Zenaku no Kuzu

This series is aggressively bad. Instead of trying to tell a story with any kind of actual depth or nuance, its basically just aiming to shock you.

Every arc consists of the same structure. Bad buys with no characterization other than being bad do something horrible but completely over the top (almost always involving graphic rape and mutilation). A family member of the victim approaches our two generic ass anti-heroes, who then proceed to murder the fuck out of the bad buy. The story contains no humor, no character growth, and ultimately is so over the top in its depiction of violent crime that its impossible to take seriously half the time.

I feel the story is also a little absurd. The central conceit is the idea that the Japanese criminal justice system is powerless to actually punish people. In reality, besides Japan being a low crime society, its arguably the most ardently policed country in the developed world, with people going to jail for years for simple possession of marijauna and the country having a 99% conviction rate for those accused of crimes. THis may be too serious an approach to take to a silly story like this, but the story having legitimately nothing in common with reality makes it feel like a borderline piece of right-wing propaganda advocating for harsher punishment of criminals. Ultimately, the story fails because it is too serious in tone to treat as just over the top violence for violence sakes, while being way too over the top to function as a serious crime drama. TLDR: This shit is bad.

Art: Functional but not great. The backgrounds are mostly photographs, the fight scenes all look like janky playstation 1 graphics. Occasionally theres a good two page spread of people dying horribly.

Character: Barely remember any of them. They've either or got generic ass backstorie, the generic victims of horrific crimes, or generic rapists. You, the person reading this review, could almost certainly write better characters than this.

Enjoyment: I actively dislike this series. Its like if Ichi the Killer/Deadtubewas poorly drawn and lacked memorable characters. Legitimately mad at myself for spending 3 hours of my life reading it.

Overall: 3