uncomfortable. To us, it's obvious that he's quickly developing a crush on her; whether Ranko is deliberately not seeing it or is unaware of his burgeoning feelings is up for debate. What's important, however, is the two characters' mental health and how they both try to overcome their issues or at least handle them differently, to help each other. This is still a stepsibling romance, but it uses the trope to bring together two people who otherwise would never have interacted. That may not be enough to mitigate the issues with the genre, but if that's not an immediate no-go, this looks like a series that could be invested in its characters' well-being tangibly.

This book was so close to winning me over. It was a rather dark and engaging story about two people who approach loneliness from completely different perspectives. We have a protagonist who picks loneliness because she does not have the energy or social skills to engage with more than one person at a time. She takes pride in her loneliness. Meanwhile, her new stepbrother has lived a life where he has been forced to feel alone. He has been taken advantage of by others, he was forced to move from household to household and overall, he's just a very broken middle schooler who lost his ability to feel anything. The circumstance in which they ended up in each other's life is completely forced. Still, I liked that two-thirds of the story was about them gradually warming up to each other and trying to see things from another perspective. One begins to realize that maybe being there for somebody else isn't so bad while the other slowly learns that it's okay to trust people because not everybody is out to hurt him. It establishes that message well while keeping a relatively healthy step-sibling relationship… and then kissing happens.

Goddamnit, you couldn't resist, could you? I don't know why every show and manga feels the need to take a strong emotional foundation for two people to get along and decide to launch it into taboo territory. It's unnecessary and I would argue in the face of everything that the book had been establishing beforehand, instead of generating a relationship where the characters are learning from each other, now we have an uncomfortable and creepy dynamic developing. It is weird that a stepbrother who is open about the fact that he was physically taken advantage of by multiple people in the past, is now pressuring his new stepsister into a physical relationship with him. From a psychological standpoint, and even a narrative one, you could argue that this all makes sense and might lead to a strong plot point or development down the road. Still, I don't believe that's what the writing is doing because that is not how the scenes played out. If anything, the end of the book threw our lead under the bus and took away a lot of her agency seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe if I hear things about it being better down the road or in the forum comments of this preview guide, I might be more inclined to check volume two out. If you're someone who's at all curious about this, just read the first two-thirds and then throw the rest away.