Mietemasu yo! Aizawa-san - Vol. 5 Ch. 28 - Hanamura of Evil

[Fredgreninjao]

Do you think there might be any hints in the fact that before aizawa comes in posessing Kasumi, you can clearly see her shadow. Could this potentially be another hint towards your idea of the whole unable to deposess?

 

[SleepyDemon]

She's going to exorcise the spirit of NTR with that chair.

 

[SatchelBagman]

"Horror comedy" is not "horror". And "horror romantic comedy" is even less so. That's the point. There's nothing scary, no extreme violence, no gore, nothing truly disturbing etc. (the main elements of the genre) in this manga. There are only shallow, superficial, aspects of "horror" (eg there's a "spoopy" ghost from time to time, but it doesn't really scare anybody reading the manga).

A famous idol group is cursed by what to all appearances is a vengeful specter that is directly or indirectly responsible for the death of one of its members, whose mute ghost has been increasingly getting sucked into possessing one of her former classmates through the raggedy metaphysical hole in her spiritual body that is real enough for a spiritually sensitive schoolmate to directly comment on it.

Our protagonist has amnesia about seemingly having known said dead idol before or around the time of her death and has witnessed, multiple times, the visible warping of her ghostly form in response to the prospect of forgetting her, and has apparently engaged in some type of ill-understood occult ritual to alter the ties that bind that ghost to her school.

Horror is a broad umbrella term and it would be very bizarre to try and say there is no horror in a series that rather regularly pulls out disturbing visuals and "off" vibes and putting the living people surrounding the cursed idol group closer to sickness, unconsciousness, memory loss, death, and the destruction of what they have worked toward.

It doesn't have to be the stuff of splatter films to "count" as horror, and we are well out of the percentage of scenes where I would describe the majority of this series's focus as "chill [and] cute," given how much the more slice-of-life interactions have come in as a breather between cases like the very public incidents of ghostly interference with De:LPhinus and the school.

The main overall plot driver in this series is "What's up with Aizawa Honami's ghost?" and the questions and answers that's raised have been decidedly unsettling. You can wave off semantics all you like, but the existing genre that stories with a predominantly unsettling plot tend to get foldered into is horror; Michi's assorted goofy gay ghost shenanigans with her friends contribute the romcom part of the author's descripion of it as horror romantic comedy, but the horror elements are present and deliberate and noticeable.

 

[shittycoolusername69]

I agree with that summary. One thing I can add is that genres are usually determined by what a given story is trying to accomplish, not whether it succeeds in that pursuit. Comedy is made comedy through attempts at making the audience laugh, regardless of how effective those attempts are on a particular individual. Likewise, even if some people don't find Aizawa-san scary or disturbing, it's pretty easy to point out the ways the series tries to disturb the reader.

And another reason why describing this series as just a supernatural romance involving a ghost would be inaccurate is that the supernatural element (the world of ghosts/spirits) is depicted as highly disordered. An Exorcist like Karasuma can create temporary pockets of order in a place affected by ghosts (usually by sending the ghosts to the afterlife), but generally ghosts are unpredictable and almost impossible to reason with. Honami's ghost is an exception; her human personality and reasoning are mostly intact because her form has been stabilized by human actors.

So the primary fuel of horror here is the fact that the actions and motivations of ghost are hard to predict, often don't follow human logic, and that (even without trying) they may inflict harm on humans that come into contact with them. The moments where Honami's form gets distorted, the dangerous behavior of possessed humans, the adverse effects of ghost contact like Michi's nosebleed and all the symptoms we could call 'possession sickness', are that chaotic world of ghosts encroaching on the more ordinary world of Michi and her friends. But of course the horror genre in general frequently aims to scare the audience with the absurd or irrational behavior of humans that are not possessed by a supernatural entity, and that type of horror might be present in this series too to some extent, most noticeably with Masaki.

 

[RC1138Boss]

Things are getting more sinister...

 

[yanderecoverl]

I can't fix you.

 

[NIPHY]

Are we getting closer on finding who killed/how she was killed???

 

[Figroth]

A famous idol group is cursed by what to all appearances is a vengeful specter that is directly or indirectly responsible for the death of one of its members, whose mute ghost has been increasingly getting sucked into possessing one of her former classmates through the raggedy metaphysical hole in her spiritual body that is real enough for a spiritually sensitive schoolmate to directly comment on it.

Our protagonist has amnesia about seemingly having known said dead idol before or around the time of her death and has witnessed, multiple times, the visible warping of her ghostly form in response to the prospect of forgetting her, and has apparently engaged in some type of ill-understood occult ritual to alter the ties that bind that ghost to her school.

Horror is a broad umbrella term and it would be very bizarre to try and say there is no horror in a series that rather regularly pulls out disturbing visuals and "off" vibes and putting the living people surrounding the cursed idol group closer to sickness, unconsciousness, memory loss, death, and the destruction of what they have worked toward.

It doesn't have to be the stuff of splatter films to "count" as horror, and we are well out of the percentage of scenes where I would describe the majority of this series's focus as "chill [and] cute," given how much the more slice-of-life interactions have come in as a breather between cases like the very public incidents of ghostly interference with De:LPhinus and the school.

The main overall plot driver in this series is "What's up with Aizawa Honami's ghost?" and the questions and answers that's raised have been decidedly unsettling. You can wave off semantics all you like, but the existing genre that stories with a predominantly unsettling plot tend to get foldered into is horror; Michi's assorted goofy gay ghost shenanigans with her friends contribute the romcom part of the author's descripion of it as horror romantic comedy, but the horror elements are present and deliberate and noticeable.

What you are describing is stakes, intrigue, threats and drama. This isn't the same as a story actually invoking a sense of horror. Lots of kinds of stories can have such elements without being horror. This story definitely has horror elements every now and then, mostly with the creepy art it does sometimes and it's also "horror-inspired", but for the most part the story isn't really about horror.
Most of it has been comedy, romance and mystery, with some thriller elements also gradually ramping up surrounding Michi, Aizawa and now Kasumi.

If we compare to Mieruko-chan, a horror comedy in many ways very similar to this story (though altogether not so much), you can see how that story does actually do horror, both with visual horror being its primary focus and with scenes that actually try to make you fear for the characters.

 

[Ichigo69]

What you are describing is stakes, intrigue, threats and drama. This isn't the same as a story actually invoking a sense of horror. Lots of kinds of stories can have such elements without being horror. This story definitely has horror elements every now and then, mostly with the creepy art it does sometimes and it's also "horror-inspired", but for the most part the story isn't really about horror.
Most of it has been comedy, romance and mystery, with some thriller elements also gradually ramping up surrounding Michi, Aizawa and now Kasumi.

If we compare to Mieruko-chan, a horror comedy in many ways very similar to this story (though altogether not so much), you can see how that story does actually do horror, both with visual horror being its primary focus and with scenes that actually try to make you fear for the characters.

Y'know, I happen to think it fits into the horror category, but the thing is... what you and I and everybody else in the comments think don't matter, b/c Odoroo Dorothy has it tagged as horror, so the tag stays on.

 

[SatchelBagman]

If we compare to Mieruko-chan, a horror comedy in many ways very similar to this story (though altogether not so much), you can see how that story does actually do horror, both with visual horror being its primary focus and with scenes that actually try to make you fear for the characters.

You're going to have to explain what the overall difference is between "A girl who can see ghosts is entangled with supernatural phenomena in her life that are often visually frightening but mostly do not affect the people around her except in her efforts to keep them uninvolved" and "A girl who can see at least one ghost is entangled with supernatural phenomena in her life that have demonstrably affected the health of a group of celebrities her social circle is engaged with as well as that social circle itself."

Like, you can't usefully tell me that Mieruko-chan counts as horror because it has jumpscares and more focus on freaky visuals but Mietemasu yo! Aizawa-san doesn't count because its ghosts possess people and a bunch of people surrounding the cursed idol group are acting erratically due to psychosocial issues directly resulting from the death and bad luck so far implied to be caused by ghosts.

Likewise, while you can make an argument that the presence of the spooky variety of ghosts in a narrative is not necessarily all it takes to make something count as horror, "horror-inspired" just means "there are elements you would find in horror fiction in this." Someone running a game of Vampire: the Masquerade purely in the "superheroes with fangs" mode is doing a horror-inspired story, but that doesn't make Vampire: the Masquerade not a horror game, because as a roleplaying game tracking its characters' descent into inhumanity it is doing so with the intent to unsettle its participants even if the most outré thing that happens is that the PCs drink blood and realize they're starting to look at people as food and/or threats.

Just as Plan 9 from Outer Space is not a comedy no matter how much it makes you laugh, this manga is not not a horror manga no matter how un-unsettled you are by it. Genre categorization is not decided by the consumer, not least because that would be a nightmare to actually sort objectively compared to "the author put this out as a horror romcom and we take their word for it that that was what they meant it to be."

 

[Ichigo69]

<stuff snipped>
Genre categorization is not decided by the consumer, not least because that would be a nightmare to actually sort objectively compared to "the author put this out as a horror romcom and we take their word for it that that was what they meant it to be."

This.

 

[Figroth]

Y'know, I happen to think it fits into the horror category, but the thing is... what you and I and everybody else in the comments think don't matter, b/c Odoroo Dorothy has it tagged as horror, so the tag stays on.

I never advocated it shouldn't have the horror tag, but I also think there's a distinction both between "a story that contains the horror tag among many" and "a horror story"; and between "what the creator/publisher labelled a story" and "what content the story actually contains". To me it seemed that the debate was more about what the manga is really about than what it's advertised as.

I agree with the author that the label "horror romcom" describes this story pretty well, but I also think that a"horror romcom" isn't necessarily a "horror story". Romantic comedies aren't really comedies usually either (at least as the term is typically used), so I don't see why it's so weird that "horror romcom" would also be seen as not quite overlapping with the horror genre entirely.

 

[Figroth]

You're going to have to explain what the overall difference is between "A girl who can see ghosts is entangled with supernatural phenomena in her life that are often visually frightening but mostly do not affect the people around her except in her efforts to keep them uninvolved" and "A girl who can see at least one ghost is entangled with supernatural phenomena in her life that have demonstrably affected the health of a group of celebrities her social circle is engaged with as well as that social circle itself."

Like, you can't usefully tell me that Mieruko-chan counts as horror because it has jumpscares and more focus on freaky visuals but Mietemasu yo! Aizawa-san doesn't count because its ghosts possess people and a bunch of people surrounding the cursed idol group are acting erratically due to psychosocial issues directly resulting from the death and bad luck so far implied to be caused by ghosts.

What can I tell you? To me the fact that one story actively tries to spook you out while the other doesn't seems like a fair distinction.
I think part of why we're seeing things differently, though, is probably that what you seem to categorise as horror elements in Mietemasu yo, I would probably categorise more so as thriller elements; a distinction that makes sense to me, but not everyone might necessarily agree.

 

[darknightgarden]

At this point I feel like Aizawa and Micchi where going out when Aizawa was alive but Micchi just can't remember it

 

[thewomanliest]

GET HER AIZAWA!!!

 

[maylsmallow]

Yaaassss doo itttt /hj

 

[Perso243]

That image of Masaki on page 21 I think is the most unsettling illustration I've seen in this manga yet. Which is pretty impressive, since Masaki is (probably) just a normal person and the competition is various horrifying ghosts and curses. Props to Dorothy for showing the the real horror was in the human friends we made along the way!

 

[Marius4002]

Fun fact if someone ever reads this :
The flowers of evil that gave the name of the chapter got banned at the time in part for having poems about lesbians.