Note: You can read our review of the first volume here.

There is, happily, no hard and fast rule that stories have to stay in their own genre lanes. Apart from encouraging entertaining new combos in fiction, this can also lead to some genre mashups that manage to be successful in more than one aspect. That's something that Turning the Tables on the Seatmate Killer! really wants to be, which becomes obvious starting from its second volume and persists to the end of its five-volume run. Where the first book primarily kept the focus narrowly on purported “seatmate killer” Yui, volume two broadens the cast by introducing a backstory for Yuuki's little sister Mina. In volume one, we basically knew that she had a thing for not wearing pants in the house. In the second book, we delve deeper into her character and learn that she's basically a shut-in, feeling isolated and alone during the school day.

Since there was a real risk that she could just turn into yet another clingy little sister character, this is a welcome turn of events. There's a real effort to make it clear that she has lingering trauma from elementary school and that she knows that she's got to work on it, and Yuuki is just as clearly concerned about her issues. The story manages to lean into that more serious turn for all of about two chapters before it zips back off into zanyland, though, and that brings us to the biggest concern about this series as a whole: it can't quite bring itself to commit to either of its base genres. Is it just a wacky rom-com? Not quite. Then is it about the issues bubbling beneath the wacky rom-com surface? It's not quite that either. Although it admirably uses elements of both, it ends up feeling wildly uneven and at times obnoxious, and that doesn't do either effort any favors.

Since this is an adaptation of the light novel series of the same name, the problem could strictly be with how the source material was adapted in the first place. There's just enough of the serious content to make that feel like a real possibility, something that really shines through in volume five. In that final book, Sayo, the younger sister of Yuuki's girlfriend-hungry friend, reveals her role in the reputation Yui has as a “seatmate killer,” and again, this delves into some fairly realistic territory: Sayo is convinced that her brother's abrupt shift into horniness is entirely the fault of Yui rejecting him. The story later points out that what actually happened is that he simply entered adolescence, but to a confused and sad little girl, blaming Yui made a lot more sense than “sudden influx of hormones.” Like with Mina, there's some real meat to the storyline, but it doesn't sit particularly comfortably alongside the rest of the plot.

The gag comedy portions of the series are much more consistent. As the books go on, metafictional jokes abound, from the way that Mina's and Yuuki's T-shirts spell out what's going on (“start call,” “end call,” “5-year-old,” etc.) to plenty of references to the artist just applying copy-paste to the pages. There are also a lot of references to classic manga series, mostly Kaiji and Doraemon, almost all of which are footnoted to ensure that readers at least know what's being referred to. Slightly more annoying are repeated words and phrases; if I had to read “test prépa” one more time, I might have screamed. A lot of the humor seems to operate on the “repetition is funny” principle, and while that holds true for some (the T-shirt gag, Mina's attempts to get out of studying via videogame), others, such as the repeated use of random French or Mina's lack of pants, definitely grow old with length of use.

There's a genuine effort to make the series' very inconsistency one of the cornerstones of its humor. Characters change at the drop of a hat, the manzai gags from the first volume go away, and pretty much all that remains consistent throughout is how deliberately goofy the whole thing is. Themes of feeling displaced in a relationship do ground the story more than you might expect, which is interesting, because it could be argued that the entire plot begins with Yui feeling like she doesn't belong in her class and taking some highly questionable advice from her older sister. Awkwardness is the root of everything, whether that leads to oblivious actions or feeling left out, and that feels remarkably true of a lot of human interaction.

Turning the Tables on the Seatmate Killer! isn't the most successful gag romantic comedy, but it tries really hard. These four volumes do improve upon volume one, and there are a lot of elements that work well. They just don't quite come together as well as they could, making this fun, but ultimately the kind of disposable that makes you forget what you've read an hour after reading it.