I have an unnatural love for Tsubasa that far exceeds it's actually quality, though it does have some extremely good points. Honestly, I'd just speed read Tsubasa while reading xxxHolic. Though, you might ask Cho how the more recent xxxHolic volumes read not also reading Tsubasa, just to see. even at it's slow points, I do think Tsubasa is good, I just doubt the series as a whole is something you'd like more than passingly. (You might like their Magic Knight Rayearth, though, even though the series is a bit on the sparse side.0
Icon is from Apothecarius Argentum. I've only read (and posted on) the first volume so far, but it's pretty good. Shoujo romance, interesting auto-angst-he comes from a tribe of assassins who ingest poison from birth until their skin and blood become poison. Her father "bought" him as a child to be her taste tester-she's the princess and heir- because he could taste the poison but not die from it. She thought he was just a friend they found for her (they were about 11 and 8 at this time) and tried to free him from the dungeon they kept him in when he wasn't with her, but she kissed him and almost died from it. this got him put on trial for execution, but she freed him for real, and "exiled" him so they couldn't kill him. What made it stand out to me is that, instead of becoming angry and bitter towards the kingdom and doing the "I hate everything but love you" bit, he stayed in the woods nearby and became and apothecary so he could use his breeding to heal people, but is still convincingly someone who was raised to be a badass assassin, and she learned everything she could about survival and detecting poisonings and assassination attempts, so that no one else would have to constantly have his life on the life for her again. And she can back it up with both brains and skill.
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Icon is from Apothecarius Argentum. I've only read (and posted on) the first volume so far, but it's pretty good. Shoujo romance, interesting auto-angst-he comes from a tribe of assassins who ingest poison from birth until their skin and blood become poison. Her father "bought" him as a child to be her taste tester-she's the princess and heir- because he could taste the poison but not die from it. She thought he was just a friend they found for her (they were about 11 and 8 at this time) and tried to free him from the dungeon they kept him in when he wasn't with her, but she kissed him and almost died from it. this got him put on trial for execution, but she freed him for real, and "exiled" him so they couldn't kill him. What made it stand out to me is that, instead of becoming angry and bitter towards the kingdom and doing the "I hate everything but love you" bit, he stayed in the woods nearby and became and apothecary so he could use his breeding to heal people, but is still convincingly someone who was raised to be a badass assassin, and she learned everything she could about survival and detecting poisonings and assassination attempts, so that no one else would have to constantly have his life on the life for her again. And she can back it up with both brains and skill.