Eden: It's an Endless World!

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WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAIN SPOILERS

This is one of those manga that has divided to it's readers. Some of them think that this is a masterpiece, others, that it's mediocre or maximum something passable. For this reason, I decided to read it in order to determine who side has the reason. I'm gonna divide this review in two parts, where we gonna analyze together the positive and negative aspects of this manga. Let's begin:

POSITIVE ASPECTS

1. Realism: I really enjoyed the topics that this manga offered. This topics includes terrorism, the issues with the prostitution and drug addiction, genocides, racism, territorial issues and the goverment corruption, all ... of them executed appropriately showing the impact of them in the story and the characters involved. The manga can be somewhat crude with the way in which the characters suffer and die from these topics, although that is the grace of it, showing us what are the consequences of these issues without mincing words, something that many works do not dare to do, or even censor part of them. To make an example, the first part of the manga was presented in my country, Peru. They showed how the terrorism made their cocaine traffic, causing a lot of slavery and, also, the massive migration of people from the provinces to the city of Lima, which increased prostitution and drug use here, also, how the goverment (minsteries in this manga), took part of this to obtain much more economical benefits from the current situation.

2. Worldbuilding: The manga not only showed the consequences of the major events with the protagonists, also, we saw how them affected the rest of the manga´s world, highlighting the excellent interconnection of the subframes presented. All these subplots are important in the main one. It also shows us the impact that technological advancement had on this post-apocalytic reality through cyborgs, the new distribution of territories in the world as the case of the Propater organization, the reality that most of this territories had and the conflicts between them. I liked how the manga didn't gave completely the reason to any of the bands involved, so we are talking about a mature story and with a true gray morality.

3. Main plot: In this manga, the objective of the antagonist force was to create an utopy where the karma effect disappear and eveyone could live "happy" without any type of fear. This has some paralelism with the main plots presented in Evangelion and Watchmen. The best part of it was that not only the writer presented this concept and how the antagonic force worked on it, but, also, show how some people gave up on their life that they lived at the time and decided, volunteerely, to join to this utopy. In addition, they showed the other side of the coin, with some characters refusing to give up and trying to step forward. The transition between the post apocalyptic reality and this intent to create an utopy was great. It took a lot of episodes, showing the changes and their impacts progresively, avoiding feel like something forced.

4. Message: This is, by far, the most debated aspect of the manga. Many readers go for the nihilistic aspect presented saying that the message of the manga is about that the humanity cannot be saved and people can't do anything about it. I consider this as a wrong interpretation of the message that this manga offers. The way that I interpret the message is that in life there will always be problems, and, to solve them, people need to adapt and overcome them. Naturally, by solving this problems, new ones will appear and this is how the cycle of the continue improvement of humanity works, which I consider to be what life itself is all about, always improve and be better every day. For this reason, I consider the main message of the manga as a very good one.

NEGATIVE ASPECTS

1. Diabolus Ex Machina: Enemies and problems appearing randomly in many moments of the manga. Even at the beginning, we see our protagonist trying his best to survive and, in the next episode, some terrorists, that came out outta nowhere, kidnap him and this how the main plot begins. Elijah is a prey of the same story, it is not that he moves the same with the decisions that he makes as in this example. During the first part of the manga, many of the attacks against our protagonits can be summarized as follows: They do an random activity and, outta nowhere, the enemies go and attack them with bombs and bullets. Where the hell do these enemies come from? Mystery in many cases. How they know the location of our protagonists? No fucking idea. It's like at the beginning of each episode the enemies recieve via fax the script and the location of them. And this doesn't end here, this random attacks are combined with other issues that I'm gonna mention in the next points.

2. Time skip: This is the flaw that damaged the manga the most, not only because some characters were rewritten (highlighting the main characters from the first part of the manga), but, also, for the use that they recieved after that. Let's talk first about Helena. After the time skip, we found out that her romantic relationship with Elijah ended and she decided to go to bed with another guy. Why did the relationship end? I don't know. The explanation was very poor so we can only infer the rest of the details of this event, in other words, we have to do overthinking; and this is not the worst part of it, during the same episode with another Diabolus Ex Machina courtesy of the house, some random enemies appear and kill her. What was the purpose of putting Helena in scene after the time skip? Wouldn't it have been better to kill her in the time that passed and save ourselves such an anticlimactic scene? What do you guys think.

Let's talk now about Elijah, Kenji and Sophia. Many readers complain about that these characters didn't have a significant character development during the second part of the manga and, with this, the plot density went down, and this happened beacuse these characters were rewritten and combined with the plot tools in the form of characters they received, which I will talk about later, they weren't be able to solve the conflicts presented for their own, unlike the first part. In Sophia's case in particular, what was her purpose after the time skip? Well, it was supposed that it was to show her "karma" during the arc in which her unacknowledged daughter kidnapped her, however, the interaction that she had with the daughter was really poor, it didn't show if she had or not some kind of remorse and regret for what was going on, this was wasted potential for a character development.

3. Sex and edgy scenes: There are moments in the manga were this topics were correctly introduced and didn't damaged the narrative flow like, for example, many fights in which Kenji was involved and the first sex scene between Elijah and Helena, where the purpose was to reduce Elijah stress and this was the form of Helena of said him that she forgave him for what he did. And then, we have a lot of scenes were Elijah simply wanted to wet the canoe with the girl in front of him and scenes (mainly in flashbacks), where the purpose was generate a cheap shock with some explicit scenes with a lot of violence.

4. Plot tools: Lethia and Loji are two characters that, most of the time, their only purpose in the plot was to save the protagonists ass when they needed the most. I'm not exaggerating when I say that nearly all the random attacks against Elijah during the second part of the manga like rockets, bombs and bullets, Lethia quickly detected them and elaborated a plan in order to keep him safe, fucking convenient. Plus, this reduced the tension because we know Elijah isn't going to die thanks to his legged plot tool. In addition, there's an incoherence that was presented with Lethia. If she was capable of detect attacks from a distance, how it's possible that she didn't do nothing when Mana was killed? Mystery. I assume that this ability only worked when Elijah was the character in danger. In the case of Loji, the writer showed us, superficially, her background and that's it. She is only in the story to take Kenji's orders and make last minute saves, she has no personality or goals of her own.

Thanks to this type of characters, it's evident why the main characters of the first part of the manga didn't have a major characterization and development combined with the time skip and the multiple Diabolus Ex Machina.

CONCLUSION

Despite the issues presented in this manga, that where really akward during my reading experience, I consider that Eden it's an Endless World is a good manga with a lot of messages that applies in the real life and it encourages the reader to reflect on them, however, I don't consider it as the 8th wonder of the world like many others do.

The first chapter is one of the best first chapters I've ever read. It intrigued me so much that it kept me reading this... thing... all the way through.

Although the first chapter was a banger, Elijah Ballard was not. Elijah is so damn annoying and uninteresting that it ruins the experience. He has so much screen time—like 10 volumes of protagonism—and in those 10 volumes, almost NOTHING really happened. I'm only counting scenes involving Elijah; obviously, the story still develops with Propatria, Maya and the colloid, but at a really slow pace because we really need to show how a 15 year old kid and ... a 25 year old prostitute fuck, and we need to see how Elijah cums in his own face as a joke, and we really need to see that, we do.

A lot of explicit sex is shown (especially underage), when it's not needed. I find it a bit disturbing because it feels like it's just for fan service. There's even a fourth-wall break with a fan service joke about some female character stripping. The glorification of prostitution is also something I didn't like, but that's a lot more personal.

25% of the story was somewhat interesting, but the other 75% is just Elijah. I got really tired of him. The ending is fine, I guess, but the first chapter set my expectations so high that I don't think this manga delivered on them

I don't know how to review manga, but I want to still share some of my thoughts on Eden: It's an Endless World! This'll be spoiler-ish.

I was suggested this fairly intriguing looking manga by a mysterious forum user. It was in response to a forum post I had made on here, I wanted to read something truly apocalyptic. Where humanity gets obliterated to hell and back. It could've very well been that for a good while. No, no such luck. So that's why I am more than glad I skipped ahead to see the ending. ( No one in their right mind should waste their ... time reading such a long tale if it might not even be headed in a desirable direction...)

This is a POST-APOCALYPTIC manga. That's what Eden ultimately is. I could insert some biased criticisms about it's natalistic and not so... dark ways of thinking, but they're reasonably presented that it would be pointless. I am just let down that I didn't get to see some deliciously grim destruction and rape of mankind.

Apocalyptic to me is when literally all hope is squashed through and through, and it focuses on it's eve. The end of everything. Post-apocalypses don't have this, and as a result more often than not give me boredom with all the what ifs and what not attached.

I guess... it was refreshing to see the gnostic influences. They're I imagine uncommon in manga.