Boy's Abyss

[b-no]

Everytime I tried to drop this, I always come back. Nagi Aoe's charm has just too much of a pull for me.

 

[BlackTileBlueWall]

Everytime I tried to drop this, I always come back. Nagi Aoe's charm has just too much of a pull for me.

Aoe Nagi supremacy 🙏🙏

 

[b-no]

Aoe Nagi supremacy 🙏🙏

Aoe supremacy but damn her childhood’s rough.

 

[cml00]

man, i've just pick this one put today and i guess the best thing about this one is it kept you hooked but the shit ton of twists and turns. Tbh i'm really intrigued to find out how this end.

 

[LeannaCR]

shittiest plot twists on the market

 

[hsun]

Did you realize that this manga is from the same author of a manga about a dude that can see hallucinations and his cross-dresser heroine?
There are others, but it was the previous manga they wrote.

 

[MAN_RAT]

stuck with this series for 2 years. read it in many forms. longstrip on my phone off an ilegal app then a pc to finnish it. this series was really, well i don't have words for it but cheers! now we can flop over and die or just do something else! im not too sure which one il pick really but il pick one or the other. thanks and bye.

 

[Bainhardt]

Wow there's a lot of comments on this one. Just figured I'd drop my post-mortem now that we're all free:
To anyone reading the beginning and thinking "this seems pretty interesting..." maybe save yourself some time and go read something else. This one's gonna test your patience. A lot.

Although who knows, perhaps reading it all in one marathon is better.
I definitely liked

Spoiler

up until around the timeskip (memories are a bit fuzzy of how far in that is chapter-wise)

but then I think it starts to lose its way and did not hold up over years of releases, imo.

 

[Spiritual_Empty]

It is finally over.

 

[Mizznimal]

I really did like this manga's beginning and middle but by the end it has gotta be one of the worst things I've had the displeasure of reading. So many things were done well with certain characters, and only nagi, gen, and esemori ended as really good characters. Ending is very disappointing and the twists and almost mood swings of characters really characterize the insanity of the plot. Timeline is very messy and the ending feels rushed. Wonderful art all the way through though. Wanted this to be a well delivered, melancholic, and emotional read, but it ended up being a very soap opera-y drama about generational trauma. Nagi aoe supremacy

 

[Memedokter]

Is finally over all the pain and suffering.

 

[zoombeedoo]

tf is that ending? never felt betrayed this hard b4. drop my ratting from 10 stars to 4.

 

[wizard_mouse]

Have you ever heard that phrase in movies or inspirational quotes that says "You need the bad moments in life to recognize the good ones"? I believe rather than being useful to someone with depression, it's better used as an example on writing dramatic stories. You NEED contrast, nuance, a way to ground it in reality where good and bad things happen all the time. The best stories that involve tragedy and drama I have read, I can perfectly describe as a "rollercoaster of emotions". This one, on the other side, is a cart on a downward slope that sometimes changes inclination, but it only goes down.

The biggest problem I have with stories that are only about how much suffering the characters can take, is that they very quickly become exhausting to read. And worse, the author may also run out of ways on how to be dramatic, for example, the whole uncle story really felt like an afterthought considering it only takes a couple of chapters. Another effect I have personal noticed is that the more bad stuff happens, the less believable it gets. Like towards the end, you have a cop that really seems concerned about a boy with a fucked up family that has attempted suicide before who is also a minor, and the best thing that you come up with is call him a couple of times to make sure he is alive??? And then the lady that also promises to take her of him all of a sudden decides to let him go as well?? The author really can't decide if he wants the adults to treat him as a child or as an adult, and it becomes frustrating.

In the end, I won't say this is a bad series or that it was badly written, but it does make me not want to read dramatic stories that bank purely on tragedy.

 

[Bainhardt]

Have you ever heard that phrase in movies or inspirational quotes that says "You need the bad moments in life to recognize the good ones"? I believe rather than being useful to someone with depression, it's better used as an example on writing dramatic stories. You NEED contrast, nuance, a way to ground it in reality where good and bad things happen all the time. The best stories that involve tragedy and drama I have read, I can perfectly describe as a "rollercoaster of emotions". This one, on the other side, is a cart on a downward slope that sometimes changes inclination, but it only goes down.

The biggest problem I have with stories that are only about how much suffering the characters can take, is that they very quickly become exhausting to read. And worse, the author may also run out of ways on how to be dramatic,

I actually was going to make a comment exactly like this, because this manga really stands out to me as an example of the kind of drama I end up always being disappointed by (although I tend to enjoy the genre otherwise), and I think I can articulate personally what went wrong. For the record, I like parts of this story. I even think some of the character beats really work. But I think the totality of the story is... way too much. So in return, I think I have written a little too much.

Spoiler

The change to your point I would make is that stories like this don't inherently need "good" to offset the bad, because that isn't always applicable in stories with this dark a tone. Objectively good things may feel out of place or opposite to what the author is trying to achieve. Specifically what these stories need are for their characters to experience victories. So in this way, think of the roller coaster as ups and downs between individual victories and failures/general bad events and disappointment.

What I mean by this is that the characters need to want things, be unsure if they will get what they want or be challenged for it, and then sometimes actually succeed. Not knowing if they will get what they want or when is what drives the dramatic tension that keeps the reader unsure what will happen, and which characters will be at highs while others are at lows. Best of all when the desires directly oppose one another, or have indirect repercussions for other characters when they are realized. That's drama 101. And these desires don't have to be good things at all! Dramatic characters can want awful, fucked up things, and should still get them, because this is what breaks up the monotony of disappointment and general dreariness.

There is no drama if you always expect the worst to happen, and it does. This ties into what you say in your comment about the need for stories like this to constantly raise the bar and try to do worse and worse things. A minor setback often hits harder when placed along a narrative upswing than any awful tragedy can at the tail end of a long list of preceding tragedies and sorrow. I call the latter effect "dramatic noise," when the actual events occurring lose their context because of how the story has been treating them. And if your characters never want anything, if the story can never award any of them any victories, then it becomes much harder to interrupt this constant noise. A manga like Boy's Abyss is like 100 car crashes happening in a row, and by car crash 11 the audience is already looking at their watch thinking "how much longer am I supposed to sit through this?" Because while 100 car crashes is objectively a lot worse than 1, a single car crash can leave much more of an impression if it's unexpected and strikes when the reader is desperately hoping it won't.

I can singlehandedly say my issue with this story is the characters are not interesting enough to watch long-term, and I think this is because the defining things they want they absolutely cannot get until the very end. Some of them work, kind of - the teacher imo is among the more interesting - but the main content of this story is just dramatic noise. Think about how often that turns out to be the result with premises with this; the main character wants to kill himself, or escape, and if either of those actually occur the story will end. So instead of coming up with meaningful characterization in the meanwhile, you do a lot of wheel-spinning, a lot of emotional angst and talking about backstories, and call it drama. It's not, at least not in my opinion.

 

[wizard_mouse]

I actually was going to make a comment exactly like this, because this manga really stands out to me as an example of the kind of drama I end up always being disappointed by (although I tend to enjoy the genre otherwise), and I think I can articulate personally what went wrong. For the record, I like parts of this story. I even think some of the character beats really work. But I think the totality of the story is... way too much. So in return, I think I have written a little too much.

Spoiler

The change to your point I would make is that stories like this don't inherently need "good" to offset the bad, because that isn't always applicable in stories with this dark a tone. Objectively good things may feel out of place or opposite to what the author is trying to achieve. Specifically what these stories need are for their characters to experience victories. So in this way, think of the roller coaster as ups and downs between individual victories and failures/general bad events and disappointment.

What I mean by this is that the characters need to want things, be unsure if they will get what they want or be challenged for it, and then sometimes actually succeed. Not knowing if they will get what they want or when is what drives the dramatic tension that keeps the reader unsure what will happen, and which characters will be at highs while others are at lows. Best of all when the desires directly oppose one another, or have indirect repercussions for other characters when they are realized. That's drama 101. And these desires don't have to be good things at all! Dramatic characters can want awful, fucked up things, and should still get them, because this is what breaks up the monotony of disappointment and general dreariness.

There is no drama if you always expect the worst to happen, and it does. This ties into what you say in your comment about the need for stories like this to constantly raise the bar and try to do worse and worse things. A minor setback often hits harder when placed along a narrative upswing than any awful tragedy can at the tail end of a long list of preceding tragedies and sorrow. I call the latter effect "dramatic noise," when the actual events occurring lose their context because of how the story has been treating them.

I can singlehandedly say my issue with this story is the characters are not interesting enough to watch long-term, and I think this is because the defining things they want they absolutely cannot get until the very end. Some of them work, kind of - the teacher imo is among the more interesting - but the main content of this story is just dramatic noise. Think about how often that turns out to be the result with premises with this; the main character wants to kill himself, or escape, and if either of those actually occur the story will end. So instead of coming up with meaningful characterization in the meanwhile, you do a lot of wheel-spinning, a lot of emotional angst and talking about backstories, and call it drama. It's not, at least not in my opinion.

Bro really said:"aight lil bro how about I actually speak like I know what I am talking about" 🤣🤣🤣

For real, imma steal "dramatic noise" and thanks for breaking it down

 

[smileyface0-0]

Bruh is this really how it ends 😭

 

[Ruckarr]

I binged this manga in 3 days. It has been extremely depressing. The pain that the characters felt was incomprehensible at times. Most of the characters were great. It got quite confusing near the end but in my opinion it's was still good. One thing that's really bad is the ending. We get VERYYY little closure for these characters. It would have been nice to take even the smallest look into the lives of these characters. How is Reiji doing now? How is Chakos life? How is Kazu doing? I don't really understand if Reiji married Yuri or Nagi cuz their "end" implied that they'd kill themselves but Chako tells us that Reiji married Yuri even though he loved Nagi. The series had me stressing at times lol, like ,,what'll happen next?'' or ,,this is so f**ked up'', I wish it wasn't so confusing but I guess that that's on me for reading it from 11pm to 5 am lol.

 

[cml00]

What in the fuck did i just read tho?
What's up with manga nowadays with their shitty ending?
It started kinda good, kept you wanting to know more, then at the last few chapters it got so tangled up and felt rush until the author just dropped the ending with almost no closure at all.
Am i missing a chapter? Is there more pages on the last chapter?

 

[Hootanic]

Man, what a ride! Binged over a weekend but man, is this some heavy drama. On the "drama scale" something like "A Town Where You Live" is a 5 and "Goodnight Pun Pun" is a 10, this is like a solid 7 or 8. Beware those who look into the abyss that abyss does not look back at them.

 

[Brokoga]

Read this in a night and boy if you are depressed please don’t ever read this.