After seeing some of the stellar ratings this manga has gotten, I was really looking forward to it. Afterwards, I wondered if I had read the same manga as everyone else. I felt frustrated and insulted after finishing the last page. Obviously I'm in the minority, but let me air my dissenting opinion.
The story in this manga is unnecessarily obfuscated. It's told in a disjointed method with several instances in which imaginary "fakeout" scenes occur. It's difficult to understand the chronology without taking notes and re-reading. Some characters are not very distinct, and it's easy to lose track of who is who when the story skips around in time. "Hmm," I wondered. "Does the author have a point in writing this in a such a way. Are my feelings of confusion and frustration supposed to enhance the emotional current of the work? Am I being provoked?" I don't think so. The story is disjointed because that gives it the illusion of planning and it is vague because that makes the ideas seem more grandiose than they really are.
That leads into my next rant: the supposed 'depth' of this story. Where is it? I see a few ideas being brought up; The uncertainty of our perception of reality. The question of whether or not we exert ultimate control over our own existence. Great, but where are the development of these ideas? I'm supposed to pick through this manga several times just so I can speculate at what the author intended? I have a roommate who is a philosophy major; I can have metaphysical questions thrown at me all day. The difference is that in a discussion with him, I actually get coherent, cogent ideas thrown back at me. Picking through this dung heap of a manga to try to unearth a few grains of meaning is not worth it. Don't get me wrong, I did my homework by reading through the lengthy discussion thread on this manga before beginning this diatribe. If you were students in my class, I'd give you an A. Some of the interpretations presented are pretty clever. But that's really the point isn't it? To be clever I mean. Isn't this just a masturbatory exercise in trying showing how clever you are by drawing water from this stone? There's good reading in the discussion. Much better than there is in the manga. Did we really need to wade through 300 pages several times over to get to this point?
Finally, I want to rail a bit on the tone of this manga. The simplest description would be to call it one of despair. The world is a cruel and brutal place. Yeah, I get it. I'm not against dark stories, but some of the lines (and maybe this is more the fault of the translation than the original work) just made me sigh and roll my eyes. How many times do I need to hear the characters expound on the emptiness of the world or watch as they commit horrible acts? Let's get real. This manga is pulp Visual Kei. I've seen tons like it before. It's a vision of a world stripped down to its most raw and vicious - a world of darkness and despair - a story of a protagonist whose life is an endless string of cold acts and dysfunctional relationships - and a half-hearted comment about society and the nature of man slapped on at the end. I don't understand why people eat this stuff up so much. Just because it's depressing doesn't mean it's deep.
Well, sorry about that. That rant was almost less coherent than this manga. I guess I let my frustration spill out a little too much. Anyway, don't take my words too harshly if you think this manga is the greatest thing ever. It's an argument that no one can ever win, because it ultimately comes down to the reader's interpretation (or imagination) of the author's intent. The world is full of opinions, and it would be boring if they were all the same. It would be nice to see the same level of thought put into the deconstruction of any manga; I just don't see the substance present in this manga that others attribute to it.
(-2)
