I wouldn’t have minded the edge and the raging puberty in the plot – I came for them: one has to read teen angsty action sometimes to mantain the balance in the world – if not for the absolutely disgusting and out of place torture imagery. I am not sure why it’s suddenly acceptable to have spreads with main heroine being strangled on her own intestines and dragged along the street by a car in shounen now. Even if these are “visions”.

So basically right after the start it’s what this manga focuses on. We have bog standard everything – a main goody two shoes hero, who suddenly can crush buildings because of some violence “virus”, an awkward teen love, a secret society of the infected, every figure of authority being conveniently nasty-lip-licking-evil (cus you know, everyone “lies” to a teen). The only original thing is that our hero constantly sees “visions” of murder, mainly violent and disgusting murder of his beloved bubbly school-beauty-queen childhood friend girlfriend.

The issue with this is that you, a reader, also have to watch them and they are a) unpleasant, b) out of place. In my opinion, you can have the nasty in your manga, but you have to work for the inclusion of the nightmare and/or sick fetish fuel – it has to be consistent with the tone and the goal. Which doesn’t seem to be the case here, especially considering that it’s a work published with teens in mind.

So yeah, the art is pretty good, but the tone is very imbalanced in a disturbing way. The main narrative is immature (those who are able to enjoy this say that the plot devolves even more later after a timeskip), and the only thing that stands out would likely be off-putting for most. (My example in the opening is relatively easy on the eyes, the rest is much more gross.)

I normally don’t write reviews for things that haven’t clicked with me, and I can barely call this text a review, but I wanted to warn other readers.

So, unless you are into seeing female bodies mutilated, and not even random bodies, but a body of a character with whom you’re supposed to have a positive emotional connection – you should probably stay away from this manga. The imagery here goes way beyond what you would expect from the demographic or mainstream manga in general. This work also doesn’t offer any supporting structure for this, like horror does, nor does it belong to genres where it’s par of the course (hentai, eroguro). It’s just a damned usual power trip shounen with zero subtlety, which thinks it can pull off torture porn.

Simply put, this manga’s plot is cheap fastfood, even if wrapped in a pretty plastic wrapper (art), and torture porn is not mainstream and shouldn’t be mainstream, whether the author enjoys fapping to it or not. I do not and I see no reason to look at this for zero plot gains. So here you are, now you know what to expect and whether you really need it.