At Japan Expo, the romance manga by Oreco Tachibana

In bookstores, manga shelves are home to numerous romances whose patterns and tropes are sometimes quickly identified by readers: love triangles, icy distance between characters before a rapprochement, opposing social worlds between lovers, bad boys with tender hearts, etc. And in this respect, Oreco Tachibana's two series - Promise Cinderella and Les Noces des lucioles (currently being published by Glénat) - are not really an exception. Upon reading them, the stories of the author, who is passing through Japan Expo (which is being held until Sunday at the Villepinte exhibition center), nevertheless seem to exploit these romantic clichés in manga differently, and to arouse all the more interest.

However, her series have rather disturbing starting concepts: her first manga, Promise Cinderella, published in Japan from 2018, tells the story of the encounter of a young, divorced, homeless 27-year-old woman with a temperamental bourgeois high school student, ten years her junior. As for The Firefly Wedding , a period tale set at the end of the 19th century, it begins with the marriage proposal of a young noblewoman with the assassin charged with killing her, to escape her dire fate. By making sensitive adjustments to the customs often in force in romantic manga, the mangaka manages to raise the stakes of her stories. Starting by ensuring that her heroines do not systematically accept without saying anything the toxic behavior of their male counterparts.

"I don't like very passive girls," Oreco Tachibana explains to Le Monde . However, "I'm quite shy. I use my characters to express things that are difficult for me to say," explains the actress who cultivates a certain physical resemblance to her heroine Hayame, from The Promised Neverland . "My mother thinks I look like her because she runs everywhere and goes all the way," she adds.

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