Novel: Full Metal Panic; Fighting Boy Meets Girl

By Shouji Gatou
Tokyopop, 308 pp.
Not Rated

I would like to take to recommend Full Metal Panic; Fighting Boy Meets Girl to librarians who are desperate to get junior high boys to read a prose novel. For the unfamiliar, this “light novel” is an adventure story about Sousuke, an international mercenary soldier ordered to go undercover in a Japanese high school to protect a girl named Kaname. (Think 21 Jump Street but with robots and hilarious misunderstandings.)

I’d like to point out to junior high boys that this book looks really thick, like you’re reading a “real” book. However, there are a lot of gaps for bullet-hole artwork between sections and it’s in a pretty big font with about 1.5 line spacing, so it doesn’t really take that long to read. You could put a book jacket on it to cover the anime art so adults won’t accuse you of reading “literary trash” - or you could leave the book jacket off so kids on the bus make fun of you less for being a bookworm.

If I were a discerning junior high bully, I would punch harder the nerdier the book you were reading. Here’s a scale, from least likely to get punched to most likely:

Maxim Magazine (least likely to get punched)
Car or motorcycle magazines
Harry Potter books
Shonen Jump Magazine
Marvel Comics (somewhat likely to get punched)
Star Wars novels
Full Metal Panic; Fighting Boy Meets Girl
Wizard Magazine
Shojo Beat Magazine (increasingly likely)
Dungeons and Dragons player’s handbook
Dungeon Master’s Guide
Milton’s Paradise Lost (You pretentious nerd!)

I haven’t been in Junior High for15 years, so 11 to 13-year-olds are encouraged to correct me on this theory.

Full Metal Panic has been available in the U.S. in anime form for several years. The original FMP anime series (24 episodes) features a more serious storyline with some comical moments, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu (12 episodes) is a series of stand-alone episodes regarded by fans as comedy gold and Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid (about 13 episodes) is a continuation of the original, more dramatic series.

Two different Full Metal Panic manga series have been published stateside by ADV Manga; but in this case the manga is not the original source material for the anime. As Gatou explains in the afterward of Full Metal Panic; Fighting Boy Meets Girl, FMP began as a series of comedic short stories “about everyday life” running in Dragon Magazine in Japan in 1998. FuMoFu likely takes from these original shorts, while the first FMP anime has the more serious tone of this novel.

As is often the case, here in North American we got the FMP franchise in a strange order; Anime, then manga, and now the novels. In Japan it started with short stories, followed by manga, then the anime. I’ve made two handy charts:

I saw the anime first, like most North Americans. I have never read the comics, but I heard that Overload! is the best one, since it’s the Fumoffu equivalent.

I really enjoyed Fighting Boy Meets Girl a lot more than the first FMP anime series. The novel has some funny episodes in the front before breaking out into a longer adventure. Kaname’s school trip to Okinawa is ruined when a group of terrorist hijack the plane and force it to land in North Korea. Sousuke has been separated from his regular arsenal by airport security, and he must fight to protect not only Kaname, but also the other hundred kids on the school trip. MITHRIL, the secret organization Sousuke works for, can only help in a limited capacity to avoid starting an international incident with North Korea.

The novel culminates in a fierce mech battle using secret and highly advanced technology of which Sousuke has no knowledge. I am not a mech fan or a giant robot fan, but I was able to enjoy the battle. Perhaps I like it because Instead of taking place in the Gundam-esque future, FMP takes place in the present day in an alternate universe where mechs, called “Arm Slaves” are a developing technology.

The translation is decent. At times there are a few awkward sentences, but one gets the feeling they are presented as the author intended. Overall, it’s a smooth read until Kaname starts lecturing Sousuke about how he thinks of his own life. That section seemed as if the concepts in the dialog were very difficult to translate.

Since this is the first FMP novel, fans unfamiliar with the franchise should not be lost reading it. For people familiar with FMP, Tessa, whom I found really annoying in the original anime, is mostly absent and seems way less annoying in book-form. I can easily recommend this book to those already familiar with FMP as well as the FMP-curious.

Fighting Boy Meets Girl may have too many sci-fi and action elements to really be taken serious by adults, but it is far from literary garbage. Teachers and parents (and students writing essays) could use the terrorist element of the book or the setting in North Korea as a jumping off point for a discussion about history and current events. The AS robots leftover from the Soviet Union could open up a discussion about the Cold War Era. Trust me on this.

Two more novels in the series are due out next year. However, I am more interested in reading the as-yet-untranslated short story collections.

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