Back to ududeoz's Profile ududeoz's Profile

[This review might contain spoilers]

As much as I love all of Satoshi Kon's work, it's really impossible not to put Perfect Blue as his masterpiece.

This was a roller coaster in the human mind and an immortal topic for society: Is a famous person the fame or the person itself?



I confess that, initially, I imagined the story with that playful mystique that master Kon loves to put in his works, but the turnaround would already start there! Perfect Blue is much more real than you'd expect, resembling messy and chaotic energy because that's how we humans behave - the mind that guides us is the ... same mind that confuses us.

And precisely for this reason the plot twist fits like a glove. It's not because the "real identity" was someone so unexpected (that when you watch again, you notice that the clues were always in hand) that this was a lazy script move. The opposite! The play with the psyche was so concise that we ended up forgetting things that were in our face all the time, or even disregarding who was there next to the protagonist.

The entire story was very well questioned by Mima herself: "is this reality or a dream?", and not only does it make us great as viewers, but the character also grows along with the conflict. This is the kind of story that respects its mess, yet plays with any uncertainty - all to a fantastic ending.

At first, I must say that I really liked the manhwa and the characters (with special from Manny and Jin himself) and I had a good time reading it. However, I cannot ignore a factor that for me killed a large part of Bastard's score.


The tutor's introductory death is a big problem. As much as Seon is powerful and influence is very necessary for an assassin, it doesn't change the fact that detectives could make the simple call that she disappeared under the tutelage of a private teacher and worked for the CEO. Therefore, the whole plot could have been discovered early on by the ... public.
In addition, the investigative body could raise even more suspicions with Kim's report: she ended up being guilty of all 6 cases of disappearance, even though she committed only two. But if the tutor disappeared teaching classes at Seon's apartment, how the hell did Faye kill her then in the first place? Even more so if Jin recorded his phone calls, he would be able to actually arrest his own father without much of the characters dying in the process.

But the score just doesn't drop too much in my view because the character construction is fantastic and Manny certainly stands out as an extremely intelligent character, well explored and developed in a wonderful way. It is a recommendable manhwa, after all.