the Old Abandoned Imitation Blog

Starting reading this manga a little while back called Teppu. It’s basically about a high school girl getting involved in woman’s mixed martial arts fighting, and from the description I read of it it seemed like it would be a shounen fighting style comic, which it isn’t at all.

The main character is this really tall girl, who has a rather poor temperament, who is apparently gifted in any sort of athletic endeavor. Basically once she learns the basics of how the sport works, she instantly becomes awesome at it. This makes these sports boring to her, since she finds no challenge to them, but she does enjoy beating people who have trained for a long time in their sport to see them crushed by someone so new to it.

Basically if this was a shounen fighting manga she’d be the bad guy/rival character not the lead.

She then encounters a rather cheery girl who is trying to start an MMA club at her school, and in a practice match with her fights her to a draw. Although its apparent that if the other girl had been trying she would have lost. Spurred on by an actual challenge our main character starts on a path to learning MMA. 

What I find interesting about it is the fact that it’s from the perspective of the “bad guy.” I would expect that the main character would normally be the cheery girl starting the MMA club. It’d be like if Avatar: the Last Airbender was told entirely from Zuko’s perspective, and you only saw Aang and the gang when Zuko came into contact with them.

That alone I find interesting from a writing perspective, but additionally it’s interesting to see her grow as a character and change because now she has to work for something. Which seems to be making her less jerk-ish and more of a likable character.