I would like to take a minute to talk about the single oddest comic I have read in a LOOOOONG time. It's called The World God Only Knows(original Japanese title 'Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai' but I'm not one of those pretentious dickholes who will always use the Japanese title because 'its more real that way' or whatever stupid excuse you get when asking them and their crappy usage of Japanese honorifics-I go with which sounds better) and it's the weirdest story that takes itself serious I've read so far.
It's a story about a boy,(vuja de?)Keima Katsuragi, who is obsessed with dating sims and shuns the real world because it's nowhere near as rewarding than his video games. He is known on the internet as "The Capturing God" because he can capture the heart of any heroine, any game, any time. This sparks the interest of a fledgling demon from Hell who is on a mission to capture escaped souls(totally not the same as Reaper. Trust me on this) who have taken up shop inside the gaps in the hearts of females. They wait in these crevasses until the girl gives birth so that they can be resurrected as their child(that's why they dont infect dudes... but chances are there's some yaoi fancomic that begs to differ)
Since Kiema is a brilliant, methodical character the demon, Elsee, has to be the bumbling type who always gets in the way. This is the shows main problem, the characters are very predictable-you always know exactly how they'll react to a given situation and have little depth. You know right out the gate that Elsee is going to fall in love with Keima and start to interfere with their work(we'll get to that after this little rant here) and shoehorn herself in the middle of Keima's endeavors. This would be a problem if the protag wasn't well aware of these things and doing everything in his power to keep those kinds of encounters from happening. after seeing an encounter with two other demons that could easily erupt into a competition for his affections, he thinks about the easiest way to get a heroine to hate you in a dating sim and walks up and grabs one of their tits. They all get pissed and storm out and I was left laughing my ass off.
Okay, time to re-rail this rambling. Elsee, being the bumbling idiot that she is, goes out to search for the fabled 'Capturing God,' the man who can capture any woman's heart. She is searching for this embodiment Fabioan machismo because the easiest way to get the souls to vacate is by filling the gap, most notably with love. That or by killing them. This is where you first realize that the whole 'demon' thing was not one of the first aspects of the story to be realized. Because the way most iterations of demonic beings are portrayed, killing mofos is not that big of a deal and would be the first-response for the situation. The writer explained this away by saying that there was some kind of reform in Hell and all the super douchey bad demons were locked away or some shit so that a new, more friendly Hell could come into being. But you don't really mind these too much on account of the fact that the encounters are always hilarious and often well written.
God i need to stop trailing off in my writings. I'm trying to explain the basic outline of the story and I'm veering off like Kelsey Grammer. So, where i left off: Elsee tracks down Keima and find that he is, in fact A Capturing God, just not the one she's looking for. Before he knows what's what he's bound to her and if he doesn't do his job, his head will explode. So now this socially repressed-and loving it- boy has to do what he hates the most: interact with real women, people he thinks of as sad excuses and not worthy of being compared to the girls of video games. Not only that, but make these girls fall in love with him. He finds that this is rather easy if he likens the encounters to those of his beloved games and plays each event as he would in a game. The series is amazing and the characters, while very arch typical and predictable, are written well enough that this fact doesn't bother you much-if at all. The art and writing are awesome and the sections where Keima goes full-on, pants-crapping, crazy are the highlight of the series. Any sad video game nerd will love the little visual cues in these segments, having the characters look like they're in Super Mario or various other games.
The series is currently on it's 78th chapter... at least thats as far as i can find, and there's no news on an English adaptation of it yet so you'll have to dig around online something fierce for it but be warned, your computer will probably get a virus or two even with a good antivirus while you're looking for it. Mangafox especially. Their horribly shitty ad system is what gave my computer the winsystem virus that still hasn't been fully removed. Currently using a sight called Onemanga but it's probably just as likely to give you the internet herpes. I would be lying if i said it wasn't completely worth it. the book is THAT good, people
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