The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

The God and the Flightless Messenger

What's It About? 

A messenger's duty is to care for and protect the god they've been assigned to. In order to complete these tasks, such messengers require wings. Shin, however, can't fly. His tiny, useless wings make him the target of ridicule and scorn among the other messengers and have kept him from being able to serve a god. Determined to prove himself as a capable messenger despite his flightlessness, Shin accepts his assignment to a mysterious being on one of the nearby mountains. At first, it seems an easy task to keep his charge safe and happy — especially when the deity in question is just a cute, fluffy ball of fur. But things aren't always what they seem.

The God and the Flightless Messenger is drawn and scripted by Hagi. Tokyopop will release both print and digital versions of the manga on December 8 for $9.99 and $14.99 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There's something that's just really soothing about a sweet, fluffy romance, and this BL one-shot is just that. In fact, there's a bit more emphasis on the fluffy, because Baku, the god in the title, has both a human form and a giant fluffball form, with the latter looking very much like the kind of pom-pom you give cats to play with. This makes Baku cute on two different levels (both male protagonists are more cute than handsome) while also adding a nice layer of whimsey to a story that, at times, can be a bit dark.

That's because Baku and Shin, the eponymous messenger, are just different enough from everyone else to be, if not strictly bullied for it, then at least very badly misunderstood. In Shin's case it's because he is flightless. Messengers of the gods in the story's world are all basically like Western angels – people with wings. Not only are Shin's wings too small to support him and in two different sizes, but they're also black while most of the other messengers have white-feathered wings. As a child this was looked at as the reason why Shin was abandoned on the mountain but it was also more than enough to make the other kids pick on him. In reaction, Shin developed a punch-first-question-later attitude while retreating to wooded areas to try to practice flying. That's where he met Baku, a young god who, unlike all the others, fed on chaos, the dark miasma that could sicken other gods. Although the head god saw that this was probably a good thing, others feared him, and like Shin, Baku retreated to unpopulated areas to hide what was different about him.

The romance basically has two phases – when the two met as children and then later when Baku, unable to truly tear himself away from Shin even after being run off the mountain, returned to the thirty-second peak, where Shin became his messenger without realizing that he was his first love. (That's not his fault – Baku did a little memory manipulating in the past.) What's so sweet about it is that Shin falls in love with Baku for the exact same reasons both times and the two clearly take delight in each other's company. Even before Shin realizes who Baku is, he's drawn to the god, and at neither time does he think it's weird that Baku consumes chaos – in fact, he's proud of him for being able to do something no one else can. Baku, meanwhile, doesn't care that Shin can't fly; he loves him for who he is, not how he compares to other messengers. It's a really lovely, affirming relationship that encourages others to look beyond how Shin and Baku are different from their peers, which is really what needed to happen all along. That means that when Shin and Baku decide their future, it will be of their own volition, not born from the biases of others.

The God and the Flightless Messenger is just a nice book. The art isn't anything special (although Fluff Baku is awfully cute), but the story is really pleasant to read, and it even sneaks in a bit of real-world mythology: a baku is a mythical creature that eats nightmares – and both in the sense that he consumes chaos and makes Shin's world brighter, that's exactly what Baku does here.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

The God and the Flightless Messenger is one of those stories that has so thoroughly failed to make an impression on me that I'm struggling to come up with even three hundred words to say about it. Nothing about it stood out as good or bad. It is perfectly perfunctory in art, writing, and character development. Nothing more, nothing less.

Although the translation calls them “messengers,” the main race of characters in this manga would be better described as “servants”, attending to every need of the gods they serve to make sure they aren't consumed by chaos. The power of flight is a huge boon in this role, enabling them to travel quickly between the mountaintops where the gods reside without going on hours-long hikes. Shin, the main character, was born with tiny, stunted wings that render him incapable of just that, and so he was never able to serve a god until now. The god, who he names Baku, is a huge white fluffball that eats chaos, but then is revealed to be a handsome young man!

The characters don't act like people so much as they act like manga characters. Their actions and thought processes are steeped in tropes, without much regard for actual human behavior and psychology. Perhaps this is why I bounced off it so thoroughly; even in fantasy stories, I like characters with some humanity to them. Shin's inability to fly, for example, could have been a take on disability and how many of its assumed limitations are societally-caused rather than inherent, but instead it's mostly used to explain why Shin was bullied as a child and has a chip on his shoulder.

The romance is sweet enough, but tepid. It thankfully skips over a lot of discomfiting tropes present in an alarming number of romance manga, but there's also a complete lack of chemistry or warmth. Maybe it's because, like in the character writing, it's ruled more by tropes than any kind of humanity. Add in a forgotten childhood friends twist and… yeah. Okay. It's fine.

It's all just fine. Nothing more, nothing less.