Chitose and Kokoro Kijinami grew up doing ice skating together as children and, while Chitose is now a writer for a health magazine, Kijinami continues to skate and compete at a global level.
But he’s not like the public persona his manager pushes — he’s a little shy, speaks with a country accent, and seems psychologically incapable of competing well if Chitose isn’t on hand to recite a spell from his childhood favorite magical girl anime! This arrangement can’t continue forever, especially when it means Chitose keeps having to sneak out of her job for international competitions, right?
Sometimes when you read a sports manga you can tell that the creator really, REALLY loves the sport they’re writing about, and those are usually the sports stories with the most infectious energy to them. It’s also fine if the creator likes the sport but isn’t head over heels for it, but as I was reading Knight of the Ice I found myself wondering if Yayoi Ogawa was even a passing fan of ice skating before she started this series. The competition scenes often felt stiff, and the background explanations of the technical aspects of skating (scores are graded from some number to some other number, you need to include these fancy looking moves at a minimum, etc) felt clunky. Overall it just felt like ice skating was the “quirk” for this romance. I was very surprised to learn that she’s previously done another ice skating manga, Kiss and Never Cry, but since that hasn’t been licensed I can’t speak to how well or ill the ice skating came off there.
I found myself thinking that the scenes involving Chitose and her work life were far more engaging, even though they weren’t exactly “exciting” scenes themselves. That’s when I realized that Yayoi Ogawa’s only other English-licensed manga is Kimi wa Petto/Tramps Like Us — I.e, dramas surrounding the office and romance are more up her alley, and I do wish that this aspect had been a larger focus of the story. Although, I’m not sure that would have been enough to make me “like” this story; Chitose’s boss gives me “there will be an attempted romance with an unbalanced power structure” vibes (something that doesn’t excite me) and Chitose herself feels like a rather stale female lead, a character who has already given up on herself in many ways (like how she seems to have a little bit of self-loathing getting in the way of realizing that Kijinami really likes her), and I’m sure the story of her finding self-worth or such isn’t going to be one I find engaging.
Truthfully, part of the reason why I have low hopes of enjoying Knight of the Ice after this first volume is because Tramps Like Us never clicked with me. But, speaking of Tramps Like Us, the digital edition of this manga has a preview of the new edition of Tramps and it’s rather funny to see how much Ogawa’s art has changed in the past couple of decades. She uses more screen tones now (making me wonder if she switched to working digitally), her lines seem thinner, and her paneling is less cluttered now, more confident in its relative minimalism. The art in Knight of the Ice does look a bit cookie-cutter for 2020, and I think it would help the story to be more ambitious in her paneling (what’s the fun in doing a sports series if you don’t even take advantage of the movement for some truly usual framing) but these are hardly unique complaints to her.
Overall Knight of the Ice just didn’t grab me, in story, relationships, or art, so I think I will look elsewhere for my sports manga fix.