Ran and the Gray World Volume Four cover

As disaster looms on the horizon, not just for the magical world but for the mundane, human world as well, Ran has a few issues closer to home to deal with first. There’s the matter of her classmate witnessing her magic (and Ran’s ill-advised attempts to “silence” him on the matter) and a new transfer student, who claims to be the former student of Ran’s magic teacher, has appeared and keeps challenging her to fights?!

Ran will need to clear up these issues first since it seems like her choices will decide the fate of another acquaintance of hers as well…

While Ran and the Gray World continues to wobble back-and-forth towards the central conflict it’s been building to since the first volume, Ran herself gets to actually have some interaction with other kids her age to which I say, good, about time! I felt like Ran and Makoto Hibi’s relationship has the perfect amount of awkwardness for two kids of their age — he’s a little tsundere and Ran is actually a bit shy, so sometimes it takes chasing each other around with a heavy frying pan to level up a friendship.

Nio Gekkoin’s introduction, however, felt a little more forced; if she came to the human world just to fight Ran why did she go to the trouble of formally transferring to Ran’s school instead of cutting right to the chase? Ultimately, I was glad that the initial conflict between the two of them wasn’t drawn out longer than it needed to be. And Nio’s presence means that we finally get to see Ran learn to use her magic! As expected, this is a story with her name in the title after all, and Ran turns out to be quite magically powerful but in an “idiot-savant” type of way. So it’s less than she needs training and more than she needs refinement, the kind that comes with experience and maturity.

Ran and the Gray World spread

Speaking of maturity, I continue to be baffled why Ran and the Gray World keeps pushing me so much to be invested in the relationship between Ran and the older Otaro. At this point the story needs Otaro (or at least a character like him) for the plot to unfurl: his tenacity (and I suspect sour personality) has created the greatest host that the world-destroying bugs could ever hope to have. And yet, Otaro is just unlikable enough that readers probably won’t rage too much if he’s killed off at the end (something that seems likely given how ineffective all other methods to halt the bugs have been).

Otaro clearly likes Ran, and creator Aki Irie is clearly invested in this ship based on how she draws the two of them together, but Ran herself seems as unaware of the implications as you would expect a slightly sheltered kid of her age to be. I sometimes see writers talking about characters “fighting” them and I feel like that’s what happened here with Ran; Ran likes thinking about Otaro as her cool, older “friend,” and Ran also really enjoys the freedom and attention she gets by appearing as a young woman, but it’s just hard for me to be invested in a ship if I don’t think the characters themselves would be invested in it (and that’s ignoring the whole age-gap detail).

I am glad that Otaro has been somewhat sidelined however and that the story is focusing more on both Ran and on the magical world she’s a part of. Aki Irie draws such fabulous and fantastical scenes where even the mundane looks magical and the magical is even beyond that. The art is really what keeps me coming back to this story, but the growing world building (like seeing how the mundane world is contending with a magical apocalypse) has really grabbed me as well.

I am still concerned how this story will end. Now that Ran has actively interfered with eradicating the bugs because of her “love” for Otaro (which both felt in and out of character for her, so the fact that this is the driving plot force at this point means the story isn’t working well for me in some points) but in for a penny, in for a pound, let’s see if Ran can save the world from being overrun and truly turning gray.

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Ran and the Gray World Volumes 4 and 5
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Helen
A 30-something all-around-nerd who spends far too much time reading.
ran-and-the-gray-world-volumes-4-and-5-review<p><strong>Title:</strong> Ran and the Gray World (<em>Ran to Haiiro no Sekai</em>)<br><strong>Genre:</strong> Fantasy<br><strong>Publisher:</strong> Kadokawa (JP), Viz Media (US)<br><strong>Creator:</strong> Aki Irie<br><strong>Serialized in:</strong> Fellows<br><strong>Localization Staff:</strong> Emi Louie-Nishikawa (Translator/Adaptor), Joanna Estep (Touch Up Artist/Letterer), Yukiko Whitley (Designer), Amy Yu (Editor)<br><strong>Original Release Date:</strong> August 20, 2019, November 19, 2019<br><em>Review copies provided by Viz Media.</em></p>