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Mar 14, 2022
Fourteen is the greatest manga that has ever been written or ever will be written. It is a dark tale of a chicken man who plans to exterminate humanity, but it goes from this premise to the most insane heights.
This series is a horrific nightmare, one that alternates between being genuinely confusing and horrifying and absolutely hilarious in its absurdity. It has a narrative structure despite its insanity, but one that might not be immediately obvious due to the stories schizophrenic and rapidly alternating nature.
The artwork is sublime, with a bizarrely realistic style that resembles a mixture of Fletcher Hanks and Robert Crumb that
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only elevates the insanity further. Character poses are stiff and emotions look somewhat bizarre and forced, but this only assists in enhancing the utter insanity that this series revolves around. It features some of the most incomprehensible bullshit I've ever seen, images that made me stare in disbelief at the nonsense I was witnessing.
The characters aren't developed extensively, though Chicken George has an interesting arc and iconic design. It doesn't matter, because their insanity only assists in the story, such as Grand Master Rose, the closest thing to a villain, who is a centuries-old technocratic billionaire who controls the world finances and replenishes his youth with a steady diet of fetus organs, or Chicken Lucy, George's girlfriend that is a regular chicken but can talk, or America, who is the president's son and actually named America, and who has hair that is a plant and becomes a Christ-like figure by the end of the series.
If you can't tell, Fourteen is a thrill ride from beginning to end. The insanity only escalates and you must turn the page to figure out more of the fantastical nonsense present in the series. None of it makes any sense. It makes Neon Genesis Evangelion look like Sesame Street. It makes Texhnolyze look like Fairly Oddparents. It makes Junji Ito look like "See Spot Run". It never lets up, with increasingly absurd and escalating mass death and panic that reaches an increasingly fevered pitch until the equally nonsensical ending.
Fourteen is an absolute masterpiece, and one that every intellectual must read.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Mar 10, 2022
Ayako is a horrifying slog through the depths of human misery.
Every moment of this series is designated to specifically be as emotionally distressing and uncomfortable as possible. It tells a story of corrupt, incestous (literally, sometimes) family ties and post-WW2 governmental corruption, with left-wing feminist themes, but the main point of the story is just being as consistently horrifying as possible.
The text-loggedness of this book is heavy, having near-novel amounts of text to the point of taking me an hour and a half to get through, and I am a very fast reader, being able to get through a typical 250 page tankobon in about
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20 minutes or so. Like most Tezuka works, it feels like it's compressing itself heavily, though that was characteristic of all manga at this time and I'm not sure I'd want to read much more. The ending is probably most fitting, but after all the horrific nonsense throughout, I wish that I had access to the original magazine ending included in the out-of print limited edition. Unfortunately, I can't find any scans of it.
If you want to read a series that will leave a pit in your stomach and make you hate a bunch of assholes, Ayako is for you!
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Mar 9, 2022
This is the stupidest thing ever made.
The deranged fever dream of what parents in the 90's thought anime must have been like, Apocalypse Zero is an obscenely violent, bizarrely sexual nightmare of utter absurdity that reaches a gradually increasing fevered pitch until everything about it fades into a stream of consciousness bout of nonsense.
The entire anime feels like someone took a sample combination of random cliche shonen scenes and put it into a GPT-3 Bot and then added hentai samples randomly, and then they took the script that came out of it and animated it. The plot legitimately feels so derivative to be written by
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a botnet combo of edgy 80's shonen action anime, but it was written by real people and is completely serious.
Objectively, this is a 2, maybe a 3. In terms of my personal enjoyment, it's a 10. My ranking of a 6 is based upon the objective use value of this series considering these factors. This is the definition of So Bad It's Good.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 8, 2022
Death Note is a series with a fantastic premise and production values and a mediocre-at best execution. It's one of the most obviously popular anime series of all time, and if you somehow haven't seen it, you should understand before watching that this series is NOT a "neo-noir psychological thriller". It wears the skin of such, but Death Note is fundamentally a battle shonen with the magic fist fighting swapped out with the characters engaging in increasingly contrived and elaborate plans in order to fuck with each other. It is a show that has its characterization and story details vastly limited by the demands of
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a weekly shonen series that it ultimately is and always has been. It's an enjoyable watch, but a hollow one that does not execute on its fascinating original premise.
These are the greatest factors that prevented me from enjoying this show:
1#: LIGHT YAGAMI'S CHARACTER ARC
Light fails a fundamental part of villain protagonists, in that while we're supposed to abhor their actions, they generally "likeable" in an interpersonal sense even if they're horrific human beings. Light, on the other hand, is a genuinely unlikeable character disregarding his moral dimensions. He is essentially the moralf*g rich white teacher's pet expanded into an entire main character. His excessive glorification of how fantastic his morality is and his excessive smugness are highlighted excessively by the nature of the story taking place from his perspective and sharing his thoughts, and as such, you come to just want to punch him in the face for being a dumb, whiny brat.
Light's character archetype of a shakespearean moral downfall is not a unique idea for a protagonist (see Anakin Skywalker and Walter White), but it's one that's incredibly unique for a demographic as tepid and repetitive as shonen. The problem, of course, is that it occurs entirely too fast. He goes from wanting to create a peaceful world by killing evil people to killing anyone who personally dislikes him in about 5 minutes. If a story is supposed to function like this, it should have at least a while of Light's morals slipping instead of immediately having him go psycho by episode 2. If the creators want us to believe he was always a sociopath, they shouldn't have conflicted themselves by stating that he would have been a virtuous detective that worked with L if he had not found the Death Note, and demonstrating the entirety of an arc to demonstrating how he was a good boi before he was corrupted with power. The creators clearly want us to feel that Light was a fundamentally decent person, one that had several issues that lead to his descent to evil, but one that would have matured from them and gone on to lead a virtuous life without the Death Note. However, his immediate rotation into being a deranged psycho merely makes it look like an on-switch was hit and is obviously rushed to create the main spectacle of him and L fucking over each other, which makes his character more shallow as a result.
2#: The Repulsive Misogyny
Misogny and Sexism in anime is an often-discussed topic, and one that many people have wildly divergent views on. Personally, I feel that a character being depicted with her titties bouncing everywhere with clothes covering 2% of her body is fine, good even, as long as it's applied equally between genders and the character herself is demonstrated with agency and depth and exists outside the purpose of male spectacle. It's good then, that Death Note is a show with almost no fanservice that still manages to be one of the most misogynistic mainstream entertainment products in the last 20 years.
What makes Death Note's misogyny more repulsive is that rather than simply having an all-male cast, it introduces several female characters, several of which show interesting plot developments, and treat them as objects that the plot can use at will.
One might wish to make the distinction between characters being misogynist and the story itself being misogynist. One would protest; "Light Yagami is a villain! Surely, him being misogynistic is simply meant to demonstrate his immorality!" and this might seem convincing. After all, L. seems to generally respect women outside of some jokes about him being considerably hornier than he's willing to let on, but I feel L's lack of misogyny is a result of coincidence over narrative intent. This is shown by Raye Penber, a character who we're ostensibly supposed to find heroic, going on a misogynistic rant about how his wife Naomi should stay in the kitchen and pump out babies. One is relieved when Light kills him as opposed to appalled, but the narrative validates his position by having Naomi killed off moments later, wasting a potentially interesting revenge-driven third player in the plot before she had any chance to show herself.
The sole female character given narrative prominence, then, is Misa Amane. I don't actually find Misa particularly annoying and she gives the show some humorous dimensions (which it has much more than people claim it to, given that L, Matsuda and Ryuk are both serious characters as well as gag characters), but she is an absolute waste of a character. She's introduced as a more unhinged version of Kira but she's unveiled quickly and immediately throws herself at Light instantly without any development. She fails at being a tragic Harley Quinn figure because she was murdering people for ridiculously minor slights before Light even met her because she had heard of Kira, and he openly admits that he's only really involving himself with her because she has useful skills and not because he cares about her. While this demonstrates Light's cold attitude, Misa doesn't come across as tragic at all, just evil.
Misa is also repeatedly called an idiot by the show. While she has some moments of cleverness, these are always superseded by the male cast. How cool would it have been for a genki lolita girl to actually be a complete badass that can mess with L and Light at their level? Perhaps she would realize Light's evil and turn to stop him. Nope, she's just there as a prop.
3#: Edgelord Nihilism
I think moral relativism as a concept is disgusting. While one can say there's no objective value where we derive morals, the same is true of all things, but we can still rationally and factually assert that a tree is a tree. Death Note disagrees. When Near speaks to Light, he seems to highlight more that Light was pretentious and thought he could choose between right and wrong than the fact that he slaughtered dozens of innocents. The whole series themes itself around morality being objectively non-existent and useless, and it's not thoughtful or intelligent like it makes itself out to be. It's a moral philosophy for teenage boys. There is good and bad, and "gray" is not nearly omnipresent. The greatest failure of Death Note is that it fails to convince me out of the idea that using a Death Note would be an innately bad or immoral act. The world could easily be greatly improved with it. It only convinced me the wrong person found it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 8, 2022
If this was written as satire, it is one of the funniest ones ever written. If not, it is the laziest story ever made. The plot is non-existent, the characters literally not even having names. Our protagonists literally randomly bump into each other and immediately decide to get married. This sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. They literally just look at each other and it's like they're being mind-controlled into marriage for literally no reason whatsoever. The mangaka of this ones-shot has written several series that seem to have at least decent reviews, which would make it strange for her to write this on
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an absolute whim. I can only conclude it is a ridiculously and absurdist mockery of Shojo in the same way "Destroy!" by Scott McCloud is for Dark Age superhero comics. In that case, it deserves a 10/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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