Ginka & Glüna: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes

Manga Details

• Author: Watanabe, Shinpei
  • Notable people they were an assistant for:
    • Kei Kamiki (Magu-chan)
      • Confirmed in the final volume. Good thing we did a podcast that explicitly made me read the final volume!
  • Confirmed in a profile page in Jump GIGA that he's a fan of Hunter x Hunter, Gantz, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
• Author’s other works:
  • Four one-shots from 2017-2021
    • Social Game (honourable mention for an online Jump rookie award, 2017) read here: http://r-cbs.mangafactory.jp/c16286/c210-17223/
    • Immortal Spirit Honemi-chan (Jump GIGA WINTER issue 3, 2019) PRINT DEBUT
    • Tsugihagi's Eight Mysteries (Jump GIGA Summer issue 3, 2019)
    • Pekopeko Disease (Weekly Shonen Jump double issue 21-22, 2021)
• Run dates: Sep 12, 2022 to Apr 10, 2023
  • Series it replaced:
    • Earthchild by Hideo Shinkai
  • Series that replaced it:
    • Do Retry by Jun Kirarazaka (Bone Collection)
  • Series in same serialisation round:
    • Tokyo Demon Bride Story by Tadaichi Nakama
• Chapters/Volumes: 29/4

About the Manga

• Plot
  • Gluna is a little girl living alone on a snowy mountain after the death of her mother. One day she gives her scarf to a bad snowman and it turns into a thicc snowman named Ginka who is a powerful magician that got trapped in snowman form. He spends the next few years teaching her magic until she becomes really good at it. Ginka wants to leave the mountain but he can’t because he’s a snowman and he’ll melt. So Gluna casts a spell on him that makes him not melt and they leave to find a way to get Ginka his real body back. They find themselves in a city where they meet Baretta, a nice magician who’s good with machines but bad with magic. Her and gluna become fast friends. She takes them to the mission area where Ginka and Glüna do a bunch of 5 star quests to gain a bunch of exp or something it doesn’t matter. They’re so impressive that they’re assigned a 7 star quest to save people from a mine. There they meet Anemone, another witch who’s better than baretta but worse than Glüna. Everyone is impressed that Glüna doesn’t need a wand or to say magic words to cast spells. It turns out that the mine itself is alive and filled with acid and tentacles, but the miners were saved by Minigin, a tiny fragment of Ginka, and they help bring everyone back to the surface. In order to bring Ginka back to full strength they must get all the other Ginka fragments and fuse them back together just kidding this plot point gets dropped.
  • 
    
  • Before it’s dropped though, everyone decides to climb a huge mountain to get to the magic guild in order to see if there’s a way to fuse the ginkas together in a way that won’t kill minigin. They come across Karula, a powerful magician with two apprentices who are little kids. He fights Glüna which causes her to go all out and reveal that she uses dark magic which is taboo. Then Ginka shows up and it turns out that he and Karula are friends/rivals so the fight stops. They get a letter of recommendation from Karula to get into the guild under the guise of non magic users or “basics” and discover that the magicians living there are dicks. The team thankfully winds up in the library regardless where Glüna gets into a fight with a powerful witch with one eye named Scheherazade or “Hera” who has the book they need. Maybe. Glüna steals it from her and then Ginka shows up which pisses Hera off cuz Ginka is the one who took her eye. Here’s where the plot point with mini-gin is totally dropped. Hera is actually Anemone’s abusive master and she pokes Anemone’s eyes out to continue being abusive. There’s a confusing fight but Ginka and Glüna win and Scheherazade is captured by Methuselah, the guild master who trained Ginka. She has a servant named Locke who hates magicians but chooses to live with them for some reason. Methuselah sends them off with Locke to a village where some shit is going down.
  • 
    
  • When they get there they meet a powerful magician named Nosferatu who uses flute magic to make trees grow for no payment and is DEFINITELY not evil. Gluna stops a little kid from trying to stab him and the kid tells them that Nosferatu killed and ate everyone in his village OMG NO WAY, HES EVIL???? Nosferatu wants to drain the happiness or something from all the townspeople to summon Magaraku, a dude who brought down the old kingdom that invented magic and wants to eat the moon? We get a flashback of Ginka as a little kid with horns. He tried to save his sister who was bought by a rich guy by working hard and pulling himself up by his bootstraps but the rich guy already killed his sister. A creepy bunny tells him that his horns give him super magic powers and he destroys the rich guy’s castle. Turns out the bunny was magaraku, who bursts out of Nosferatu’s body in Ginka’s original form. Gluna fights him and uses memory magic bullshit to erase her memories of Ginka in order to gain superpowers and she sends him running away. The rest of the manga consists of trying to help Glüna get her memories back. After a year of trying It doesn’t work, so Ginka introduces himself to her again in the hope that they can once again be friends.
• Characters
  • Gluna
    • She perky not afraid of things
    • Wants to be a magician
    • Jordan’s goblin mode daughter
      • How dare you
    • Loves bread
    • Mary sue
      • David spelled this “Marry Sue”
  • Ginka
    • Talking snowman!
    • Totally would have been voiced by Norm McDonald rip
    • Greedy
    • Gotta protect that smile
  • Beretta
    • Over talkative magician
    • Somehow Gluna knew her name she never introduced herself
    • Messes up a lot
    • Wants to forge her own path
  • Anemone
    • Punk kid
    • Raised by some monster thing
  • Locke
    • Hates magicians but works for one?
    • Big softy

Why it failed

• JFC don’t name a series that has an ambiguous to pronounce name
• Why does gluna wear such a weird outfit
• Why did they skip all the cool learning magic stuff
• This series struggles with power progression as the mc is too powerful at the start
• Seriously what is with this pacing I feel the author tried to emulate fujimoto without understanding him
• How are you glossing over glunas first time meeting another person like that
• Some shots of Gluna like uhh yeah
• Did I miss this lend Ginka magic power thing - they have a powerful artifact why not use that?
• STOP SKIPPING OVER THINGS
• This has no consistent rules to how anything works it's hard to keep track
• I just don't have the energy to note the weird continuity errors like anemone isn't blind in scenes she should be or cuts missing on the same page
• Why are you introducing characters doing nothing with them then abandoning them
• This series really sooin feeds every joke or plot like the immediate destruction of flowers like chill man you don't need to have the impact immediately after the setup

What it did well

• It has a good sense of style and design
• The Ginka looks like she is capable which is nice, as is having a female MC
• Fairytale aesthetic is fun
• Humor is sharp as well
• It is fun having chaotic good protagonists vs lawful good or neutral good ones
• I appreciate it shows magic is embraced by society as it should given how powerful it is
• The scene of the dad asking the magician to tutor his son and covering it was cool
• The art is consistently really really good

Where it could have gone

• I really would have liked a survival story in the mountain wilds it could have been very comfy
• Honestly a magical mechanic series sounds fun
• Ya know it’s fine if the character is competent at magic but why not focus on application? Like learning how to interact with people and how to best use magic
• Show the mountain survival like shit idk
• Do more of the learn a spell show application like with the freeze spell
• An arc where they can't use magic is actually a cool idea but then they just cheat

Misc Thoughts

• It was little Wayne “real g’s move in silence like lasagna”
• If the author had kept it in the snow he'd have had it so easy with backgrounds
• How dare you write bla bla blah as part of showing a character is really talkative you write it all out like how the ww or togashi would
• Is gluna good at magic or not I really don't know
• Where did her friends go during the mountain part
• This is a weird fma rip off
• 
  
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
  • Maxybee hates this series and you can see their full thoughts on the Patreon
  • Scheherazade as a name comes from the storyteller of the 1001 Nights (aka Arabian Nights). It is not clear why this name was picked for a sadistic villain.
  • Methuselah is named for the exceptionally long-lived religious figure in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic text. Suitably, in G&G she is a deceptively youthful-looking character who is in fact old enough to have trained all the elite magicians.
  • Nosferatu is named for the Romanian word for Vampire. Bit on the nose, really.
  • Locke is almost definitely named for John Locke, renowned philosopher and empiricist, which probably explains his skepticism.
  • There are several other characters that Watanabe seems to just forget to name, so why not make up your own!

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Tucker: Boring horseshit’s never looked so pretty
    • Maxybee: I barely consider this a comic
    • duderocks the earthchild stan: a decently fun and charming mess | Mangas author has serious commitment issues
    • Kermit The Grog: I read Ginka as Sans Undertale
    • Scott: Cute Characters, sorry about the execution.
    • Redblade: Lacking Commitment Retroactively Makes Everything Filler
    • The Wolf The Wood The Trafalgar: Side characters who? Plot where? Whatever
    • Xylon: Glüna forgets Ginka. Author, everybody else.
    • Riel: Fun idea, but couldn't sustain it. | Do you wanna build a Snow-Mage
    • Meru (Charly): I miss magico manga so much
    • Digizi, the evil A.I.: Magic does anything but stay interesting
    • Thores (aka Daniel): All These Ingredients, Forgot To Cook
    • Luffy0321: Glüna's lucky, doesn't remember this mess
    • Loser: Much like Glüna, I forgot everything
    • Lord Anubis: First chapter's pacing scared me off
    • Chickenwarlord: Whatever happened to consistency in worldbuilding? | Waited too long picking a lane
    • DevBrev: Frosty the snowman but without focus
    • Portal man: sorry, I hibernated through this story | Taking the magic out of snow | walking in a boring wonder land
    • KirbymonDoscolas: Unfortunately, magic can’t write successful manga
    • Meru (Charly): New MtG banned and restricted announcement
    • Diego (The phantom seer): The snowman never bothered me anyway
    • Sandmandf: Did you know, Hawaii it snows
    • Dralgo: Author's sitting on the TV remote | author refused to touch the breaks
    • Vanarchist: Snowman is so cute, so unfocused
    • blahmoomoo: Everyone forgot the plot. Try again.
    • Andy’s Islands: Glüna's grungy, grubby gab gets gutted
  • David: Don’t just stitch three manga together | Chaotic good protags, just chaotic plot
  • Jordan: This art deserved a better plot