テガミバチ

TEGAMI BACHI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
20
RELEASE
November 4, 2015
CHAPTERS
100

DESCRIPTION

Gauche Suede is on his last delivery before a big promotion. In the outskirts of Yodaka, the darkest area of Amberground, Gauche is surprised to find that the package is a young boy named Lag Seeing. Lag had been traumatized by his mother's abduction and is due to be delivered to his aunt. In this remote area rife with Gaichuu, Lag and Gauche face a dangerous journey that inspires Lag to become a Letter Bee.

(Source: Viz Media)

Included Special Chapter:

Volume 3: A Bee and His Dingo

CAST

Lag Seeing
Niche
Steak
Gauche Suede
Jiggy Pepper
Zazie Winters
Thunderland Jr.
Sylvette Suede
Roda
Aria Link
Connor Kluff
Largo Lloyd
Niche no Ane
Darwin
Signal
Caribs Garrard
Jacob Gobeni
Sabrina Mary
Hazel Valentine
Signales
Vincent Alcott
Nello Pepper
Anne Seeing
Hunt
Elena Blanc

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO TEGAMI BACHI

Cover Art for Tegami Bachi: Hikari to Ao no Gensou Yawa

SPECIAL AdventureTegami Bachi: Hikari to Ao no Gensou Yawa

ANIME AdventureTegami Bachi

ANIME AdventureTegami Bachi REVERSE

MANGA AdventurePEZ

REVIEWS

Shellshock
40/100
A series that forget what the main plotline was.
Some light spoilers in this review upto vol. 12. Nothing super major, because the main story actually takes a small break before getting back into it.

The series is about Delivering Letters... Mostly. They're 3 main concepts to the series. The artificial Sun, Being the best bee & delivering letter and killing Gaichuu's which is the main enemy of the series.... I think. It's not entirely clear. The idea here is that the chads, the Main characters are people who deliver letters known as the Letter Bee's. However letters here are more than just simple words on a piece of paper but rather contain their heart or piece of their soul. Letter Bee's have a weapon called a shindan which uses the user's own heart/soul to shoot. They use there dingo's (sidekicks) find the weak points of Gaichu's and the Bee's shoot them dead with there Shindan. That's basically the story for the first 15 volumes until the author realized that the actual main story about the main character's mother was also a thing and very abruptly came back to it.

The main character is a very uncharismatic character for like 18 volumes of the series. A constant crybaby that really destroys the emotional weight this story could've had. When a scene does require him to cry it just falls flat due to how much you cannot take the main character seriously anymore. Its disappointing but what can you do. You can choose to not read the manga. That's a bright idea.

The action and the story was actually very underwhelming. Though I was initially interested in the story, the way it was unraveled was one of most boring and poorly paced ways ever. The story is 2 fold. 1 is finding the truth about the MMC"s mother and what happened to her. Why she was taken to the capital. However we talk a long break from this main story to fuck around. For about 10 volumes there is this big fucking gaichu that attacks peoples hearts. Huge problem but this guy is fucking annoying. Its literally a giant monster with no absolute personality. He's not vicious either. The taking heart basically borrows the people's soul so when the MC can inevitably defeat it they can return back. This completely destroys any sort of tension the you may get when the characters themselves are in no real danger.

The things I enjoyed about the series was the characters and world building which also fucks right off. However the actual solid moments of character interactions are just constantly bogged down with information about shit I don't care about. Imagine you are playing a video game and you pick a codex that's underneath a bed that tells you the minute details about shit you can't even connect to. That is the main dialogue of tegami bachi between characters. It sucks too because they are some great characters they are just severly underutilized. Jiggy Pepper and the Bearded Dingo were probably the best characters in the series.

The MMC"s Dingo Niche was a problem as well. I quite liked her as well. She was funny and had some decent action scenes. There is a running joke where she doesn't wear underwear which would be fine when its done once.... Not the amount the author decided to shove in to the point that it became very uncomfortable.

I was under the impression this was a good series but not a single person has told me this was a good manga so far as I was Live reacting on discord. Everyone told me that it was boring and I can see why. There are many characters that get sidelines, many plotlines that get dropped out of knowhere. It is incredibly disappointing.

If there is 1 refuge I can say about the quality of the series, its the quality of the ending. The ending is ballsy. Yes everything leading up to the ending was an asspull and the way the actual ending occurred was also an asspull. But the consequence that occurred did make me think, ok yeah, this is a decent ending to the series. Its not a well written series but the ending did take some balls. Either that or the author realized that he should just throw some action on the screen.

Overall. I'm disappointed. Gonna go back to playing Hades. At least that was entertaining. Due to the ending I did consider giving the series a 5/10 because I'm not made of stone damn it. However... Considering I've typed all of this out, they were moments where I did enjoy the series it was just far too few in between and if push comes to a shove I would not recommend this series.
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ioctan
35/100
Delivering hearts, maybe.
Setting
In a world with no sun only a limited man-made sun shines, there are giant insects seeking the "heart" of people and letters, so "letter bees" are tasked with the dangerous task of delivering the letters.

Story
It starts being Lag Seeing, who had his mother taken from him, being delivered as a "letter" to be taken care of, from that point onwards he decides he wants to be a letter bee too, and wants to deliver letters as well as find his mother.

Art
The line art is generally good, I'm not a big fan of high-contrast shading, but it doesn't bother me much here. Though generally, the author will bring some weird looking asses and disrupt the tone of the manga (as well as my appreciation for the manga in general).

Spoilerless review
While I didn't like it at all, I can see others enjoying it, and the best way to judge it is probably to read 2-3 volumes, if you don't like them, I doubt you'll like the rest, but if you like them, you'll probably like the majority of it.

Personally, I wasn't really invested in the main cast of characters nor the bigger plot, and the bad people from the short stories lacked any nuance whatsoever, mostly there for some cheap tragedy or revenge porn - which might appeal to some, but I found underwhelming.

The fights, while competently drawn, lacked any tension to me, and I was just watching the clock for them to finally end, and the jokes I found to be a mixed bag. In general, I enjoyed the gags involving animals, special mention to Steak, but the ones involving humans were more hit-and-miss for me, specially those related to Niche as they had a high chance of being ass jokes.

From this point onwards, expect SPOILERS.

Characters
I had a hard time sympathizing with the characters, a lot of them seemed to exist to fulfill some sort of role: Zazie was the lone wolf that learns to trust his friends, Jiggy the ultimate "cool" guy, LLoyd the "mysterious" guy, and so on…

Then you have characters like Thunderland who is introduced as some sort of monster that will stop a nothing to dissect animals just to then show he's a good guy, all in a way that felt like it was there to be just padding... him running with Steak made sense when he was what he was originally implied to be, not after the reveal he had been taking care of the cats rather than dissecting them and what not.

From the main cast, I'd say that my favorite is Connor, unpretentious and easy going, he just loves to eat.

For the letter bees in general, I'd say that Lily Confort. And I think the author did her dirty by snatching her heart instantly when you had pages upon pages to recover a heart when the plot called for it.

Setting
You'd think that something like having no actual sun would have a huge impact in the world, but what we know is that there are essentially 3 areas of different levels of riches based on how far they are from the sun, but it's not like any reason is giving for this. It's only like 15 volumes when we see many plants in the capital... but then we also see a giant forest outside the capital, so what gives?.

We also don't see goods being sent around, other than letters, it really doesn't seem like the capital sends food outside, yet, even though we see a few plants around plants, we don't really see crops around, it's a wonder how towns sustain themselves when even outside far off towns there's only fucking rocky terrains, rocky terrains everywhere.

I thought it would have other effects as well, with some places living in constant darkness, and others living in constant light, but I saw nothing of the sorts being seriously touched upon.

Story
As I mentioned, I wasn't really invested, and the fights just dragged the pacing down, specially when Reverse called the gaichuu, and it took multiple volumes to resolve, and even then, it's unclear what the fuck they were planning to do with that. So it eats the "man-made" sun which is actually a gaichuu... now you have another giant gaichuu and no sun, so what the fuck have you achieved?

And the closer it gets to the end, the more the manga drones and drones about information I couldn't care about, bogging down the pacing more and more.

The story was supposed to be about Lag searching his mom (which is eventually replaced with finding Gauche instead, and then the mother topic is dropped for most of the manga) and delivering letters, so I thought we would have more individual stories about the letters. But there are surprisingly few considering that this is 20 volumes long.

While I can't say I loved them, I still liked them more than the main plot in general. Something that got in the way was how people were often sinless victims or absolutely garbage with no redeeming qualities, with not much in between. And in the off-chance we got an ok story - like the working mother whose daughter died while she was out - there's a big chance there'll be obtrusive asses drawn and kind of focused by the shading and affecting the tone of the scene.

My favorite story was the one about the lighthouse

Nitpicks
Back when Reverse was leading the Gaichuu, Lag goes to help the human sacrifices but encounters Gauche and a verbal battle ensues before the actual fight, which ends with Lag getting really mad at him when he hears people got their heart taken. But while Gauche was placed there to hinder letter bees... at no point does Lag try to avoid him to go save the people, not only that, the one managing logistics and leading the people there was Roda, who was right there, but Lag is mad at Gauche specifically enough to say he'd kill him, while he grabs Roda who was falling to her death (which wasn't her death of course).

While Gauche is the one to take the Gaichuu of the ice, it's not clear how he achieved it when it's supposed that Maka doe shit that prevents people from entering, a thing that wasn't done when Lag came because he was with Niche.

There are several kinds of Gaichuu, and there are several of said kinds, yet somehow Zazie knew that X Gaichuu was the one who killed his parents? While a lot of Gaichuu live in specific areas, this one moved around which is why it took him years to find it, but that's even more of a reason to not know if it is the same one...

It's never explained why the majority of bees are teens or even early teens, you'd think adults would be better suited in general for this dangerous task, but there are very few of them that we actually saw.

While Lag got Sylvette's heart back, I don't think it was explained what happened to everyone else who had lost heart, because - if he could return hers - he should be able to return Gauche's, Lily's, Sunny's and more...right?

And in general, whether someone survived or died after losing heart seemed to be mostly on the whim of the mangaka.

You might also think you'd get fake mailmen too, or at least a cheaper, less curated, unofficial alternative considering it was said they were very expensive... but nope.

Conclusion
I wanted to be kinder to this manga - the premise is interesting and has a lot of potential, the art is good, and there's a big focus in a large cast of characters - but the execution doesn't work for me at all.

I didn't connect with most characters, making the individual stories underwhelming for the most part, and making the overarching story a chore to read rather than interesting. Sealed with the fact that I couldn't find anything to be excited about in the battles.

I also think that the way the author drew asses, crotches, and (sometimes) crotches, went against the kind of tone he probably wanted to set. Or at least it's my impression that it was supposed to be a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes bittersweet, story of putting your all to win against impossible odds and help your friends and all that jazz.

Looking back, the only thing I remember fondly is some gags, and that just isn't enough.
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