REC Impressions

Scanlations are a hard thing to review. Their chatper count is hard to divide into actual volumes, and they may or may not be legal to read depending if they're licensed in the states or not. So when I review scanlations or raws, I'll just put "Impressions" in the title of the post. Got it? Good.

One of today's featured scanations is REC, a story about an aspiring voice actress who has no home and moves in with a man she randomly went to the movies with.

REC
Q-Tarou Hanamizawa
Chapters read: 2/40, ongoing

Quite an interesting story, to say the least. We start out with an unnamed girl, who bumps into a man who has been stood up. Taking somewhat of an advantage of him, she goes with him to the movies. The girl is quite strange, reading the movie's subtitles out loud. Later the man finds out that this girl, Aka, wants to become a voice actress.

After bringing her home for a night, she "does it" with him but quickly runs off after they've finished. Cut to the next morning when the man comes looking for her. He finds out that the place she lived has been burnt down! Oh noes! So what to do? Take her in, that's what. Being the good guy he is, he offers her to let her live in his apartment. After this, he goes to his new job which is advertising for a snack food company. He dresses up as the snack company mascot, Neko-san, while Aka does the voices.

After a few standard antics of living in someplace new (such as walking in on her changing) and some banter, we're back at the jobs of the two. The guy runs into a young girl who loves the Neko-san character, and Aka is delighted that someone likes her talents.

Thoughts
The premise sounds a bit average. It's fairly decent, and you can see the relationship between Aka and the man growing little by little even if she wants them to be just friends. But I'm really not sure if it's going to work out with Aka being a tsundere and all. One minute she's angry, and the next she's in tears over someone liking her work!

REC isn't groundbreaking, and it isn't going to win any awards. But it's a good way to kill some time if you're looking for a good seinin manga with two characters in a more mature relationship.

Companies that could possibly license this:
I'm going to say possibly Media Blasters (Anime Works), because they could release the manga along with the short, 12-minutes-an-episode anime and OVA all in one package for a good price.

As a second choice, I'd say Yen Press. They look like they'd be ones to take a risk and publish more "mature" stuff. If both those fail, I'd say CMX because they pick up "smaller" titles like this one.