Well, I didn’t see that coming.

If you’re an Otonari ni Ginga manga reader you had the advantage of me.  I had no idea what I was dealing with as this episode unfolded in relatively pleasant fashion.  I expressed two main concerns about this series in the preview – first, that it kind of read like a pre-faab seinen manga premise.  And second, that the heroine came off a bit like a manic pixie dream girl in the description.  The first has certainly been addressed, though I’m not sure how the twist at the end reflects on the second.

The cold open gives us some idea that things are a bit weird with heroine Goshiki Shiori.  She’s a princess for starters, going off on a journey somewhere that clearly doesn’t have the approval of her mother (or perhaps older sister).  Quickly enough we’re deposited in the daily lives of a young man named Kuga Ichirou, who’s inherited responsibility for his two young siblings after the death of their father (the mother appears only in a brief phone flashback later in the episode).  He supports the kids through the “social apartment” building he inherited, and the royalties on his “not very popular” manga.

A male shoujo mangaka as the protagonist of a seinen series is an interesting premise – such juxtapositions of demographics can work very well (like Nozaki-kun).  Mostly though the premiere is inoffensive, cute slice of life.  The younger sister is precocious and a lover of fantasy, the youngest brother quiet and a bit timid.  Ichirou works too hard and gets scolded by his sister, and is delighted when his editor tells him he’s found an assistant candidate.  A rookie, he says, but one with lots of potential.

This is pretty typical manga-creation anime – long hours, exhaustion, unexpected mishaps (like missing pages).  Fortunately for Ichirou Shiori is a marvel, picking up things with blazing speed and never making a mistake (despite having learned from a “how to” manual).  The temptation of course is to take advantage, which to his credit Ichirou tries to avoid.  An emergency necessitates an all-nighter though, which leads to the pair of them falling asleep in the office (which I was sure was going to result in a missed deadline).  The reality was far stranger than that, though…

“Princess of the Star People”, huh?  All right, I’ll roll with that.  What strikes me here was how blasé Ichirou was about the whole thing – I mean, she has a stinger (fortunately not with the same properties os a honeybee’s)?  Star People?  I can only assume this means she’s an alien, perhaps from Otonari ni Ginga, but we’ll see.  There’s no way I can make any assumptions after a balls-out plot twist like that – you just have to check back and see what happens.  I liked enough about this first episode to do that, but more than anything I’m curious about whether this abrupt turn makes Otonari ni Ginga a better series, or a lesser one.