Chobits vol 3 by clamp

Hideki and Minoru use all the tricks they know to find who kidnapped Chi. They’re sent a cryptic photo that turns out to be a map of a neighborhood of Tokyo, and the search leads them to the house of a user named Dragonfly who posts on the same forums as Minoru. He has Chi plugged into several other persocoms, but the attempt to break her defenses backfires, and he ends up strung up by wires. Hideki takes the man’s laptop persocom as proof that he kidnapped Chi, and Dragonfly becomes fairly cooperative. Hideki and Chi return to the bakery, and they are unknowingly followed and observed by Yumi, a girl who used to work there and was in love with the bakery’s owner, Ueda. After running away and being chased down by Hideki, she tearfully reveals that Ueda used fo be married to a persocom, and the thought of him comparing their relationships makes her distraught.

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This volume continues the philosophical debate about persocoms being more human than machine. Ueda's marriage to a persocom brings up some painful things, like whether persocoms are better companions than humans, but another picture book Hideki picks up points out there are things persocoms can do that humans can't, but there are things humans can do that persocoms can't. There is some more intrigue in this volume as we get a little bit more revealed of Hideki's landlord, who has something to do with the Chobits experiment, and it seems the team of Hideki-Minoru-Dragonfly are close to revealing Chi's mysterious past and previous owner. This series is supremely engaging with these tidbits of mystery interlaced with a fairly difficult philosophical debate.

There are more fan-service shots of Chi topless, and there is a bit of discussion about how her power switch is in her vagina - which is not normal for persocoms. In a trance state, Chi tells Hideki that only the “someone just for her” is allowed to enter her while she puts his hand on her pelvis over her clothes. Because of these moments, this would be best for older readers.

Sara's Rating: 9/10
Suitability Level: Grades 11-12

Reviews of previous volumes in this series: vol 1. vol 2

Publisher: Kodansha
Publication Date: October 20, 2020
ISBN: 9781646510177 (Hardcover)

Tags: Rating: 9/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Science Fiction, Romance, Kodansha