Back to GreatHeathenArmy's Profile GreatHeathenArmy's Profile

INTRODUCTION
Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins begins with an intriguing concept: an entire family wakes up with amnesia after a car accident. As they attempt to rebuild their lives, fragments of their past return—revealing disturbing truths they may not want to face. It’s a strong psychological hook, and for the first chapter, the story seems to lean into its emotional and philosophical potential. But much like Taizan 5’s earlier work, Tapokii no Genzai, it doesn’t take long for that potential to unravel.

FROM MYSTERY TO MESS
The opening chapters are sharp, almost deceptively so. You think you’re stepping into a tight psychological drama where the real horror isn’t ... monsters or magic, but the act of remembering who you truly are. The setup is lean: the Ichinose family’s bond is fragile, their past is clouded, and there’s tension in watching whether love or guilt will surface first.

But that clarity doesn’t last. Instead of following through on that central conflict, the story buckles under its own ambition. Every few chapters, the rules of reality itself shift: memory resets, identity swaps, timeline loops, dream sequences that may or may not matter. What begins as a clean premise about memory turns into a shapeless puzzle-box where the pieces don’t connect.

The effect is exhausting. Characters are reintroduced in new “forms” so often that they lose all sense of consistency. Emotional stakes—so carefully laid down in the opening—are drained away by the sheer repetition of “shocking” twists. For example, when the father suddenly morphs into a blond impostor with a vague scientific backstory, it’s not intriguing—it’s confusing, because the groundwork for it simply wasn’t there.

Worse, these reveals don’t deepen the story; they cheapen it. Instead of asking, “What does memory mean for identity?” the manga settles for, “Here’s another rug-pull.” It feels like each new turn exists only to one-up the last, rather than to say anything meaningful. By the halfway mark, it isn’t a family drama anymore—it’s a circus of false profundity, where the shock value actively undermines the themes that should matter most.

A TAPOKII REDUX
If you’ve read Tapokii no Genzai, the déjà vu is impossible to ignore. Taizan 5 seems to carry over the same creative impulses—and unfortunately, the same narrative pitfalls. Both works start with a clear, emotionally charged premise, only to collapse under melodrama and contrivance.

The most glaring issue is how trauma is used. Instead of being explored with care, trauma becomes stage decoration—introduced with shocking detail, then abandoned without resolution. Characters exist less as people and more as delivery systems for suffering: bullied victims, grieving families, broken authority figures. Their pain is paraded in front of the reader, but never examined in a way that feels honest or earned.

Agency is another casualty. In Tapokii, almost every character is written as little more than a moeblob drifting between victimhood and incoherent outbursts; in Ichinose Family, the entire cast suffers a similar fate. Once the memory loops and identity games begin, the characters stop making choices that define them. They’re simply shuttled from twist to twist, puppets in service of the author’s spectacle.

The supposed “depth” comes from piling on symbolism, not from storytelling. Where Tapokii tried to use its mascot creature as a metaphor for coping with grief—but never clarified what it stood for—Ichinose Family goes a step further by layering dreamscapes, alternate selves, and pseudo-philosophical monologues, as if complexity alone equals profundity. Instead of clarifying the themes, the effect is smothering.

What makes this even more frustrating is that you can see Taizan 5’s potential in flashes. Both series flirt with moments of genuine emotional weight—whether it’s Shizuka bonding with Naoki or the Ichinose family’s early attempts to rebuild their lives. But just when those threads could develop into meaningful arcs, the stories detour into theatrics. Rather than confronting the messiness of grief or memory, the narratives dodge into reset buttons and spectacle, leaving the reader with nothing solid to hold on to.

TAIZAN 5's NEED FOR RESTRAINT
What makes Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins so maddening isn’t that Taizan 5 lacks talent — it’s that his strongest works prove he does have it. Early one-shots like Kisu Shitai Otoko demonstrate clarity, control, and emotional precision. Within the tight frame of a single chapter, he can build tension, sketch out believable characters, and land a payoff that feels earned. Those stories aren't perfect or anything, but they work because the boundaries of the format force him to prioritize focus over indulgence.

The moment he transitions to serialization however, that discipline evaporates quickly. Both Tapokii no Genzai and Ichinose Family reveal a creator infatuated with escalation, constantly chasing the next twist or shocking reveal, even if it undermines everything that came before. Instead of deepening his characters, he overwhelms them with contrived scenarios. Instead of letting themes breathe, he buries them under excess.

This isn’t a simple pacing issue — it’s a structural flaw. Without an editor (or the self-awareness) to reign him in, Taizan 5 doubles down on spectacle at the expense of coherence. His longer stories read like an arms race against himself, each arc trying to “out-dramatize” the last until the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

If anything, Ichinose Family proves that Taizan 5 is most effective in the short form. With the clock ticking, he’s forced to make hard choices: cut the fat, sharpen the theme, and stick the landing. But when given too much space, his worst instincts take over. The result isn’t ambition — it’s indulgence.

FINAL VERDICT
Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins could have been a thoughtful meditation on memory, identity, and forgiveness. The premise alone — an amnesiac family forced to confront forgotten sins — has the DNA of something haunting and profound. But instead of nurturing that core, the story collapses into a convoluted patchwork of half-baked twists and tonal whiplash.

Every time it gestures toward emotional depth, it undercuts itself with spectacle. Every time a character seems poised to grow, their arc is abandoned or rewritten to make room for yet another shocking reveal. What should be intimate family drama mutates into a revolving door of timelines, impostors, and dreamscapes that overwhelm any real sense of narrative purpose.

Worse, this isn’t new. Taizan 5 already fell into the same trap with Tapokii no Genzai: substituting trauma-porn aesthetics and overwrought melodrama for meaningful storytelling. Instead of learning from those missteps, Ichinose Family repeats them with even greater excess — as if sheer complication could disguise shallow execution.

The real tragedy here is that Taizan 5 has proven, in his one-shots, that he can write under guardrails. But serialization exposes his worst instincts: the need to escalate endlessly, to twist for the sake of twisting, to pile on drama without foundation. Without structural discipline, his stories read less like deliberate narratives and more like self-sabotage in slow motion.

So what we’re left with is not a profound work of psychological fiction, but an indulgent mess that mistakes confusion for complexity. It’s the kind of manga that looks gripping in chapter one, trends on social media for its “big twists,” and then leaves nothing behind once the smoke clears.

Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins isn’t a masterpiece. It’s a warning — a case study in how excess ambition, untempered by restraint, can sink even the strongest premise.

Masaaki Nakayama’s Fuan no Tane is a strange little experiment in horror manga. At first glance it feels slight, even disposable — most stories run only two or three pages, usually ending just as the scare takes shape. But that brevity is the point: Nakayama isn’t telling “stories” in the traditional sense, he’s sketching fragments of fear. Each chapter plays like a half-heard rumor or an urban legend told on a message board, a moment frozen right before explanation arrives.

This is very different from what readers might expect if they’re coming from Junji Ito. Ito’s shorts are essentially miniature novellas: he builds tension carefully, escalates ... the bizarre, and lands with a grotesque payoff that makes the whole story stick. The Enigma of Amigara Fault or Tomie linger because they feel like complete tales with a beginning, middle, and horrifying end. Nakayama, by contrast, denies the reader that resolution. He thrives on incompleteness — you turn the page and the scare has already cut off, leaving your mind to fill in what’s missing.

The result can feel uneven. Some chapters land with genuine creepiness — a figure standing too close, an unexplained shadow, a face where it shouldn’t be. Others pass by so quickly they read like two-sentence horror: more an idea than a story. That inconsistency is both the strength and the weakness of Fuan no Tane. It can be frustrating when a vignette feels undercooked, but the cumulative effect of reading dozens of these fragments back-to-back is what gives the series its atmosphere.

Looking at Nakayama’s later work, PTSD Radio, you can see him trying to refine this style into something more cohesive. Instead of pure vignettes, PTSD Radio threads its fragments together into an overarching mythos — curses, hair, eyes, gods — and the repetition of imagery makes the horror feel oppressive rather than fleeting. Where Fuan no Tane is scattered and ephemeral, PTSD Radio is tangled and suffocating.

In the end, Fuan no Tane won’t deliver the polished “short story punch” of a Junji Ito collection. But if you approach it less as a set of narratives and more as a scrapbook of unease, it works in its own way. The brevity, the unfinished quality, and the randomness of its scares make it feel like overhearing ghost stories late at night — eerie, fragmented, and impossible to piece together. It’s not Ito’s carefully orchestrated crescendo, but it hums with a different kind of static dread.

PTSD Radio is not your typical horror manga. At first glance it looks like an anthology of short, eerie stories in the vein of Junji Ito, but as the volumes progress it becomes clear that all of these fragments are connected. What begins as static-filled transmissions of urban legends slowly converge into something much larger, anchored by the mysterious Ogushi-sama, a “god of hair” whose presence haunts both the past and present of a rural community.

What makes PTSD Radio unique is the way it uses fragmentation as horror. Chapters are often short and disorienting, giving you only glimpses of characters or events before cutting away. ... At first this can feel frustrating — faces blur together, stories slip away before they fully land — but over time that structure becomes part of the experience. The manga feels less like a narrative and more like tuning into a cursed broadcast, where pieces of a larger signal bleed through at random.

The recurring motif of hair is central: it strangles, obscures, and entangles. Hair survives death, passes through generations, and ultimately becomes the medium through which Ogushi’s curse spreads. Nakayama uses it to visualize trauma as something that doesn’t end with one person, but grows, tangles, and suffocates across time.

Perhaps the most shocking turn comes in Volume 5, when Nakayama himself enters the story. After suffering a medical scare eerily similar to what he had been drawing, the author recounts his own hospitalization and sense of unease. This sudden fourth-wall break feels less like a gimmick and more like the curse breaching the manga itself — as though Nakayama was not inventing the story so much as transmitting it.

The final volume amplifies this feeling of incompletion. Eyes multiply, faces take shape, stories overlap — and then it stops. In part this is due to Nakayama’s real-world health concerns, but the lack of a neat resolution feels strangely appropriate. Curses don’t tie themselves off neatly, and trauma doesn’t resolve cleanly. PTSD Radio ends like a transmission cut mid-broadcast, leaving its fragments to echo in the reader’s head.

It isn’t perfect — the short length of individual chapters makes it easy to lose track of characters, and the fragmented style won’t be for everyone. But taken as a whole, PTSD Radio is a deeply unsettling and uniquely ambitious horror work. It may not have the polish of Junji Ito’s stories, but it carves out its own identity: messy, raw, and unforgettable. Reading it feels less like consuming a story and more like being haunted by one.

Koe no Katachi is one of those manga that people often describe as "raw," "emotional," or "nuanced." It wants to be all of those things. It tries to be a story about bullying, disability, redemption, and communication. But the unfortunate truth is that behind the tears and dramatic stares lies a deeply immature piece of writing that tries to confront big themes with the emotional intelligence of a moody teenager.

When I first read Koe no Katachi, I expected to be moved. And I was—at first. But the initial anger I felt at how Shouko was treated quickly turned into confusion as the story spiraled into ... a mess of contradictions. Shoya, our protagonist, is written as someone who is irredeemably cruel in his youth, but the story suddenly asks us to feel sorry for him when he's socially isolated in high school. There’s no real transition, no deep internal shift—just a sudden pivot from "bully" to "broken boy," as if showing him be sad and lonely is enough to cleanse the memory of what he did.

It isn’t.

Shoya's arc wants to have its cake and eat it too. He's framed as both the villain and the victim without doing the emotional labor to earn his redemption. The manga manipulates the reader into pitying him, not because of real growth, but because it keeps screaming, “Look how much he hates himself!” That isn’t empathy. That’s emotional guilt-tripping.

And then there's Ueno—a character so venomous and one-note that it genuinely feels like the author wrote her out of spite. She’s hostile, aggressive, and emotionally abusive, especially toward Shouko. Yet the story still awkwardly tries to wedge her into the cast as if she’s part of some shared healing journey. She’s not. She’s a narrative thorn that sucks the air out of every scene she’s in. Worse, her toxicity seems to infect the rest of the cast. Kawai is fake and manipulative but gets barely any development. Sahara is introduced as someone with regrets and then completely forgotten. There are simply too many characters, and most of them aren’t given the space to breathe or the depth to matter. They’re either bullies, bystanders, or pitiful victims—and none are given meaningful arcs.

Even worse, the manga doesn’t seem interested in offering anything beyond sadness. It introduces serious issues—bullying, ableism, depression—but rarely examines them. Instead, it drowns in self-pity and emotional manipulation, pretending that cynicism equals depth. "Society is cruel," the manga seems to say, again and again. Okay—but what else? Where's the insight? Where's the hope?

And… then there are the adults. If there’s one glaring sign of immaturity in Ōima’s writing, it’s how adults are portrayed. They're either reduced to well-meaning but useless bystanders or just outright ignorant and cruel. There’s no depth, no perspective, no challenge to the systems that allow bullying or neglect to fester. I kept hoping the manga would give us something with teeth—a parent, a teacher, a mentor with an actual spine or moral stance. But there’s nothing. Just tired tropes about how adults are clueless and the kids are evil. It's lazy, cynical writing dressed up as insight. These aren't characters; they're cardboard cutouts that exist solely to either fail or yell. It doesn't feel like commentary—it feels like being spit on.

And then... there’s Shouko.

Shouko is the core of this story, and the way her character is handled honestly feels insulting. Ōima wants her to be compelling and sympathetic, but instead she makes Shouko’s deafness her entire identity. Every part of her character revolves around it. Her desire to sing early in the manga felt like it might lead to something—like she might want something for herself—but it turns out it was just written in for cheap sympathy. She is never given true agency. She rarely speaks (both literally and narratively). She exists to be suffered upon, to forgive, to cry, to be the object of other people’s emotional arcs.

And then there’s the romance.

The story expects us to find it heartwarming that Shouko starts falling for Shoya, the boy who tormented her relentlessly. This isn’t redemption—it’s romanticized abuse. The implication that this somehow represents “forgiveness” or “healing” is not just confusing—it’s deeply disturbing. What is the moral here? That a victim’s role is to emotionally rehabilitate their abuser? That love makes everything better, even when it’s built on trauma? The messages here are so mixed and misguided that they left me genuinely frustrated. What was Ōima even trying to say with Shouko’s character? That disability is something to be pitied and overcome by the kindness of others? That forgiveness should be unconditional, even when no real amends were made? It’s contradictory to the point of incoherence.

And honestly? I don’t even know if I’d call the anime "better." It crams seven volumes into a single feature-length film, and in doing so, actually exacerbates many of the problems. There's even less room for characters to breathe, and the core conflict gets buried beneath meandering melodrama and even more polished self-pity. Fittingly, it was animated by Kyoto Animation—a studio known for gorgeously detailed productions that often feel wasted on vanilla slice-of-life high school adaptations like Hyouka. In this case, all that visual flourish only makes the story’s emptiness more glaring. It doesn’t elevate the material; it exposes how shallow it already was.

What ultimately broke this story was realizing that everything Koe no Katachi tries to do is done infinitely better by Real, by Takehiko Inoue. Nomiya, the protagonist in Real, is a troubled teen who makes terrible decisions. But his growth is gradual, earned, and grounded in emotional realism. His mistakes scar him permanently, and he doesn’t heal by wallowing in guilt—he heals by rediscovering purpose through basketball. It’s not a magical fix. It’s just honest. It has a moral core. Koe no Katachi has a guilt complex.

In the end, Koe no Katachi is a story with good intentions, but intentions alone don’t make a good story. What we get is a hollow shell of emotional theatrics that fakes complexity by piling on pain. If you want a story about redemption, disability, or emotional growth, look elsewhere. This one just left me feeling manipulated, exhausted, and disappointed.

INTRODUCTION – THE DUAL REBELLION OF BLEACH
When people talk about Bleach, the conversation is often dominated by two extremes: the dizzying highs of the Soul Society arc and the jumbled, bitter fallout of the Thousand-Year Blood War. For a series that once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with One Piece and Naruto as part of Shonen Jump’s “Big Three,” its fall from grace was as loud as its rise—yet few analyses dig beneath the spectacle to ask why it all collapsed so spectacularly.

To understand Bleach, you must understand that it was always a story about rebellion. On the surface, it was the tale of a teenager who sees ... ghosts and gets roped into the affairs of a celestial bureaucracy. But dig deeper, and you’ll find a story that continuously revolves around disillusionment with power structures: Ichigo breaking into a holy institution to save a friend, captains and lieutenants wrestling with loyalty and conscience, and an entire world slowly realizing that the afterlife isn’t fair—it’s rigged.

But the real rebellion wasn’t just in the story. It was behind the scenes. Tite Kubo, the man behind Bleach, was fighting his own war—not against hollows or Quince’s, but against the very industry that was supposed to support him. Shonen Jump demanded weekly output, relentless merchandising potential, and formulaic arcs designed to maximize appeal. And somewhere along the way, Kubo stopped playing the game. He didn't just burn out—he started writing against the expectations placed on him. What we saw as narrative collapse may have, in truth, been artistic sabotage.

This analysis isn’t just about what went wrong with Bleach. It’s about how its author embedded his frustrations into the DNA of his story—sometimes purposefully, sometimes destructively. It’s about a manga that began as a slick supernatural adventure and slowly mutated into a bleak, fragmented protest the very machinery of shonen storytelling. And in doing so, Bleach became something rare: not just flawed, but angrily flawed. Spiteful. Resistant.

And that, more than anything, is what makes it fascinating.

PART I – THE NARRATIVE REBELLION: SOUL SOCIETY AND ITS ROT
The Soul Society arc is often praised as Bleach’s peak—and rightfully so. It’s where the story sharpened its tone, expanded its world, and established itself as more than just another monster-of-the-week series. But beyond the fan-favorite fights and stylish visuals, Soul Society is where Tite Kubo made his first serious pivot: from ghostbusting shonen to systemic critique. The arc was a full-blown rebellion, not just against the world he built—but against the genre’s expectations.

At first glance, it reads like standard shonen fare: rescue the girl, beat the bosses, power up, and win. But once you enter the Seireitei, everything feels… wrong. The Soul Society isn’t a noble heaven—it’s a rigid, classist, militarized oligarchy. The ruling captains are revered as demigods, but most of them are either complicit, indifferent, or actively cruel. The average soul lives in poverty, with massive districts left lawless and ignored. The bureaucracy is brutal, and justice is a myth. This wasn’t a twist for the sake of edge; it was Kubo pointing a finger at power and saying: this isn’t sacred—it’s broken.

Rukia’s execution isn’t about justice. It’s theater. It’s bureaucracy eating itself. Even Byakuya, one of the most stoic figures early on, is portrayed not as a villain, but as someone so wrapped in duty and tradition that he becomes blind to morality. This isn’t a battle against evil—it's a battle against complicity. Bleach, in this moment, feels deeply personal. It's less about Ichigo vs. Renji and more Ichigo vs. the idea that “this is just how things are.”

The reason this arc resonated so hard is because it wasn’t just a story beat—it was a tonal revolution. You could feel Kubo pouring himself into every frame, not just in style (which was top-tier), but in intent. He wasn’t just drawing soul reapers—he was critiquing a system that chewed up lives and called it order. It was a jab at hierarchical loyalty, blind obedience, and the way tradition can hollow out the soul.

But perhaps the most telling part is what happened after. Because once Ichigo wins, once the structure is exposed and torn down a bit… nothing really changes. Soul Society stays intact. The Gotei 13 persists. And the arc ends not with reform, but resignation. It’s not a happy ending—it’s a temporary win inside a system that doesn’t know how to be better.

This is where you start to see the seeds of disillusionment. Kubo didn’t offer a solution—because he didn’t believe in one. Even at its height, Bleach carried a heavy sense of fatalism. You could break the rules, but you couldn’t rewrite them. Not really. Not when they were designed to absorb rebellion.

And that brings us to a hard truth: Soul Society wasn’t just Kubo’s triumph—it was his warning shot. A sign that this series wouldn’t follow the shonen playbook forever. That beneath the swords and screams, there was a writer staring at the industry and quietly saying, I don’t trust this.

PART II – HUECO MUNDO: THE STYLE SPIRAL AND RIVAL ROULETTE
If Soul Society was Bleach’s rebellious soul, then Hueco Mundo was the beginning of its narrative drift. The arc is visually stunning—no one denies that. The color palettes go cold, the architecture grows sharp and alien, and the Arrancar designs are sleek and menacing. Stylistically, this was Kubo at his most indulgent, and in many ways, most confident. But while Hueco Mundo expanded the world, it also exposed something deeply fragile: Bleach had no real narrative core.

The cracks start small. You think it's just pacing—maybe the arc takes too long to get going. But then you realize something else: the stakes feel hollow. Ichigo is here to save Orihime, but her arc is paper-thin. The villains look cool, but their motives are vague or philosophical to the point of nonsense. And worse, Ichigo himself has started to become… untethered.

By this point in the series, Ichigo had accumulated a graveyard of rivals, none of whom had any staying power.
• Uryu began as a promising foil, the lone Quincy with pride and history—but he gets benched the moment the spotlight shifts.
• Renji looked like the Vegeta to Ichigo’s Goku, only to become comic relief and plot fodder.
• Urahara had the mystique of a trickster mentor and a murky past but never steps into true opposition.
• Then came Grimmjow, all bloodlust and swagger—gone as soon as his role as hype-machine expired.
• Ulquiorra, more subdued and introspective, looked like he might mean something. But his existential musings collapse the moment the swordplay begins.
• Aizen? He was barely a rival—he was a final boss in a chair, playing 4D chess alone while the rest of the show scrambled to catch up.

Unlike Naruto, which (for all its messiness) tethered everything back to Naruto and Sasuke’s ideological collision, Bleach lacked that axis. Its rivals weren’t foils—they were phases. Disposable. Trend-driven. The series chased the new instead of deepening the old.

What made this worse was that Ichigo himself didn’t evolve in response to these rivals. He powered up, yes. But psychologically? Emotionally? He was static. If Soul Society was about Ichigo questioning authority, Hueco Mundo was about Ichigo learning to scream louder. We’re told he’s haunted by his inner Hollow, terrified of losing control—but the show never forces him to live with that in any meaningful way. It’s just another source of power. Another mask.

This is where Bleach’s aesthetic brilliance became its Achilles heel. It was obsessed with vibes over structure. New character designs dropped like fashion spreads. Whole scenes felt storyboarded like music videos. But behind the curtain, there was no thematic scaffolding holding it up. Even the Espada, introduced as this elite death squad, are discarded so rapidly and meaninglessly that it retroactively cheapens their presence.

By the time the arc ends, Ichigo has died, transformed, revived, and transcended. Orihime’s arc goes nowhere. Uryu is a footnote. And Aizen, the chessmaster of everything, monologues himself into irrelevance.

The real tragedy of Hueco Mundo isn’t that it lost momentum—it’s that it lost focus. It forgot what it was rebelling against. It stopped being a story about a teenager caught between worlds and became an endless parade of power-ups, rival standoffs, and cryptic melodrama. The story wasn’t just bloated—it was bleeding out, slowly, stylishly, and silently.

And all the while, the audience could feel it: something important had slipped away.

PART III – FAKE KARAKURA TOWN: A STORY BEGGING TO DIE
By the time Fake Karakura Town rolls around, Bleach isn't just tired—it’s actively falling apart. The seams aren't showing; they’re ripping. What was once sharp and urgent has now become a slow, dragging dirge of battles that never end, plotlines that never converge, and characters who seem increasingly like puppets sleepwalking through a war that lost all meaning ten volumes ago.
You can feel Kubo’s exhaustion bleeding through the pages.

Gone is the narrative momentum of Soul Society, gone is the visual flair and thematic weirdness of Hueco Mundo. What’s left is a glorified tournament arc—except instead of stakes or progression, every fight is a reset button. One-character powers up, the other counters, then we stall for ten more chapters until the next escalation. It's Dragon Ball Z without the energy, Naruto without the ideology, and Bleach without the soul.

But the biggest casualty here is by far is Ichigo, who long stopped being a compelling character.

He doesn’t develop. He doesn’t react. He’s not even growing numb—he’s simply hollow. At this point, he’s the mouthpiece for power-ups, the mechanism by which the plot eventually stops. Even his final form—Mugetsu Ichigo—feels less like a triumph and more like a funeral pyre. He obliterates Aizen with such detached finality that you’d think the story itself was sighing, “Can we be done now?”

And that’s the tragedy: Ichigo IS Kubo.
• Early Bleach Ichigo was brash, conflicted, and deeply human. He didn’t want power—he just wanted to protect people.
• But the deeper into the story we go, the more that humanity is stripped away. First by plot demands, then by power creep, and finally by sheer apathy.
• By the end of Fake Karakura, Ichigo is a weapon. A walking deus ex machina. He’s mournful, distant, and emotionally disconnected.

The subtext writes itself: Kubo is done. Not because he doesn’t care—quite the opposite. He cared too much, and the system ground him down for it.

And then there’s Aizen. The so-called “ultimate villain,” who, after hundreds of chapters of planning and deception, is reduced to a nonsense god-form spouting philosophy like a college freshman high off Kant. He’s not menacing. He’s not terrifying. He’s just… there. Like a lecture no one asked to attend. And Ichigo ragdolling him doesn’t feel earned—it feels like mercy killing.

This whole arc screams for an ending it never gets. Characters like Chad and Orihime are completely sidelined. Uryu, the would-be rival, is reduced to cannon fodder. The captains all get spotlighted in repetitive, exhausting one-off fights with Espada who exist solely to fill chapter quotas. And when Yammy, the 0th Espada, is revealed as the “strongest”—no one cares. Even the characters don’t care. Because the audience, like the author, is tired. Tired of the hype. Tired of the twists. Tired of pretending there’s still something meaningful beneath all this noise.

By the end, Ichigo loses his powers, and it's framed as bittersweet. But there's nothing sweet about it. It’s a release. For the audience. For Ichigo. For Kubo.

Bleach should have ended here. But it didn’t. The industry wouldn’t let it. And so, what should have been a cathartic finale becomes a false ending—setting up the Thousand-Year Blood War, not out of creative excitement, but because there was still ink in the pen and money on the table.

PART IV – THE THOUSAND-YEAR BLOOD WAR: FANFICTION WITH A BUDGET
If Fake Karakura Town was Kubo’s quiet breakdown, then The Thousand-Year Blood War is his loud, disoriented attempt at redemption—an exhausted creator returning to the ashes of a story he once loved, trying desperately to reignite something long extinguished.
And for a moment, it almost works.

The first chapters of the Thousand-Year Blood War arc feel like a rebirth. The tone is heavier, the stakes are immediate, and the enemy—the Quincy—aren’t just another monster-of-the-week threat. They’re brutal, organized, and driven by ideology. For once, Bleach feels like it has a direction again. Fans, long demoralized by years of filler, rushed back in with cautious hope.

But the honeymoon doesn’t last. In fact, it doesn't even make it past the reception.

Let’s rewind slightly: the anime post-Aizen arcs are the very embodiment of burnout.
• We get The Lost Agent arc—what should have been a quieter, more introspective arc about Ichigo’s identity in a post-power world. But instead of soul-searching, we get a bland filler villain, budget constraints, and character arcs that go nowhere.
• These were Kubo’s lost years. It’s painfully clear he wanted out. But instead of being allowed to end his story, Bleach became a zombie: dead inside, still walking, groaning in pain.
• By the time the manga announces The Thousand-Year Blood War, it doesn’t feel like Kubo’s triumphant return. It feels like his contractually obligated encore.

And so, begins the most chaotic arc in Bleach’s entire run.

Let’s talk structure. There is none.
• The war begins, escalates, stalls, restarts, escalates again, introduces 25 new characters, kills half of them, then forgets they ever existed.
• Fights are frequent but unearned. Characters vanish mid-panel. Powers are introduced and discarded with whiplash speed. The story moves like a writer scribbling on napkins during deadlines.
• Old faces return—not for resolution, but for nostalgia bait. Chad is still a jobber. Uryu is still a rival with no closure. Orihime is still written like Kubo resented ever including her in the first place.

And then there's Yhwach.
• The final villain of Bleach is a black hole of charisma. His motivations are vague, his personality non-existent, and his dialogue is metaphysical nonsense. He isn’t threatening—he’s confusing. Like someone trying to write Griffith but forgetting why Griffith worked.
• Even his defeat is unsatisfying. It's not Ichigo’s willpower, growth, or even teamwork that wins—it's a last-minute time travel retcon that renders the final battle irrelevant.

This arc is where Kubo’s worst habits completely take over:
• Rivals with no payoff. Uryu was supposedly a key player in this war, only to spend most of it benched or brooding.
• Powers for plot’s sake. Bankais are introduced and countered within the same chapter. Nothing matters. Nothing sticks.
• No emotional resolution. Ichigo doesn’t grow. He survives. The war ends, not with catharsis, but confusion.

And then comes that ending.
A time skip. Ichigo is a dad now. His kid has powers. Peace is restored.
No reflection. No aftermath. Just... “here’s a baby, now leave.”
This isn’t closure. This is a cop-out. It reeks of exhaustion. As if Kubo finally got to finish Bleach on his terms—but found that he had nothing left to say.
It’s not his fault entirely. Shonen Jump chews up artists and leaves them hollow. You can feel Kubo’s resentment in every panel of this arc. He doesn’t just want to end the story—he wants to burn the bridge behind it.

PART V: THE MISHANDLED ROMANCE OF BLEACH
Among the many threads Bleach introduced and later abandoned, perhaps none are as emblematic of the series’ narrative fatigue as the love triangle between Ichigo, Rukia, and Orihime. What began with real promise — contrasting personalities, layered emotional tensions, and moments of genuine connection — gradually faded into the background, reduced to half-hearted gestures and ultimately an ending that felt more like a shrug than a resolution.

Ichigo and Orihime had the makings of a slow-burn romance. Orihime’s insecurities, her longing, and her jealousy all pointed to a story of emotional growth. But that growth never happened. Instead, her arc became one of passive admiration, and their eventual pairing feels unearned — a decision made more out of obligation than conviction.

Rukia, on the other hand, shared real emotional intimacy with Ichigo. She challenged him. She gave him purpose. She had her own compelling backstory, riddled with pain, repression, and loyalty torn in multiple directions. She should have been a co-lead throughout the entire story, but her development was so frontloaded that she quietly faded from focus after the Soul Society arc. Her chemistry with Ichigo — full of mutual growth and unspoken emotional resonance — was ultimately left to rot offscreen.

What’s frustrating isn’t that Bleach made a particular romantic choice. It’s that it refused to follow through with any of them in a meaningful way. Romance, like so many other threads in Bleach, started strong, hinted at deeper possibilities, and then was hollowed out over time. It’s not even about “shipping” — it’s about the lack of resolution for emotional arcs that were clearly meant to matter. But like the show itself, they just withered under the weight of mismanagement and burnout.

PART VI: BLEACH VS DANCOUGA – SUPER BEAST MACHINE GOD – WHERE IDEALS AND IDENTITY DIVERGE
The tragedy of Bleach isn’t that it was never great—it’s that it didn’t know how to stay great. It had a mythic framework, a stellar cast, a distinct style, and moments of raw, genre-defining brilliance. But when push came to shove, Tite Kubo lost his grip—not on his pen, but on his vision. He started out drawing the story of a lost teen finding meaning in a broken world... and ended up with power creep charts and characters that barely remembered why they existed.

But what if he didn’t?

What if instead of spiraling into reactive storytelling, Bleach took the route of a forgotten mecha gem—Dancouga – Super Beast Machine God?

You’d be forgiven for not knowing Dancouga—unless you’ve stumbled into the ever-expanding chaos of Super Robot Wars, it remains a buried artifact of 1980s anime. But if you do know it, you know Dancouga is Bleach’s spiritual sibling in concept... and its narrative opposite in execution.

As Bleach limped into its final arcs, the core tragedy wasn’t just in its messy structure — it was in Ichigo Kurosaki himself. Once a defiant teenager who took responsibility not because he had to, but because he wanted to protect others, Ichigo slowly transformed into a passive tool for the narrative. His journey, filled with promise and anger and drive in the Soul Society Arc, dulled as he became little more than a punching machine—his agency stripped away by Kubo’s own burnout and Shonen Jump’s pressure to keep the machine alive.

But where Ichigo flounders in purpose, Shinobu Fujiwara of Dancouga – Super Beast Machine God thrives in contradiction.

Shinobu is introduced as a hot-blooded, insubordinate pilot whose strength is matched only by his contempt for authority. And unlike Ichigo, who is often defined by others’ conflicts — first Rukia’s, then Renji’s, then Aizen’s, then eventually Yhwach’s — Shinobu constantly pushes back against the narrative trying to control him. He fights the Muge Zorbados Empire, yes, but his resistance isn’t clean-cut. He also fights the Earth Military, mistrusts the chain of command, and even questions the Dancouga system itself, which alters the pilots emotionally and psychologically the more it’s used.

He’s not just a character in a conflict — he is the conflict. And that’s the stark contrast: Shinobu evolves by resisting control, whereas Ichigo decays by surrendering to it.

Aizen is arguably Bleach’s most iconic villain. But once his big reveal hits, he morphs from manipulative genius into a megalomaniacal plot device. His betrayal of Soul Society is treated like a chess move, devoid of any personal consequence or emotional cost. In contrast, Shapiro Keats, Dancouga’s traitor, is deeply human — an idealist who defects to the enemy, seeking power not out of cruelty, but because he genuinely believes humanity is unworthy of survival. He betrays his lover, Sara, and the team. But unlike Aizen, who simply escalates into another unstoppable god-villain, Shapiro is betrayed in turn — discarded by the Empire he sought to use, and ultimately dies a hollow man, hated and alone.

That’s the difference: Shapiro’s downfall has consequences. Aizen’s just gets... sealed.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning Sara Yuki, who arguably serves as Dancouga’s emotional lynchpin — the closest parallel to Bleach's Rukia or Orihime, though far more layered than either. Sara isn’t a damsel in distress, nor a passive cheerleader. She’s the betrayed lover of Shapiro Keats, a man who sold his soul for power and left Sara emotionally wrecked in his wake. And yet, her arc doesn’t revolve around waiting to be saved — it’s about survival, confrontation, and slow-burning grief. Even while still emotionally entangled with Shapiro, she’s actively fighting against him, against Shinobu, and against a military hierarchy trying to contain her.

She’s not perfect — she’s naïve, brash, often impulsive — but she’s tragically human. That humanity, that conflict of love and loyalty, gives her a weight few women in Bleach ever had. Compared to Orihime, who often felt ornamental or at worst, like a narrative hostage, Sara actually has agency. She makes choices, she asserts control, and she carries scars that aren't romanticized but acknowledged. It’s characters like Sara that remind you what Bleach could have been — a series where emotional fallout matters, where women aren’t just symbols but participants in the larger thematic war of identity, betrayal, and power.

Bleach tries to send Ichigo off with peace, but it’s not earned. He ends up with Orihime, sure, but emotionally? He’s a shadow of himself. The war ends, but the damage to the narrative is irreversible. Meanwhile, Dancouga ends with sacrifice, personal loss, and a pyrrhic victory — but also clarity. Shinobu may never fully reconcile his flaws, but he grows. His struggle against the system, the enemy, and himself feels complete.

The tragedy of Bleach isn’t just in its writing inconsistencies — it’s in its missed opportunity to be more. Series like Dancouga, obscure as they may be, prove that a mecha story about beast gods can carry more thematic weight than a sprawling, mainstream Shonen. When you put Shinobu and Ichigo side-by-side, you don’t just see two different protagonists.
You see what Bleach could’ve been… if it had the courage to let Ichigo change.

Now, I won’t pretend Dancouga is a perfect show. The production values are clearly stretched thin, and outside of Shapiro Keats, the antagonists feel more like structural placeholders than compelling characters. Even among the heroes, a lot of the supporting cast gets eclipsed by the central emotional triangle of Shinobu, Sara, and Shapiro. But despite all of that, Dancouga is still worth watching. Why? Because it commits to its vision. It may falter technically, but narratively and thematically, it sticks the landing in ways Bleach never quite could. That commitment alone makes it stand out — not just as a relic of its time, but as a sobering mirror of what Bleach could’ve been if it didn’t burn itself out trying to spite the system.

Some might argue that Berserk would be a better point of comparison — and in terms of tone and emotional weight, they wouldn’t be wrong. But the problem is Berserk has become so canonized in anime discourse that it now casts a shadow over everything. Comparing Bleach to Berserk isn’t wrong, it’s just uninspired at this point. That’s why Dancouga matters here — not just because it’s obscure, but because it’s a spiritual cousin that tried to tackle the same conflicts (power vs. humanity, betrayal vs. conviction) without succumbing to the same bloated fatigue. Dancouga isn't better because it's darker or bloodier — it’s better because it knows when to end, and it has something worth saying when it does.

CONLUSION: WAS IT WORTH IT?
When all the dust settles — after the battles, betrayals, time skips, retcons, and final farewells — you’re left sitting with a question that haunts Bleach far more deeply than any Hollow or Quincy ever could:

Was it worth it?

Not just as a reader, trudging through arcs that started strong but spiraled into exhaustion. But for Kubo himself — a man who poured his identity, anger, resistance, and eventually his fatigue into a series that never let him rest. Bleach was always more than just flashy fights and cool swords. In its best moments, it was a deeply personal, almost cathartic work about rebellion, isolation, and trying to retain your sense of self in a system that wants to strip it away.

But somewhere along the line, the rebellion became routine. The fire dulled. The boy with orange hair who once fought authority became a pawn of narrative necessity. Ichigo didn’t just lose his purpose — Kubo did.

And it’s tempting to look at it all cynically. To call it a failure, a burnout, a commercial puppet dragged beyond its natural life span. But that would be ignoring the core truth of what Bleach represents.

Bleach is what happens when someone dares to fight the system and loses. Not for lack of talent. Not for lack of vision. But because the machine always demands more than it gives back.

So, was it worth it?

For us, maybe. We got glimpses of brilliance — arcs that electrified us, characters that stuck with us, and a world we still argue about today. But for Kubo? For the creator who slowly unraveled alongside his creation?

That answer might be a lot harder to swallow.

And maybe, in the end, that’s the final message Bleach leaves us with — that even the brightest flames burn out when caged too long.

SPOLER WARNING: The OVA is still ongoing, but this review addresses the manga’s structure and themes, and contains spoilers.

Tapokii no Genzai – A Broken Story Wrapped in a Glossy Package

I’ve already written a scathing review of Tapokii no Genzai, but with the recent OVA adaptation blowing up on social media, I feel the need to revisit it—specifically, to address something I didn't delve into the first time: the characters, or more accurately, how shockingly bad the character writing is.

🎭 The Flawed Blueprint of “Bullying Stories”
One of the big problems I notice—particularly in Japanese media—is how often the bullying narrative falls into a tired, emotionally manipulative ... structure:

* The protagonist is a passive, self-pitying husk.
* The bullies is irredeemably evil.
* Authority figures are useless or absent.

Ironically, Koe no Katachi, often credited with popularizing this structure, may have inadvertently set the tone for a generation of nuance-less, trauma-core storytelling—a style more interested in extracting sympathy than actually engaging with the subject matter in a meaningful way.

And Tapokii no Genzai doesn’t just follow this trend—it completely loses itself in it.

🧍‍♂️ Naoki Asuma – The Lone Survivor of Decent Writing
Naoki is the only character with anything resembling real agency. His inferiority complex gives him a believable emotional center, and his early attempts to help Shizuka create the illusion of a grounded, character-driven story.

Unfortunately, the moment his arc starts to build momentum, the narrative fast-forwards through it and drops him altogether. He’s the only potentially meaningful character—and even he’s wasted.

👧 Shizuka Kuze – From Victim to... Dog Conspiracy Theorist?
Shizuka starts as the bullied protagonist—a familiar role, but not inherently a flawed one. The issue? She never evolves. Her role feels like it was written out of a checklist:

Bullied victim? ✅
Traumatized past? ✅
Sudden dog-related emotional subplot? ✅
Unexplained character turns? ✅

At one point, she literally believes her estranged father's kids ate her dog. Then she goes from sidelined, to antagonist, to randomly making peace with Marina—her former abuser—without any credible arc or emotional payoff.

There’s no catharsis. No emotional throughline. Just disjointed moments with no connective tissue.

🧑‍🦰Marina – A PSA Villain in a Story That Forgets It’s a PSA
Marina might be the second-worst character in the entire narrative—not because she’s evil, but because the writing is utterly directionless.

She starts as a cartoonish bully who kills a dog. Gets killed by Tapokii (?) Suddenly becomes a tragic figure with family issues. Then... decides to reconcile with Shizuka?

This isn't a “sympathetic antagonist”—it's a chaotic mess of character notes with no effort to earn redemption. You can’t throw trauma onto a character and call it nuance if nothing is done to support it.

🤖 Tapokii – Plot Device with a Smile
Then there’s Tapokii, the titular “magical” creature meant to carry the emotional weight of the story.

It’s cute. It’s undefined. It’s narrative cancer.

Tapokii has Doraemon-like potential—a childlike lens through which to view serious issues. But in Tapokii no Genzai, it’s just a deus ex machina with a pastel filter. It solves problems, muddles stakes, and even kills a character, somehow without any weight or explanation. It’s not magical—it’s just incoherent.

In a better series, Tapokii could have worked. Here, it’s just a Band-Aid slapped over a bullet wound.

🎬 Final Thoughts – An OVA Masking a Hollow Core
Tapokii no Genzai is short—but painfully so. For all its high production value and viral buzz, it’s a shallow mess dressed in aesthetic polish.

Characters have no arcs.
Emotional beats have no setup.
Redemption is meaningless.
The one decent character is discarded.

It’s not profound. It’s manipulative. It presents tragedy as a vibe, not as a message. And worse, it doesn’t even seem to know who it’s for or what it wants to say. It's near 9.0 MAL score might fool some people into thinking it might be deep or profound, but this is simply an illusion of influencer marketing rearing it's ugly head again.

Who was this made for?
What did it want to say?
I still don’t know—and I doubt the creators did either.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight – The Bare Minimum, Praised Like a Masterpiece

Let’s be real—Chivalry of a Failed Knight is the kind of anime that gets praised not for doing anything great, but for not doing anything egregiously awful. People go “It’s not a harem! The couple actually gets together! The MC isn’t a perv!”
Cool. That’s the bare minimum. That shouldn’t be a flex in 2025.

This anime plays like a paint-by-numbers underdog story, just with a bit more polish. There’s an “OP but misunderstood” MC. There’s a tsundere redhead swordswoman. There’s a magic academy that looks cool on paper but barely gets explored beyond tournament ... brackets and empty hallways. The plot is about as surprising as a toaster. You've seen everything here before, just rearranged.

---

💤 Predictable to the Point of Numbness

Every beat feels like it’s ripped straight out of a light novel storytelling guidebook:

* The underdog MC who isn’t actually weak, just misjudged.
* The overpowered fight scenes where he wins with "skill" instead of raw power.
* A romance that technically happens but then gets shelved for tournament arcs.
* A dramatic family subplot shoved in too late to matter.

It’s not even offensively bad—it’s just so safe, it’s practically frictionless. There’s no tension, no stakes, no moment where it feels like something unique might happen. You can see every twist coming three episodes early.

---

💥 “Underdog Power Fantasy” Done Without Guts

The irony? The show thinks it’s subverting tropes.

“Oh wow, the MC actually wins fights using skill!”
“Oh wow, he has a healthy relationship!”
Sure, but the show still builds everything around tired tropes, just without the conviction or creativity to elevate them. The result is something that’s not even “so bad it’s good”—it’s so average it’s sleep-inducing.

You don’t feel anything watching this show. Not rage. Not excitement. Not joy. You just stare as another episode ends and think, “...huh.”

---

🏫 Flashy World, Empty Hallways

Magic knights. Sword abilities. Noble bloodlines. Rankings. It sounds like a rich fantasy setting.
But nothing ever happens outside of the arena.

The world feels like it exists only to justify the tournament setup.

* Where are the politics?
* What’s life like outside these duels?
* Why do the characters care about the rankings?

It’s all flash. No substance. The show wants you to think there's a deep world behind the sparkly fights, but there’s nothing behind the curtain. Just more recycled tropes.

---

📉 When "Not Being Trash" Is Treated Like a Win

Let’s be honest: Chivalry of a Failed Knight gets love because it came out during a time where light novel garbage was the norm. So when it did the absolute minimum (a romance that actually concludes, an MC who isn’t a total doormat, and a female lead who gets a bit of agency), people praised it like it was revolutionary.

But time has passed, and it hasn’t aged well. The "wins" people celebrated in 2015 are now standard expectations. And without novelty on its side, what's left is a show that’s just not worth remembering.

---

🧾 Final Thoughts

There’s a difference between bad and forgettable. At least bad shows are funny. Chivalry of a Failed Knight is neither. It’s the kind of show that exists only to fill a seasonal quota.
It’s not insulting. It’s just nothing.

If you're looking for romance? There’s better.
If you're looking for fantasy? There’s deeper.
If you're looking for fights? There’s stronger.
If you're looking for passion? Look elsewhere.

If the Cat Soup Manga was a dark, cruel misadventure, then the Cat Soup OVA would be a silent, sad eulogy.

Directed by Tatsuo Satō and based on the manga by Chiyomi Hashiguchi (aka Nekojiru), Cat Soup presents itself like a children’s picture book run through a nightmare printer: cute on the surface, but steeped in existential dread. There’s no dialogue, little context, and nothing conventional about its storytelling—yet it manages to express something painfully human in its silence.

⸻

✍️ Story – 8/10

The narrative is almost dreamlike: a young cat, Nyatta, follows his sister’s half-stolen soul through a surreal and collapsing world. Along the way, they encounter ... melting time, mechanical gods, sentient sausages, and mutilated animals. It’s hard to summarize because the story doesn’t unfold—it floats.

But that’s the point. This is grief filtered through the lens of a child. The events make no logical sense, but emotionally, they’re piercing. It’s not meant to “add up.” It’s meant to ache.

⸻

👥 Characters – 6/10

Nyatta and Nyaako aren’t deeply developed characters in a traditional sense—they’re avatars for something much bigger: innocence trying to process death. Their actions are simple, but their journey speaks volumes.

This isn’t a character-driven story in the conventional sense, but their blankness amplifies the tragedy. They don’t fight fate; they wander through it.

⸻

🎨 Art – 9/10

The visuals are whimsical, like something from a child’s sketchbook—yet that makes the horror hit harder. The contrast between style and content is one of the film’s most powerful tools. A soft color palette carries you gently through scenes of dismemberment, decay, and despair. It’s beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable.

⸻

🎶 Sound – 8/10

There’s almost no dialogue—just ambient noise, distorted lullabies, and an eerie, minimal score. The silence is deafening in the best way. When sound is used, it always carries weight.

⸻

🧠 Themes – 9/10

This is where Cat Soup truly shines.

While the original manga (Nekojiru Udon) was darker and more cynical—borderline cruel in tone—the film feels like an elegy. Released after Hashiguchi’s tragic death in 1998, the adaptation seems less like a surrealist gag and more like a mourning ritual. It strips away the bitterness of the source and replaces it with something softer, but much sadder.

This isn’t “just weird for the sake of weird.” It’s about:
• Losing someone and not understanding why.
• Watching the world fade around you.
• Accepting that some answers never come.

⸻

📌 Final Thoughts

Cat Soup is short, surreal, and emotionally dense. It won’t explain itself. It won’t comfort you. But it will linger.

More than just a curiosity or an experimental film, Cat Soup feels like the soft sob of a grieving mind. Whether you interpret it as existential horror, grief allegory, or just a sad dream, one thing’s certain: you won’t forget it.

⸻

Recommended if you liked:
Serial Experiments Lain, Angel’s Egg, Texhnolyze, or anything that feels like crying with your eyes open.

INTRODUCTION
Shounen no Abyss is what happens when Aku no Hana, Chi no Watachi and Scum’s Wish collide—a Frankenstein’s monster of psychological torment, toxic relationships, and desperate escapism. It contains all the hallmarks of a psychological thriller: despair, suffocating small-town life, and the slow erosion of self-identity. However, unlike Aku no Hana, which masterfully builds tension and discomfort, or Scum’s Wish, which dissects toxic love with surgical precision, Shounen no Abyss struggles under the weight of its own ambitions.

One of the biggest factors at play is Ryou Minenami’s inexperience in writing psychological thrillers. Where veteran authors like Shuzo Oshimi excel at crafting deeply unsettling character studies, ... Minenami’s approach leans into melodrama and shock value rather than subtle emotional descent. Complicating matters further is her background in ecchi manga—a genre influence that bleeds into the story, creating moments of tonal inconsistency. This is most evident in character designs, such as Nagi’s outfit, lifted straight from First Love Zombie, Minenami’s previous work. While fanservice can be tolerable in a more lighthearted series, here it often undercuts the heavier themes, making serious moments feel absurd.

Despite these issues, Shounen no Abyss manages to craft an engaging—if deeply flawed—narrative that explores cycles of trauma, obsession, and the futility of escape. It is a story that isn’t for everyone, nor is it for the faint of heart, but it’s certainly a worthwhile read if you can stomach its frustrating writing.

GENERATIONAL TRAUMA
One of Shounen no Abyss's strongest themes is generational trauma—the cycle of suffering, self-destruction, and toxic relationships passed down through generations. This is most evident in Reiji and Akira, two men trapped in the same suffocating small-town reality, clinging to women they believe can "save" them. However, Nagi and Yuko, rather than offering salvation, only accelerate their descent.

The story deconstructs the idea of love as a redemptive force. Instead of leading to freedom, love in Shounen no Abyss deepens suffering. Nagi and Yuko are not merely manipulative but victims of the same cycle, shaped by their own traumas. The pattern repeats, with each generation falling into the same self-destructive behaviors.

A recurring element is the presence of an outcast female friend—Sakuko for Reiji and Saki for Akira—who offers an alternative path. Yet, instead of serving as saviors, they too suffer under the town's weight. Sakuko nearly loses herself trying to help Reiji, only for Saki to later help her heal and move on.

This break in the cycle, represented by Sakuko and Saki, provides a rare glimmer of hope. While Reiji and Akira remain trapped, Sakuko reclaims her identity with Saki’s support. Their arcs suggest that while escape is difficult, healing comes not from reckless escapism or dependence on others, but from self-acceptance and the courage to forge one’s own path. Though suffering lingers for many, the fact that Sakuko and Saki break free proves that change, while rare, is possible.

CHARACTERS
While Shounen no Abyss presents a fascinating thematic core, its characters often struggle under inconsistent writing and uneven development. A major issue is the sheer number of characters, which makes it difficult to keep track of everyone and dilutes the narrative focus.

Reiji Kurose
Initially, Reiji seems like a strong protagonist, especially when viewed through the lens of his parallel with Akira. However, his biggest flaw as a character is his overwhelming passivity. He lacks agency and simply absorbs the will of those around him, becoming a hollow vessel for others’ desires. While this may be intentional—highlighting his lack of identity—it makes him feel more like a plot device than a fully realized character.

The mystery surrounding Akira’s potential status as Reiji’s father is another weak point. The plot introduces multiple red herrings, making the reveal feel drawn-out and inconsistent in pacing rather than engaging.

Nagi Aoe
Nagi suffers from a similar issue. Outside of her role as a model and a brief chapter exploring her past, she lacks depth. Unlike the carefully crafted parallel between Reiji and Akira, Nagi initially feels like a direct copy of Yuko, with little to distinguish her as a unique character.

Later in the story, her backstory is revealed—her family perished in a hurricane, leading to guilt and depressive tendencies. While this does recontextualize her earlier actions, it does little to change how she was written up until that point. Worse still, her arc is not even given a proper resolution due to the catastrophic ending.

Sakuko Akiyama
Sakuko is one of the more well-developed and tragic characters in the series. She dreams of escaping her small town and idolizes Nagi and Akira. However, her optimism is gradually worn down by her personal struggles—Reiji’s infidelity, her deteriorating home life, and her disillusionment with her role models. This culminates in a downward spiral from overeating to anorexia, stripping her of the warmth she once had.

It is not until she meets Saki—a character who experienced similar struggles—that she finally begins to recover. Unlike the rest of the cast, Sakuko’s arc is one of the few that reaches a satisfying conclusion.

Other Characters (Gen, Kazumasa, and Yuri)
Gen Minegishi is a frustrating character to analyze because most of his development happens offscreen. His shift from being overprotective of Reiji to becoming a shut-in, then suddenly deciding he wants to be Reiji’s mother, feels abrupt and unearned. His relationship with Yuko is meant to be complex, but it comes off as confusing rather than nuanced.

Kazumasa Fukami, like Gen, is underdeveloped. His arc about finding out who his real father is feels like an afterthought and is overshadowed by the manga’s already bloated cast.

Then there’s Yuri Shibasawa, who is by far the worst written character in this story. Introduced as a disillusioned homeroom teacher, she initially had the potential for a tragic, yet meaningful arc. However, her sudden elopement with Reiji feels forced, and her shifting personality—desperate, then possessive, then seemingly heroic—makes her character writing extremely messy.

Her arc reaches an infamous low point in the final chapters, when she kidnaps Mao and drives off, never to be seen again. This last action serves no clear thematic purpose and comes across as a last-minute shock twist rather than meaningful character development.

ART
Visually, Shounen no Abyss succeeds in reinforcing its dark, melancholic themes. The heavy shading, muted expressions, and stark contrasts between beauty and despair enhance the story’s suffocating atmosphere. Backgrounds, when used effectively, contribute to the feeling of isolation, whether it is the claustrophobic small-town setting or the empty, hollow eyes of its characters.

Minenami’s storytelling techniques does present noticeable flaws however. She tends to overload dialogue, sometimes barraging the reader with long, rapid exchanges that feel overwhelming. Lengthy conversations are immediately followed by sudden intimate moments, creating a disjointed pacing. Additionally, the manga leans heavily on cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. While this is an effective way to hook readers, it also makes the structure feel formulaic tension escalates without enough space to breathe.

Despite these issues, Shounen no Abyss maintains a gripping pace across its 183 chapters. While the execution may feel chaotic at times, the relentless tension and strong visual storytelling keep the reader engaged. It's actually impressive how Ryou actually manage to pull off the genre change in this area. You would expect a writer with stints in the Ecchi genre to produce something that's a lot worse, but Minenami’s managed to make it work.

THE ENDING
The ending of Shounen no Abyss is one of the most infamous moments in the manga, leaving many fans frustrated and dissatisfied.
In the final chapters, Reiji visits Akira in the hospital but lashes out instead of reaching closure. His final scene, standing on the road with Nagi, is heavily implied to be a suicide, but it is left ambiguous. After such an intense journey, this lack of resolution left readers feeling like his arc led nowhere.

Meanwhile, Yuri’s story takes an even more baffling turn. Her final act—driving away with Mao—feels completely disconnected from the rest of the story. The manga had already built her up as an unpredictable character and this bizarre twist served no thematic purpose outside being one nail in the coffin for Yuri’s characterization.

The only character who receives meaningful closure is Sakuko. She recovers from her spiral and is implied to become a writer. She also forgives Akira and is at peace with him.

Outside of Sakuko, the ending failed to provide a satisfying resolution, opting for an ambiguous ending while somehow leaving other plot points outright unresolved. Perhaps if Ryou had some more time to reach a proper conclusion, then the ending would have been better, but alas the end result one of utter disappointment.

CONCLUSION
At its best, Shounen no Abyss is a compelling exploration of generational trauma, featuring haunting themes and strong parallels between past and present. At its worst, it is a bloated, melodramatic mess that squanders its potential. The narrative is engaging but riddled with inconsistencies, and the ending is one of the most divisive aspects of the entire series.

If you are looking for a psychological thriller with nuanced character work and a satisfying resolution, this may not be the best choice. But if you can embrace the chaos, Shounen no Abyss delivers an unforgettable—if deeply flawed—descent into despair.

INTRODUCTION
Bullying is an incredibly sensitive and challenging subject to address in media. Many creators try their hand at exploring this theme, but too often, they fall into the same traps of emotional manipulation and overwrought melodrama. These narratives frequently lean on grim, overly dark portrayals—where protagonists wallow in despair, bullies are shallow caricatures, and authority figures inexplicably turn a blind eye.

In Japanese media, this theme is particularly common, often serving as the foundation for "power fantasy" narratives. Popular titles like Sword Art Online provide escapism, offering audiences perfect protagonists who are universally adored while facing opposition from cartoonishly villainous figures.

With that context, let’s dive into ... Tapoki’s Original Sin, a web manga by Taizan 5 that’s garnered enough buzz to inspire a movie adaptation slated for 2025. Curious about the hype, I decided to give it a read. Unfortunately, what I found was a tangled mess of missed opportunities and poor execution—a story worth discussing for all the wrong reasons.

PLOT
The story follows Tapoki, an alien who lands on Earth and meets Shizuka, a bullied pre-teen. Right from the start, the manga overwhelms readers with Tapoki’s juvenile antics, which do nothing to lift Shizuka’s spirits. Meanwhile, Shizuka endures relentless abuse from her classmate Marina and her posse, who boast about vandalizing her belongings and stealing her money. Tapoki’s attempts to console Shizuka fail, leaving her only solace in her dog, Chappy—a fleeting comfort, as it’s implied Marina kills the dog during a violent assault that leaves Shizuka severely injured. Shortly after, Shizuka tragically takes her own life.

This opening sequence is a checklist of “grimdark bullying” clichés. But then, things somehow get worse: Tapoki reveals a time-rewind ability.

Yes, you read that right—a clumsily explained time-travel mechanic is thrown into the mix, layering nonsensical metaphysics onto an already bleak narrative. Tapoki uses this power to revive Shizuka, only for the cycle of torment to repeat. Marina’s bullying continues unabated, and Tapoki’s misguided interventions only make matters worse. The result is a repetitive and exhausting narrative where Tapoki’s naïve approach to human emotions becomes unbearable.

NAOKI AND THE ATTEMPT AT DEPTH
A brief improvement comes with the introduction of Naoki Asuma, the story’s only remotely well-developed character. Naoki offers Shizuka encouragement and support, though she initially rejects him. His late arrival to the plot raises questions—where was he earlier? Nonetheless, his presence adds a hint of complexity to an otherwise shallow narrative.

Naoki’s backstory explores his struggles with an inferiority complex stemming from his older brother Junya’s achievements and abuse. Meeting Shizuka helps Naoki begin to confront his insecurities, offering a glimpse of the story’s potential. However, this arc is rushed and underdeveloped, leaving its emotional weight unrealized.

MARINA AND EMOTIONAL WHIPLASH
The focus later shifts to Marina, attempting to make her sympathetic by revealing her abusive home life. However, this effort is undermined by her over-the-top cruelty. By the time the narrative tries to humanize her, readers are too disconnected to care.

A key moment occurs when Marina assaults Shizuka in the woods, leading to a confrontation where Tapoki accidentally kills Marina. The fallout could have been a meaningful exploration of guilt and accountability, but instead, the story devolves into absurdity. Shizuka convinces Naoki to help cover up the death and use Tapoki’s powers to impersonate Marina.

INCOHERENT PLOT SHIFTS
From here, the story spirals further out of control. Naoki’s perspective is revisited, delving deeper into his inferiority complex and strained relationship with Junya. This arc gains momentum until the narrative abruptly drops a bombshell: their mother has died—offscreen, with no explanation. This sudden revelation leads to a bizarre interaction where Junya accuses Naoki of causing her death, only to reassure him moments later. The emotional whiplash is staggering, derailing any attempt at coherent storytelling.

Meanwhile, Shizuka becomes fixated on finding her missing dog, Chappy, leading her to confront her father. In a baffling leap of logic, she concludes that his children ate the dog. Her anger culminates in her killing Tapoki, adding yet another layer of chaos to an already convoluted plot.

The narrative then inexplicably shifts back to Marina, who somehow reappears despite having died earlier. Efforts to flesh out her character feel pointless, as the story’s coherence has long since disintegrated.

THE TRAINWRECK ENDING
The final chapters are a jumble of nonsensical events. Marina inexplicably falls in love with Naoki, while Tapoki decides the solution to everything is killing Shizuka. The narrative lurches toward its conclusion with Shizuka melting down over her suffering, which might have been compelling if the story weren’t so cluttered and incoherent.

In the end, the timeline resets to the beginning. Marina suddenly decides to befriend Shizuka after a moment of reflection, bringing the story to a baffling close.

ART
Let’s take a moment to discuss the art. It’s a mixed bag—occasionally shining during emotional scenes but generally appearing rushed and low-effort. The designs lean toward simplistic, with characters resembling typical "moeblobs," which might not appeal to everyone. That said, I do appreciate this departure from the overly polished digital art style that dominates many modern manga.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to say. Even if the art were exceptional, it couldn’t salvage a story so riddled with disjointed, incoherent writing. In this case, the visuals feel like a missed opportunity to elevate an otherwise lackluster narrative.

CONCLUSION
Tapoki’s Original Sin begins with a flawed premise and only deteriorates from there. Its constant tonal shifts, underdeveloped characters, and reliance on tired clichés make for a frustrating, incoherent experience. While Naoki offers a glimmer of what the story could have been, his arc is drowned out by a chaotic mess of rushed subplots and illogical twists. By the time the manga stumbles to its conclusion, any potential for meaningful impact is buried under its chaotic, disjointed storytelling.

Unless you’re in the mood for a masterclass in storytelling failure, skip this one.