Claymore, Vol. 27: Silver-Eyed Warriors

I don't really add manga to my list but I wanted to write down my thoughts on this somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. This is a stand in for all 27 volumes I read and the review is for the series as a whole.

Claymore is a good manga that could have been downright amazing but manages to sabotage itself at every turn.
It helps that the problems I have with Claymore are for the most part, not outright faults but things that I see great potential in that never fully utilized. This applies to both plot points and characters.

The biggest culprit I see in this is that Yagi is using in GGRM's words the “gardener” method of writing, not planning ahead but just thinking “let's see where this takes us”. Nothing wrong with that in itself but if you want your writing to be consistent in this style you need to have some ground rules about how your setting works. Claymore doesn't. It's bafflingly obvious that Yagi keeps coming up with things on the spot, especially in the final arcs. This is very easy if you take a look at the earlier chapters.

Claymore has a large cast and few of them really get to shine, generally they will get a moment to shine, a backstory, generally involving how they ended up a claymore. It's not much however I still love every one of the claymores introduced. It's hard not to feel sympathetic of even the most cruel of them when you know the circumstances they've lived in. The manga is at it's best when it focuses on claymores as a group and the bond between the warriors.

I would say the manga has two main plots, one is Clare's quest and the other the fate of Claymores in general. The first becomes a bit of a mess with shounen tropes creeping in, the “power levels” getting higher every chapter to the point bordering on self parody. It's also where the most underutilized character and plot points come in, especially in regards to Raki (without giving spoilers his plotline could have allowed him to give a lot of insight to a certain important villain(s) but instead he is just here parroting things he said the first chapter). It's not bad, there are definitely parts that I enjoyed about this storyline too, I didn't close the book angry at the ending, just kind of disappointed that it didn't hold up to what it could have been.

The other major storyline is, despite coming into play halfway through much better handled. It's a much less typical storyline than “defeat this monster” which the first storyline can be roughly summed up as. It also is a much more satisfying conclusion, after this Clare's story feels a bit like an extra.

The art while gorgeous, one initial problem with it is that characters start off looking very similar. As claymores the have the same hair, same eyes, rougly the same uniform. You basically have to recognize them purely by hair style. Later on Yagi learns to work around these and have more unique looking claymore. Althought the art is beautiful in general where it really shines is the monster design, they all manage to be creepy, unique and most of the time also absolultely gorgeous in a way. The panel work on the other hand is pretty standard. There are times where it's hard to know what is going on because of how every new enemy has a completely unique anatomy.

Claymore at the end of the day is a very flawed manga I don't have purely positive things to say about any aspect of it. And yet for all the flaws that it has none of them kept me from loving it to bits. Objectively I would say this is a 8 out of 10, maybe even a 7. But in my heart it remains a 10.