Manga Review: Seven Deadly Sins

Spoilers for the first four chapters of Seven Deadly Sins!

Longtime readers of “Curiously Dead Cat” know that Yours Truly tends to be pretty positive about the things I review. Today will be different. Not too different, mind you, but a bit critical. SDS kicks off with a young fellow, Meliodas, running a bar that serves terrible food and passable drinks. He’s assisted by a talking pig. But the pub is a bit of an oddity, as a couple of the patrons remark: “It wasn’t here when I came by three days ago.” A mysterious knight, revealed soon to be Princess Elizabeth, walks in. There’s been a coup back home, and she’s seeking out seven heroic knights, the titular Sins, to help her stage a comeback. Meliodas, it turns out, is one of them, and he’s seeking the rest as well. So off the two set together.

Review: SDS feels like it should work. I can’t help comparing it with Fairy Tail. It’s got the same light feel with darker undertones, the same young guy/young woman pairing in the first chapters who are each seeking something that draws their paths together, the same “pervert with a heart of gold” character types, the same “talking animal friend of the main character” trope, and even similar art styles. But while I’ve finished the Fairy Tail manga and anime, I just can’t get into SDS. Here’s a couple reasons why it just doesn’t work as well.

First, the pacing. By the end of the first chapter of Fairy Tail, we’re at Fairy Tail: we’ve reached the guild. The second chapter introduces us to a hefty number of zany characters that we can fall in love with right away, and then kicks off the first plot arc. By contrast, Seven Deadly Sins takes its sweet time getting started; after reading through the first few chapters, I still have little idea where it’s going and who it will involve. This might not be such a problem if the two main characters were compelling in their own right, but they aren’t engaging enough, and that leads to the second problem.

That’s the characters, and particularly the main characters who have to carry the story. Meliodas and Elizabeth are the only people we see enough to grow close to in the early chapters, so they bear the weight of the story there. And that’s a heavy load for just the two of them. Whereas Fairy Tale uses Natsu and Lucy to get us into the action in the first chapter, and then gives us dozens of distinctive and recognizable characters—and, more importantly, their relationships and dynamics, which are the spark and the life of Fairy Tail. It doesn’t overwhelm the reader (which, granted, could be a danger), but it helps distribute the weight of the story across an engaging group who will each get their day in the limelight. There’s a lot more life and color in early chapters of FT.

Part of the character issue may also come down to how the stories handle the reader’s perspective. Both series introduce a young woman seeking a group she looks up to, and then finding a young man who seems to have no connection to her quest but who turns out to be part of the group she’s seeking. But SDS starts off from the man’s perspective, with the manga’s “camera” following Meliodas’s point of view—until the time comes to reveal his secret identity. So there’s a tension between the reader taking the perspective of the man discovering the surprise identity of the woman (princess) and then the reversal as the woman discovers the identity of the man (knight). FT starts with Lucy’s perspective and doesn’t hide any big reveals about her; this allows her to stand in for the reader, and for the reader to identify with her as she discovers the truth about Natsu, Happy, and the Fairy Tail guild. The SDS approach could probably be made to work, but here the FT way of doing things just works more smoothly.

At the end of the day, Seven Deadly Sins feels like an attempt to imitate the success of Fairy Tail that falls short. But if you want to give the former series a try, you can find it for free on K Manga, purchase it on Amazon, and probably find it in your local bookstore (as I have). Buying it through my affiliate link always makes me happy, but so does supporting walk-in bookstores like Barnes & Noble or mom-and-pop shops. So do the latter whenever you can!