Sakura Cardcaptor manga review

 

Author: CLAMP

Original publication date: From 1996 to 2000

Description: Sakura Kinomoto is a 10-year-old who lives in Tomoeda, one day she releases a stack of magical cards and s tasked with capturing them all. If she does not, something terrible will happen. 

Thoughts:

Initially, I had intended to do a review for every few volumes. That ended up not happening because it is very predictable and not much happens as an overall plot. Each chapter is episodic and formulaic. 

I do not mean it as a bad thing. This is targeted towards a younger audience, I remember seeing the anime adaptation when I was growing up. I really enjoyed it. By now I barely remember any of it. My memories of the conflicts, the plot, is gone. I just remember some of the characters and my feelings towards them. 

With that in mind, as I started to read them I realized there was a lot of content edited out of the original work, or maybe it was censored, or as a younger person, I did not really notice it.  

In the story, there were a few things that could be conflicting for some, and I ranted a bit about it in my previous review for the first 5 volumes. 

-Romantic relationships, not just feeling between adults and children or very young people. In this one we see several of them take place. I was shocked to see them. I mean it reads as if the characters here were way older than their 10 years. How could I say it was ok to see an adult in any type of romantic relationship with an elementary school student, or a middle school student with a teacher, or any other the other examples are shown here? Some were semi platonic as the child was in love with an older person but that was it. There was no real relationship or at least it was feelings one-sided.

Moving on from that because I could go on and on about that one topic.

The story does not focus on the romance, thankfully but we do see it hinted, mentioned, and even verified on-page, be aware of it.

We see Sakura going around, in secret with a group of kids her age, receiving magical help. Again parents are unaware or in her case her father is oblivious. The older brother thinks her much too mature for her age and simply pays attention to her as she goes around in her goose chase. I really like the portrayal of friendship. We get to know a few of the classmates and connect with them. But mostly we follow Sakura and see a bit of the people who help her Li, Touya, Yukito, Tomoyo and of course Kero. 

This is very easy to follow and a tiny bit predictable. There is never any doubt Sakura is going to accomplish her goal. She always triumphs easily. And her improvement in magical ability is in enormous leaps. 

I enjoyed my time reading it, it felt like a tv show. You get invested in the characters and their lives. I really recommend it for a fun time. It's full of fluffy moments, cute scenes, struggles about figuring out who they like for the first time. It simply put a cute series. Just to be clear I should not have to say it, but the fact that they romanticize a few inappropriate relationships does not mean the rest of the story is not enjoyable. I expect all adult and young adults reading this are able to tell some things just are not supposed to happen and children, well sometimes they wouldn't even get it fully. In anime format, it was edited out I assume. 

Do not expect the concept to be overly complicated, the magic is never explained, you are simply enjoying the ride. 

As a series, I gave this

For now, that's it, stay safe.

See you next time.