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messy, beautiful

i uh, really loved this show

anime has a way of being so earnest and, hm, no, what i mean to actually say is

i wish i could bare my soul to this extent, just be so earnest and vulnerable that it feels utterly embarrassing to witness. but if i'm being honest i cant. i'm a shadow of a person, turn the light on and i disappear. my every rotted bridge, all neglected away into nothing, even the slightest possibility of intimacy and closeness, no, it petrifies me. i let all my chances of deepening friendships slip by me, left as a glancing, yet fatal blow ... on any relationship like an iceberg scraping the titanic. alone by choice? weird way to describe fucked brain chemistry and circumstance, but i can't dispute it. if you fail it means you never should have tried. you should see how red my face is right now. fade everyone into a light acquaintance until they move on. never really there, flighty, anxious, too terrified of human connection to really open up to anybody. nothing but lightly pleasant and frustratingly noncommittal to everyone, moving at a coward's pace, unfocus the lens and you won't have to see anything anymore, quicker that way

i can't even imagine how it would feel to be so disgustingly free, just all feathers and fire like that.

you'd think for an industry bent specifically to manufacturing commodified sincerity to sell to teenagers, that they'd somehow come by it a little less easily.

when genuine storytelling is codified in such a way as the way to tell your product's story, what speaks genuine about that? art as genre as mad libs, fill in the blanks, paint by numbers, give me the premise and i can probably tell you how it ends, lets kill god, lets nebulously choose free will and uncertainty over an unfeeling stability. if i melt my skin into yours can we understand each other? if my blood runs through your body will that make us feel any less alone

have you read that old sci-fi book yet you probably should its pretty good except for the parts where its comically, outrageously racist and sexist, but its where your favorite show got all their ideas from and its still a surprisingly easy read today

if we can make it to the Budokan, maybe the stars will start reflecting in your eyes again, that's what everyone says anyway. turn the music up and let it all come pouring out

everything is someone's first time somewhere, that's what makes it so special, its a miracle anything good gets made at all, flowers growing through cracks in the concrete i guess, i can tolerate a little cliché if you smash through my ribs and tear out my heart with it. god bless the people who aren't "well-read" in anything, they get to experience love for the first time again.

i was terrified of even resisting

one day we'll look back and see the ruin we dragged ourselves out of, and on that day i hope you'd have found someplace you can truly belong and be at peace

every time i watch one of these prescriptively life-affirming anime meant to encourage teenagers to follow their hopes and dreams, i always feel encouraged to cultivate and nurture my own relationships in my life, but i almost immediately come to the crashing event horizon that i discarded some of my closest ones willingly, and the rest withered with them. "i abandon here a part of the flesh of my body." over and over again until there's nothing left, just a stain on the wall, when the alternative is nursing increasing masses of necrotic tissue, it almost sounds like the sane thing to do. "you don't understand me at all," i understand you're a disgusting person, and i hope i never see you again in this life or the next

fuck you. i still miss you so, so much, you absolute piece of shit. fuck you.

eventually the question of whether it was the right or wrong thing to do fades away like everything else and all you're left with is whether you regret it or not. when i crawl out of this pit i threw myself into i can tell you where i eventually ended up at

i want to make things, i want to live a life worth living, i want to be a person worth loving, i want to be a person loved, i also just want to lie on the floor forever and feel nothing, i also want to lie on the floor forever and just fucking seethe, wow, multitudes. clench my teeth until they crack open and choke on my own blood, my dentist is going to scold the shit out of me next time i see her

Where were you twenty years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you when I was new?

the joy of art and others is that they're able to get past the sandblasted wasteland of that emotionally blunted hellscape you call a heart and bring that passion bubbling back to the surface like breaching magma, spikes and valleys. i haven't cried since 2017, but on rare moments i feel close, and i think in those moments, i'm happiest. distant figures on the moon, the bright tone of a butterscotch telecaster, feels nostalgic. the joy of art and others is that the only thing that truly matters is who you are when you bring yourself to them. maybe the best art, the best people, are the kind that can change who you are when you're exposed to them. never forget, you're a canvas too:

messy and beautiful.

*the mildest of spoilers for an early character's introduction scene, a different early character's primary motivation, and an off-hand mention to what chapter number a major arc ends on*

you ever watch a show on like, paleontology or something, dinosaurs, and the dude takes some animal’s partial skeleton, like just a small skull fragment, and half a jaw bone, and then somehow uses that to completely extrapolate an entire animal out of that? like full skeleton, muscle structure, organs, even like, behaviors and such?

“oh yeah, because it’s skull was shaped like this, we can figure out that it ate this and that and probably lived ... like this,” just like, mind-blowing shit?

reading the Bocchi the Rock manga after coming off of the Bocchi the Rock anime feels like rediscovering those fragmented skeleton bits and going “damn they really made a whole dinosaur out of this?”

at first anyway, I think that it really comes into its own, not only in terms of both authorial direction and craft, but also fan translation-wise as well, after the first volume and a half. which is, funnily enough, immediately where the anime ends, but we’ll get into that I suppose.

like a lot of people, Bocchi the Rock came out of nowhere and rocked my socks off, and then, like a lot less people, I went to go check out the manga afterwards. I had never read a 4koma before, so I had virtually zero meaningful engagement with the format before reading Bocchi, and I honestly wasn’t -really- sure how to wrap my head around it conceptually? like on paper I can see the format and ‘get’ the idea, but like, serialized storytelling in this 4 panel format? do tell. like sure, I guess I was vaguely familiar with newspaper comic strips, and there are quite a few examples of them that do long-term storytelling through them, something like Funky Winkerbean being like, an extreme example of something that started as 4-panel gags that veers extremely hard into 4-panel drama, in a way that seemed kind of ridiculous from the isolated strips I saw of it online, but even then its not something I ever actually read.

I guess for the contemporary american comic reader that was born long after the golden age of newspaper comics(???), and had never really dipped her toes into manga before, something like webcomics offered a lot of that similar structural framework of like, gag-a-day stuff and genuine long-form storytelling, but I’m at a Loss to think of any of them that handled doing it particularly well. except for like, Blind Alley, which is a great 4-panel webcomic, though one focuses-in way more on like, mood and tone than going all in on gags all the time. and the confidence that that work has in being able to just let its strips breathe and sit with themselves the way they do, sometimes with multiple strips in a row flowing through without dialogue or jokes, is something that always sticks with me about it.

but the point being that outside of that, I had no practical experience or expectations for what to expect from a 4koma, so I was excited to learn about it through Bocchi the Rock the manga. and I wanna preface this by saying that I mean this in the most loving way possible, but it seems that the author was really struggling to get it too?

and its hard for me to judge this accurately, since the only way to read this in english at the time of writing is through a fan translations on your manga-scanlation reading platform of choice that started out, maybe less than stellar. and for the vast majority of the comic online, the english fan translation of BtR was handled by one person by themselves? (this is apparently normal, forgive me I’m not on the up and up on how the fan translation scene works) and this is the part where the whole experience of trying to read this thing swerves into something that I found much more interesting at that point than the actual work itself. because the whole like, I guess, apparatus surrounding it that lets me being able to read this story in english is like, really, really messy?

BtR starts out the gate with like, breakneck speed, its a 4koma so that means you structure the whole thing around your 4-panel punchlines, right? but the punchlines, while they are the same ones from the show, flow so like, cosmically different, that the whole thing doesn’t really hit as it should. the pacing of the comic feels like someone viciously edited out all the quiet moments, so there's no like, valleys or slopes, only peaks and spikes. so it feels less like the naturalistic, rapid fire comedy that’s constantly sprinkled throughout the show, and more like a 30 second youtube video of just the punchlines of every joke rapidly fired out of a cannon, like the DNA is there, but nothing that makes it into a full body. and because of the 4-panel format, the whole comic is forced to anchor its entire pacing on the weight of its jokes that are written as quickfire breezy things that somehow have neither the build-up or punchiness to really play to that 4-panel format, nor the room to let them breathe due to the fact that this is a serialized story that has narrative beats its trying to hit in ten pages per chapter, and by golly, its gonna hit them like fucking Bocchi-themed whack-a-mole.

and this extends not just to the jokes, but to the more serious moments too. Hiroi’s introduction is an example that sticks out in my mind, her defining establishing moment where she stops goofing around and gives Hitori a genuine heart-to-heart to stop her from selling her guitar after Hitori lied to her and said that she gave up on learning it, that is like -a moment- in the show, its its own little scene. in the manga it is exactly two short sentences that take up one panel, because there is absolutely no time or room to stop and let this moment play out; and its also panel 3 of 4, so its not even the climax of the page? its buildup to the weak joke of Hitori revealing that she was lying about selling her guitar actually, which is the wind-down to that scene in the anime, not the climax of the scene like in the comic. there is a real sense of tension at play as the author seems to struggle to figure out, in real time, how exactly to tell the story she wants to tell in this particular format that reverberates loudly throughout the first volume of the manga. this idea the early issues have that every 4-panel strip needs to facilitate one, or even multiple, jokes, no matter the cost, while also trying to tell a whole story at a feverish pace, belays a prickly nervousness in the storytelling that just makes the whole thing feel like sonic the hedgehog is punching me in the face.

and none of this is helped by the fan translation, which starts...rough. I’m not saying this just to be mean to the translator at the start of this project, which appears to be a passion project (what fan translation isn’t I guess? idk, yell at me if there's a whole lucrative industry behind scanlations actually, I'm ignorant here). their first upload of the comic was in 2019, and it appears that they’re using it to teach themselves how to better learn japanese? there's a lot of odd phrasing and weird sentence structure, as well as maybe strange translations for things that have multiple meanings? the thing I remember the most is when Kita is explaining why she joined the band in the first place, which is to get closer to another band member so she could try and date her. this is translated in the show per Crunchyroll's subs as “I wanted to join Kessoku Band and become Senpai’s girl!” (girl meaning girlfriend); whereas in the manga, its written as “I wanted to join Kessoku Band and become Senpai’s daughter!” which is a vastly freakier thing, but rock on girl. but yeah, on the whole it was not really helping the comedy, which despite its reputation as a funny faces work, is mostly focused around its snippy dialogue and the interactions between people, to really have the writing be this kind of thing that is as much of a learning experience as it is that is meant to showcase a work to other people. not that I’m like, denouncing the effort or anything, that sounds like a really cool idea to do if you wanna try and hit like, really practical experience trying to learn a language by yourself.

and I do wanna point out that everything I wrote so far just covers the first like, 20 chapters or so, which is meatier than it sounds. from the way the 4koma is paced and structured, everything that it wants to hit feels very like, condensed and packed in like a collapsing star or something, which makes the act of reading the whole thing feel very like, fibrous. like one chapter feels like a full thing in the same way that say like, eating a protein bar is a full thing, despite it only being like 10 pages long, that still like, 20 strips of jokes. the whole thing really feels stuffed to the brim, which just makes the jaggedness of it all stick out that much more.

but yeah, so the whole thing was a struggle between all three parties: author, translator, and reader, as we’re all swirling around in a big washing machine trying to figure out, in practice, what the fuck a 4koma is. and despite everything I wrote, I’ll be honest, I found the whole experience to be really endearing. there's a fascination, and a charm in reading something that is like, imperfect in ways that the people making it are like, actively trying to work out and making strives to improve that comes across in the pages, and the whole experience as like, anime paleontology is always a bit fun to do.

and whattaya' know they all get better. around chapter 12 (episode 8 in the anime, you know the one) the author manages to figure out how to really sell the big dramatic moments and let them breathe, that is to suddenly switch formats to a traditionally paneled comic to give themselves the freedom to play with pacing, space, and like, impact. but outside of that, the pacing of the regular 4koma panels also improve and relax as the high-strung tension of constant gags calms down a bit into something that feels a bit more casual, a bit more conversational, and slowly becomes something that becomes the sort of comedy that can actually play it it a bit naturalistically, even when it pops off, which is much more suiting to the jokes its telling. the same goes for its narrative storytelling too, it also gains that confidence to just let things breathe and give its non-jokey moments the space they need to hit, and the work as a whole just becomes so much more comfortable with itself and what it wants to do. chapters that spring to mind for that are like, chapters 29 and 45 (chapter 45 is the like, final chapter at the end of a major arc so like, spoilers I guess, don’t jump to that one immediately haha).

the translation also improves with it as well, the dialogue becomes a lot more cohesive and natural, the jokes become much more sharp and well-timed. the entire project has this like, really nice, upward momentum of quality as both the author and translator both improve their craft in a way that measurably shows in the work itself, and the Bocchi the Rock manga ends up in a place that, appropriately, feels very like, warm. I get a fuzzy feeling thinking about it.

and maybe, weirdly enough, reading on through those later chapters bring something the anime does into a kind of surprising clarity. since a lot of the early jankiness of the manga ends immediately, almost comically so, at the ending point of the anime, the thing that the anime ends up doing is kind of bridging that gap between the first part of the manga and the rest of the manga. where it like, brings the opening chapters up to the same level of quality that the latter parts of it have, in a way that feels like, really cohesive. like its one of those situations where you can finish the anime and then immediately pick up the manga and keep going (chapter 22 incase you’re wondering) and there’ll be a minimal difference in vibe, its kind of wild honestly. and also as an added bonus, any of the possible question you could’ve had regarding Bocchi and her relationship to the band at the end of the anime are again, answered almost immediately in the next chapter as the conflict of the next major arc, again, there's that sort of weird immediacy after the anime cut off, kinda' funny. but I do think its worthwhile going through those opening 20 or so chapters, first volume and a half, just because I think that upward progression in storytelling on all fronts is really interesting to see and also really resonates deeply with BtR's thematic substance too.

but yeah uhhh, she's Bocchi the Rock?? put some goddamn respect on the name, its quite good, I feel. I originally planned on finishing this review a long time before the official english release came out, but as I’m writing this, I got the email that the first volume of the official english release of the manga has shipped out to me. so I had to hightail it over to my writing folder to prioritize this dang thing, since a lot of it hinged on the experience of reading the fan translation, since that was (currently is? at time of writing???) the only available way to read it in english, and honestly, I think that the translator is worth the kudos? idk, while i am curious how the overall vibe of that first volume will change with an official translation, there's still a lot of volumes after the first one that won’t be available for like, years and years, so like fucking uhhh, don’t be afraid to check out the scans afterwards, they out here, they putting in the work, they're pretty good!

oh, also uh, if you made it to the end and you’re like ‘ah, ill pass on the manga’ but you also like the anime, you should at the very least check out chapter 16, its like the only extended bit from the manga that was cut out of the anime, and that's seemingly only because it would've just landed smack dab in the middle of episode 10 and completely annihilate the pacing. but its a very funny chapter, the way that the comedy layers on top of itself as two characters start to break down as they're trying to course correct a situation that just keeps kind of falling apart as everyone else around them refuses to help is just peak Bocchi, to me, personally.

*minor spoilers for a couple of gags and basic joke/character structures for the early chapters*

this is a manga that starts off with one joke and a bizarrely leering camera, that eventually turns into something that is pretty good and interesting.

in it, an extremely normal teenage girl inexplicably gains the ability to see ghosts, much to her immediate terror, and decides that the best thing to do is to simply pretend that she can't see them. this is easier said then done, as it turns out that the dead are an ever-constant presence and can appear in the most unlikeliest and uncomfortable of places, like cockroaches. ...

the humor deriving from the comically obtuse, inconvenient, and often visually horrific ways in which the main character is impeded from doing normal everyday things with the people around her, and her attempts to casually side-step them while also maintaining her stoic façade to trick the ghosts around her into believing she can't see them. her effort's to no-sell the ghost's terrifying presence often leaving her panicked and on the verge of tears as the cracks start to show in her resolve through each encounter, never being as stalwart as she hopes she can be, much to the humorous befuddlement of both the living and the dead. these episodic situations being carried on the backs of just how visually terrifying and dangerous these spirits are, which helps sell how comically helpless the main character is throughout.

this is its one joke, and it is a fairly decent one.

unfortunately it is also like, kind of really skeevy about it? at least early on.

its not rare or unusual for a manga/anime to be like, Horny, which under normal circumstances is like, yeah sure whatever, ya'know? anime. but it is unusual in the weirdly specific brand of Horny this manga starts off as. there is a weird sense of voyeurism through the way that the camera frames the main characters, leering shots of their butts with the impressions of their underwear visible through their clothing, situations where they're in various states of undress while a ghost lingers in the room, an early chapter dealing with a ghost who is mostly made up of arms and hands that won't stop groping high school girls.

its kind of A Lot, honestly, like the level of detail consistently paid to making sure you can see a characters bra or panties pressed up through their clothes is not something you typically see outside of something that is like, explicitly sexual; and the vulnerability displayed by the main character during these moments only serves the enhance the skeevy and leering feeling those early chapters left me with. like i was being pulled along for a ride as the author indulged in their fetish of taking creepshots on the street or something. the fact that this work isn't horny in any way otherwise, and doesn't even really deal any sort of romantic element at all just makes it stick out even more as like, doubly bizarre and kind of gross.

which i think is why i dropped it when i first trying to read it a few years back? but i got the itch for some Ghost Shit again, so despite my reservations i went back to it the other day on my way to starting Dandadan and actually had a fairly fun time.

the gross fanservice stuff tapers off indefinitely after about the first ten chapters or so, which is around the time that the series gets a second joke in the form of a slightly younger (or at least, significantly shorter) novice medium who becomes obsessed with the main character after she inadvertently caused her spiritualist mentor to quit her job on the spot, mistaking her awkwardly casual trepidation for the incomprehensibly high-level magical techniques of a master exorcist. the humor coming from the younger girl's brazen confidence and insecurity in attempting to "one-up" the main character coupled with her utter inability to detect any supernatural activity aside from the smallest and weakest entities getting them both in potential trouble with significantly larger, more dangerous ghosts, which the main character has to then scramble to find a way out of having to deal with, (their initial encounter ending in the main character choking her out with a wrestling move, causing the girl to start reading literally everything the main character says and does to her as an active threat of physical violence from a powerful shaman.)

again this is a fairly decent joke.

but i'd really be burying the lede here if i didn't talk about the actual star of the show here, which are the ghost designs. they're pretty great? the thing that this series really understands is how to convey a monstrously horrifying otherness; it knows how to bloat and disjoint a corpse, how to stretch skin tight over a space that's too big for it until it begins to tear, how to make a design that just screams in quiet agony until its finally able to burst open like a rotten gourd. it knows how to warp flesh and twist limbs and dilate eyes until what's left is only a vague mockery of what a person is supposed to be in the form of a twisting, gaping maw. the comedy that its mostly archetypical and cookie cutter characters deal in is only able to be sustained through the continuing presence of some genuinely disturbing, threatening and moreover, creative monsters, ghosts that you look at and go "wait, that used to be a person?" it might seem obvious to say, since they're the main selling point of the manga, but the comic probably wouldn't continue to exist without them looking as gnarly as they do? they're fantastic.

that isn't to say i don't enjoy the human characters, but they are expressly sold as a zip-lock bag of character traits to be placed into different gag scenarios in. the main character, Miko, is a nice, quiet girl who is overall, very normal. her understatedness and passivity used to highlight just how extraordinary the events she finds herself trapped in are. her friend Hana is a bubbly air-head who loves to eat constantly and is completely unaware of any of the weird bullshit around her. Yuria, the novice medium, is literally just Scrappy-Doo if Scrappy-Doo was a teenage girl. like they're fine, they're cute, idk. for what this manga is for the first sixteen chapters, they're perfectly serviceable for its function.

because eventually, after a fairly ample amount of time it spends setting up all these little dynamics and gags, the manga finally begins it's first major story arc. and its like, actually pretty good? it is genuinely really sweet, with some fun plot reveals and mix-ups that gives its characters something to actually act as characters against that's not just a one-note gag. because it turns out the other thing that this series really understands when given the opportunity, is that it knows what ghosts are. they are what gets left behind at the end of human connection: they are the words left unsaid, things left undone, desperate pleas gone either unheard, ignored or otherwise misunderstood. they are the invisible material weight of regret and pain that weigh upon living as it slowly sinks them both down into the dirt; the final rotting epitaph of the trauma's you give and the trauma's that you take, left to fester in forgotten places until they can finally stand up and look at you and ask "Can You See Me?"

this isn't the first time that the series considers its subject matter like this, there are a couple moments in it's establishing chapters that do bring in moments of melancholy tenderness, but this is the first time that the series really brings into focus like this.

and its from this folding in of the central gimmick ideas of ignored presence, repeated miscommunication, and just a general inability to tell each other what they truly need or who they truly are, into the core themes of the series as it continues to build on through it's next two story arcs is what makes this, i feel, a really promising series actually, despite its uh, rough start.

so yeah! overall pretty good, seems to update monthly though, so i'm probably gonna' forget about it for a few years before i remember it and catch up again.

oh uh, one other things that really fun is that the adult mentor characters are all various flavors of scam artist, and only moonlight sometimes as genuine spirit mediums, ones a mostly phony street stand fortune teller and another is a fucking Tim Burton-ass occult youtuber/video game streamer that's constantly asking his audience to buy his expensive useless occult trinkets and to like, comment, and subscribe to his channel and his monthly-subscription based website. pretty good bit.

also the little sprite ghost characters that would be cutesy mascot characters in any other series are, in here, nasty little old naked gnome men, and i kind of love them, they're so grossly off-putting that they wrap back around into being very cute.

a psychological horror webcomic that is extremely good at what it does. and what it does, is stress the hell out of me, haha.

i think its important to get this out in the front end, but this is an extremely difficult and explicit story, and as such it bears mentioning several CONTENT WARNINGS carried throughout this webcomic for graphic depictions of murder, sexual assault, torture, familial abuse, emotional manipulation, kidnapping, trauma, homophobia and also pedophilia and incest in the later chapters, judging from some of the other reviews on this page. this is a story exploring the relationship of someone held hostage in the home ... of an active serial killer, and the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that stems from that in, again, extremely explicit ways. very rough stuff.

this type of story isn't usually my bag, but i was recommended it by a friend, and while it was indeed, not really my bag, it's rare for me to read a story that, through its construction, feels like it enjoys toying with you as much as its serial killer antagonist does with his victims. but through the way that Killing Stalking utilizes its endless canvas to really draw out the tension between panels to their upmost extreme, it somehow manages to build the anxious anticipation of a page turn found in more conventionally formatted comics, throughout each of it's individual panels.

and that, coupled with both the uncomfortably drawn out and intimate play-by-play detail with which it conveys the horrific relationship between infatuated victim Yoom Bum and serial killer Oh Sangwoo, and the long length of its chapters that make them feel like they actually stretch on forever and bear the emotional costs of entire arcs rather than individual chapters (the website i was linked to read it on clumsily chopped each chapter up into pages while still maintaining the scrolling 'endless canvas' format, and resulted in around 75 pages per chapter) creates an atmosphere and pacing that i would describe as "unbearably relentless."
there is no "turning away" in Killing Stalking, no mental escape you can use to momentarily distract yourself from the situation you found yourself trapped in; you are painfully present and alert for every single moment of this webcomic. every panel an eggshell you are forced to walk on, every negative space you scroll through threatening to explode in horrific unpredictable violence at the drop of a hat. it is the comic storytelling equivalent of waving smelling salts under your nose, and it subjects you to all this with an almost, malicious glee.

again, i would say that it is very good at what it sets out to do. but it was also a bit too much for me, and i tapped out around 14 chapters in, the act of reading it was frankly, fucking exhausting.

unsurprisingly, this is an oppressively bleak work, for which you are given no quarter, again, no breathing room. there is a constant tug-of-war at play in its character dynamics between unbelievably tiny victories, and catastrophic failures; with any progress towards the former almost always getting immediately engulfed by the latter. this is embodied through the main antagonist Oh Sangwoo, who's endless capacity for cruelty manifests itself in either a pointedly sadistic focus or an aloof casualness that uh, jarringly brings to mind the himbo innocence of the "I'm not at the beach, this is a bathtub," porn guy.

"of course it's dark...it's a basement."

both of these are shades of the same monster, the only difference is whether the pain inflicted is indifferent or not. the tiny victories manifesting themselves in a strangely tender, almost alien, affection that surfaces out of Sangwoo for Yoom Bum, appearing for only the briefest of moments, sinking back rapidly for the flimsiest of excuses. this dynamic is, in effect, not unlike having to interact with an actual wild animal inside of your home on a daily basis. like a bear or a lion or something. he's terrifying.

if any of that sounded appealing to you, then i would go ahead and check this out, it is a veritable fire hydrant of extremely tense, fraught, horror-thriller storytelling. it gives roughly the same feeling as being a fly trapped in a spider's web, watching helplessly as the spider slowly inches it's way up towards you. though with as far as i got into it, i was unable to find any sort of emotional release or catharsis, seeing as i was no where near the end, nor any sort of recognizable break point, i cannot claim to know if the ending is satisfying in any way whatsoever, or if any of it even means anything by the end of this, or if maybe there's an extremely fucked up message or theme that we're left with at the end of the story, who can say! but if you want to feel distressed and bad for a few hours, like, hey, worse ways to do it, we all like to make ourselves feel miserable sometimes.

but also uh, going off some of these other reviews i'm reading here, please be sure to recognize this story for what it is, which is extremely not a love story in any way whatsoever, but rather extremely horrific and broken people doing extremely horrific and broken things to others. the dude is literally a serial killer