Bokutachi ga Yarimashita

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I've been a fan of Kaneshiro Muneyuki for some time now and Bokutachi no Yarimashita is no exception. Dark and ponderous, it follows four high school boys after they carelessly commit a crime that goes on to torment them for the rest of their lives. It's certainly not your typical manga. The characters are all incredibly flawed and the events and message are uniquely grim. However, like Kaneshiro's other works, it shines in how it forces the reader to rethink the meaning of life and the world around them.

The story begins with Tobio, an ordinary high school boy who spends his time with three other ... questionable friends, including the shrimpy, gossipy Maru, the incredibly lustful Isami, and last but not least, the much-older high school dropout Paisen who throws around his money in order to keep his friends around. When Maru is attacked by a gang from a nearby high school, Tobio and his friends decide to bomb the school as revenge (all over the course of a couple chapters, which goes from 0 to 100 real fast.) Although they commit the crime jokingly, they quickly see the consequences: the death of four students and a hunt for the criminals.

It's incredibly clear from the start: Tobio and his friends are, to be frank, assholes. They're immature. They're materialistic. They care about money, sex, and having fun, without ever really thinking their actions through. However, after their crime, they're forced to develop and change as they run from the law. They each come upon their own answers for right and wrong and struggle to live when burdened with incredible guilt. They don't magically end up good people, and they don't magically end up happy. Even many years after they graduate, they're still plagued with the consequences of their mistakes and unsure with how to move on. However, the change they each go through as they find meaning in their lives is remarkable. Each one of them has personal adventures and personal turning points in their character, including an unexpected pregnancy and a confrontation with parental neglect. What's interesting is how they approach these issues. They each go through their own personal journeys and character arcs and thus end up different places. Kaneshiro Muneyuki carefully illustrates how their lives change as a result of the single incident and turns the four boys into real people, however flawed they may be. He explores their relationships with the people around them as well as one another, and although he covers many honestly terrible things, the raw emotion and the reader's immersion in the story makes it new and thoughtful, rather than graphic and dark simply for the sake of being grotesque.

I have to say, I'm not really huge on the art. However, I also have to admit that it suits the story perfectly. The expressions of the characters in particular are incredibly well-drawn and always go a long way in telling the story since they're just so in-your-face. The art is graphic when it needs to be and subtle when it needs to be. It honestly just works. I'm reminded vaguely of the art in Imawa no Kuni no Alice (Alice in Borderland), my favorite psychological manga, with some of the stylistic decisions (and even some aspects of the character development).

To conclude, Kaneshiro Muneyuki does an excellent job of developing the four friends into their own individual people. Although the series is dark and many of the events are graphic and grotesque, the uncomfortable feeling the scenes leave you with also serve the story's purpose: to make you think about how you're living your life. In this case, each character asks himself the same question: what is the meaning of life and how can you move on from your past? As much as they try to move on from their mistakes, they are forced to confront them and deal with their feelings of remorse and guilt indefinitely. It ends with a note of hope as they each continue to struggle through life. However, no matter how much they progress, they will always remember the bombing and the fact that they were the ones who did it.

I genuinely tried to like Bokutachi ga Yarimashita. I like the bastard characters, their broken relationships, the drama, and the themes.

But my God, I don’t like the ending. The chapters from 65 onward, with the boys wanting to confess and atone for their sins, seemed great to me, why couldn’t it end there?

Everything that follows feels like an inorganic and forced sequence of events meant to squeeze in one last dark-humor joke, throwing everything that had been built overboard. It even feels like a cowardly move (I mean, even the blonde comes out of nowhere, in the exact place at the exact time, just to ... have sex).

I could have let all of this go since I liked what they were doing with Tobio, but sadly the ending is… strange? The only thing that was salvaged from the ending is Paisen, the only character who had consistent development and a satisfying conclusion.

I know a lot of people can’t handle this style of humor, but personally, I was REALLY enjoying it. I don’t know what the hell happened at the end.

I thought Bokutachi ga Yarimashita would be a "realistic" version of My Home Hero.

That is, I thought this series would be about a group of high school kids that accidentally get caught up in an incident that eventually leads to people dying. In it would be gunfights, teenage angst, drama, and a bunch of edgy shit happening. Unlike the controlled, slow, and scripted encounters that My Home Hero was dealing with, Bokutachi ga Yarimashita would be more chaotic with action to boot, but that's kind of where the charm is.

And much like My Home Hero, it overstays its welcome while also derailing from the core ... aspects that make such a synopsis and story fun to begin with. Which is, of course, the chaotic and edgy circumstances that one inevitably comes into contact with when trying to hide a murder.

Instead, this manga's more like some half-assed pseudo-psychological story that never quite hits the mark on any motif or theme, but repeatedly bludgeons you with forced scenarios that try to invoke empathy from the reader, but to me, it just felt like the author ran out of ideas. Like haha, isn't sex good? People also feel guilty for being murderers by the way! And everyone in Paisen's group of friends has got to be some sort of scumbag, one way or the other.

I guess I just don't care. The stakes are too low, and it feels like some sort of melodrama with angst mixed in half the time. There's a lack of coherent psychoanalysis, and it seems like it's just that traumatic events are shoved into everybody to make them feel depressed. The story and characters both have no direction, and it's only through the suicidal thoughts shoved in your face that make the manga becomes remotely interesting, but again, just shock value rather than feeling like the person in question had intimate experience with death.

Too much cringy shit happens with low stakes while simultaneously shoving in traumatic events with no rhyme or reason. Pair this with a mentally unstable group of shitty teenagers and this is the result.