I Want To Be Killed by a High School Girl
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NOTICE: chapter 9 is translated, just wait for a couple of days to read on MangaDex...well, maybe a bit more than a couple of days, I'm busy playing Hitman 2!
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all the images are "failed to load" 
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This guy has serious mental issues...
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end spoiler
ending was the most devastating cock-block in all of history
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this scum is hopeless
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I feel the need to share a few thoughts about this manga, Usamaru Furuya is an outstanding mangaka and while I will agree with the sentiment that this is not his best, it's also not his weakest, and that says a lot because even when worst stuff is quite good, so... spoilers ahead. I think this was really good and I feel like the weakest part were some of the characters(particularly Maho and Yukio), bit surprising as Furuya excels at writing teenagers and capturing their rawness, I used to look for fiction with adult characters as a teenager, but with time I discovered that if you don't fall into cliches, using kids or teenage characters allows a certain freedom(as they will allow you to insert naivety or stupidity without comprising and making the character very gullible or stupid. Teenagers are just dumb, even if they're smart, they lack life as they've only lived for a short period of time) but I digress. Higashiyama, in contrasts, was a complex character. When I first saw the name of this manga I laughed and saw Furuya's name and thought "this might end up being the best thing ever" but with time I learned to control my expectations and as that lonely first scanlated chapter sat there I quietly reminded myself that the execution will always be more important than the idea. I imagined a very dirty and perverse manga with a ton of humor sprinkled in(as I said, the title alone made me smile) but this was very clean and this comes back to expectations, Usamaru Furuya is one, if not THE most versatile mangaka out there, he can make perverse and dark ero-guro stuff and then he can do clean and safe shonen stuff, looking back at his career and seeing something like Lychee Light Club, you can understand why Furuya chose to contrast this by using a dirty and perverse idea but turning out a clean manga instead of repeating himself with a dark and perverse series, this of course underlines the editor's note at the end of each chapter that it's probably not the best idea to have this manga as your first contact with Usamaru Furuya.
I heard sentiments of the ending being weak back before I even read it and I was a bit surprised to hear this because Furuya excels at endings and... I was not disappointed here either. If anything, certain middle parts were the underwhelming moments of the manga for me, particularly, as I said, I found Maho and Yukio to be quite bland and shallow and I found the way Maho's multiple personality disorder to be quite weak, I kinda wish Aoi had a bigger role because dude is really good at writing mentally ill or autistic characters and he could've done more with her assburgers(please humor me and this dumb and overdone joke, it just... had to be done).
Furuya does a very good job as presenting Higashiyama as both pathetic but ultimately... what did he really want to do? He wanted to disappear completely(and never be found again), considering the evidence he had mailed out to Satsuki to make sure Maho would't get into trouble... He was ultimately inoffensive , as you see Satuski's sadness when she notes that this is all simply because he's lonely, he doesn't connect and he can't find love, a basic need in this world, you believe her tears and Higashiyama's tears that... maybe... maybe love is what's missing from his life, genuine love, genuine human connection, Furuya in general is pretty good at making real charterers(not realistic, but real, in the confines of the worlds he creates in his stories, his characters always follow their own internal logic, and that internal logic is always well presented in advance by the mangaka). The revelation at the end is quite surprising, if you allow yourself to be sucked in, but it's also worth noting that he does not want to be killed by Maho, but by a high school girl(this is, after all, still his fetish) and hypnosis allows him the freedom of picking any cute girl he wants. Maho will soon graduate. Ending in general do not have to wrap everything nicely and put a bow on top, that's not how life works and we only get a glimpse inside these people's lives. We don't know what will happen next but it is not important, we have seen enough of this world and we got a story out of it.
I go back to what I said earlier about expectations and while I initially expected a very dirty and dark manga... I'm not the creator so I need to temper myself and let the creator tell his story. I understand why he chose to tell this story the way he did and it's probably for the best that he didn't retread ground, ultimately I was engaged and I found that he did a good job of restricting the fetish in this story instead of exposing it and shoving it in the reader's face, it still had the feeling of a "secret".
He used a very clear and clean style for this series, using wide panels with either bland or blank backgrounds that emphasize the characters but because of the emptiness the panels often have, I wonder if it worked in his favor or the opposite and people simply flipped through the pages at a fast pace instead of dwelling on the close ups and truly reading their dialogue and understanding their struggles and emotions. He only puts a lot of detail in the backgrounds in the forest which creates a sense of entrapment for the readers, giving it a coffin-like effect even, if for the majority of the manga it always feels like the characters are in a lot of space, in chapter 9 for example when he reveals his plan there's a sense of there not being enough space, not place to go, something that emphasizes the climax of the series, we've arrived at the conclusion, this is what his plans built to and there's no escaping it now, there's no space to run to, the trees are blocking every direction. I'd also like to note that Higashiyama is not a genius character and this is not a convoluted style series in which the characters create elaborate plans that account for their rival assuming he will assume that he assumes he will assume that he assumes he will do something so he will do the opposite to catch him off guard. People are messy and after some time stop trying to hide every little thing.
Anyway, this was a really good manga in my opinion, it does a good job of portraying a pervert's obsession and fetish without going too far into the fetish itself and, also, it does a good job of portraying Higashiyama's suicidal desires, you have to remember, everyone that meets him, from professors and Satsuki and all the way to the children in the school, they all like him but at the same time, he lacks genuine personal connections with anyone and he just wants to die. He is, in this manga, both despicable and pathetic. You feel sorry for him and yet you also feel disgust for him. He's friendly but deep down he's fucked up. He seems dangerous, but he's only dangerous to himself.
Usamaru Furuya is, in my opinion, one of the greatest people working in this medium and... despite this... I feel like I have yet to read his magnum opus. This means that I will always be very excited to read the next series by him, often after someone does his masterpiece there's a sentiment that after that "he just lost his touch" even if that creator still makes great stuff... it's sad but it's something that everyone has felt about a writer, artist, musician, director etc and we're all guilty of being ignorant like that and trying to push that idea that "his/her best is in the past now". With Furuya, I still have that eagerness to read his newest creation because even if I've enjoyed everything he's done, I have a hard time picking my favorite thing he's done.
So my advice to anyone that read this manga and then decided to read this wall of text(😅) is to keep reading Furuya, his numerous collections of short stories are great, the characters are very well done and real in them and they all deal with different themes and he works a lot of styles in his stories, different writing styles and different art styles to better fit the story he is telling, I might have a small problem with Innocent Boys Crusade at the end but it's easily ignored and I think that's a fantastic series, Music of Marie is great, he creates an outstanding world that sucks you in and the ending is so SO good. Even something like Genkaku Picasso is great and it's a shonen series with no sexual undertones or much edge, it just has a supernatural hook and... it's just really good, Short Cuts and Palepoli really show his ability as a cartoonist and how much you can do with a limited amount of pages. Seeing him change so much from story to story but maintaining the Furuya aesthetic and feeling in his writing and art is a real treat and part of why he's so good.
Much appreciation to the scanlators that we finally got to read this series and I hope we get to see more of Usamaru Furuya's stuff licensed in english. Or at least scanlations for the several stuff he's done that is not available outside of Japan(and in some cases France).
I heard sentiments of the ending being weak back before I even read it and I was a bit surprised to hear this because Furuya excels at endings and... I was not disappointed here either. If anything, certain middle parts were the underwhelming moments of the manga for me, particularly, as I said, I found Maho and Yukio to be quite bland and shallow and I found the way Maho's multiple personality disorder to be quite weak, I kinda wish Aoi had a bigger role because dude is really good at writing mentally ill or autistic characters and he could've done more with her assburgers(please humor me and this dumb and overdone joke, it just... had to be done).
Furuya does a very good job as presenting Higashiyama as both pathetic but ultimately... what did he really want to do? He wanted to disappear completely(and never be found again), considering the evidence he had mailed out to Satsuki to make sure Maho would't get into trouble... He was ultimately inoffensive , as you see Satuski's sadness when she notes that this is all simply because he's lonely, he doesn't connect and he can't find love, a basic need in this world, you believe her tears and Higashiyama's tears that... maybe... maybe love is what's missing from his life, genuine love, genuine human connection, Furuya in general is pretty good at making real charterers(not realistic, but real, in the confines of the worlds he creates in his stories, his characters always follow their own internal logic, and that internal logic is always well presented in advance by the mangaka). The revelation at the end is quite surprising, if you allow yourself to be sucked in, but it's also worth noting that he does not want to be killed by Maho, but by a high school girl(this is, after all, still his fetish) and hypnosis allows him the freedom of picking any cute girl he wants. Maho will soon graduate. Ending in general do not have to wrap everything nicely and put a bow on top, that's not how life works and we only get a glimpse inside these people's lives. We don't know what will happen next but it is not important, we have seen enough of this world and we got a story out of it.
I go back to what I said earlier about expectations and while I initially expected a very dirty and dark manga... I'm not the creator so I need to temper myself and let the creator tell his story. I understand why he chose to tell this story the way he did and it's probably for the best that he didn't retread ground, ultimately I was engaged and I found that he did a good job of restricting the fetish in this story instead of exposing it and shoving it in the reader's face, it still had the feeling of a "secret".
He used a very clear and clean style for this series, using wide panels with either bland or blank backgrounds that emphasize the characters but because of the emptiness the panels often have, I wonder if it worked in his favor or the opposite and people simply flipped through the pages at a fast pace instead of dwelling on the close ups and truly reading their dialogue and understanding their struggles and emotions. He only puts a lot of detail in the backgrounds in the forest which creates a sense of entrapment for the readers, giving it a coffin-like effect even, if for the majority of the manga it always feels like the characters are in a lot of space, in chapter 9 for example when he reveals his plan there's a sense of there not being enough space, not place to go, something that emphasizes the climax of the series, we've arrived at the conclusion, this is what his plans built to and there's no escaping it now, there's no space to run to, the trees are blocking every direction. I'd also like to note that Higashiyama is not a genius character and this is not a convoluted style series in which the characters create elaborate plans that account for their rival assuming he will assume that he assumes he will assume that he assumes he will do something so he will do the opposite to catch him off guard. People are messy and after some time stop trying to hide every little thing.
Anyway, this was a really good manga in my opinion, it does a good job of portraying a pervert's obsession and fetish without going too far into the fetish itself and, also, it does a good job of portraying Higashiyama's suicidal desires, you have to remember, everyone that meets him, from professors and Satsuki and all the way to the children in the school, they all like him but at the same time, he lacks genuine personal connections with anyone and he just wants to die. He is, in this manga, both despicable and pathetic. You feel sorry for him and yet you also feel disgust for him. He's friendly but deep down he's fucked up. He seems dangerous, but he's only dangerous to himself.
Usamaru Furuya is, in my opinion, one of the greatest people working in this medium and... despite this... I feel like I have yet to read his magnum opus. This means that I will always be very excited to read the next series by him, often after someone does his masterpiece there's a sentiment that after that "he just lost his touch" even if that creator still makes great stuff... it's sad but it's something that everyone has felt about a writer, artist, musician, director etc and we're all guilty of being ignorant like that and trying to push that idea that "his/her best is in the past now". With Furuya, I still have that eagerness to read his newest creation because even if I've enjoyed everything he's done, I have a hard time picking my favorite thing he's done.
So my advice to anyone that read this manga and then decided to read this wall of text(😅) is to keep reading Furuya, his numerous collections of short stories are great, the characters are very well done and real in them and they all deal with different themes and he works a lot of styles in his stories, different writing styles and different art styles to better fit the story he is telling, I might have a small problem with Innocent Boys Crusade at the end but it's easily ignored and I think that's a fantastic series, Music of Marie is great, he creates an outstanding world that sucks you in and the ending is so SO good. Even something like Genkaku Picasso is great and it's a shonen series with no sexual undertones or much edge, it just has a supernatural hook and... it's just really good, Short Cuts and Palepoli really show his ability as a cartoonist and how much you can do with a limited amount of pages. Seeing him change so much from story to story but maintaining the Furuya aesthetic and feeling in his writing and art is a real treat and part of why he's so good.
Much appreciation to the scanlators that we finally got to read this series and I hope we get to see more of Usamaru Furuya's stuff licensed in english. Or at least scanlations for the several stuff he's done that is not available outside of Japan(and in some cases France).
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yo wtf happening below
