Spoilers ahead!
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Gantz, Hiroya Oku’s breakthrough book, but it’s such a trashy manga (it’s usually easy to spot these; is the manga published by Dark Horse? Then it’s crap). There’s one female character who is introduced naked and has big bewbs. She’s eventually given a name but for a time she’s simply referred to as “Tits” and is basically a living sex doll who allows herself to get felt up by the scumbag main character whenever he wants. Gantz is almost like a parody of the perception of boy’s manga with its gratuitous sex and violence - that’s how unbelievably sleazy it is.
Anyway - I thought with Gigant that Oku had matured as a creator. Yeah, he’s still fixated on big bewbs but he was sorta restrained with that in the first book. I also mentioned in my review of the first book that I would really hate it if Oku made the obvious - but extremely dumb - choice of having big boobed pornstar Chiho (who’s in her 20s) become the girlfriend of awkward teenage schoolboy Rei. WELL GUESS WHAT FRIKKIN HAPPENS IN VOLUME 2?!
I couldn’t believe it either. And how it happened too is still more baffling. Rei literally bawls like a baby in a restaurant when Chiho tells him she just wants to remain friends - bawls so much that she says if he continues she’s going to find it hard to respect him. Yes! That’s exactly the right response! But then she relents, agrees to be his girlfriend if he stops sobbing like a spoilt brat and off they go a-fuckin’! It’s jaw-droppingly insane.
I briefly wondered if this was statutory rape but then I’m guessing it probably wouldn’t get printed if it were and that Rei is just at about the age of consent. Who knows though - maybe it is? I wouldn’t put it past this creator. Can you imagine if the roles were reversed and this were a teenage girl getting porked by an adult man? Not that Rei’s gonna be traumatised by any of this. He’s basically living every straight teenage boy’s dream!
But that’s what this book is: wish fulfilment for immature kids. And this is where I’m leaving the series because I just can’t even. Oku doesn’t respect the reader’s intelligence - this is like reading a manga for morons and I feel stupider for having read it.
Which is a shame because I’m still interested in the storyline about the website that grants wishes and the increasingly crazy things that happen in the series. I enjoyed the second half of the book because it was about the website storyline and its unpredictable wishes. It’s not enough though to balance out the ridiculous relationship going on here. I know - all the dragons, giant gods, and other wackiness going on in this book and the most semi-realistic thing here, a relationship between two people, is where I draw the line? But none of that other stuff is real - pornstars and students are real and we’re being asked to believe this relationship could happen. And the way it happened too - bawling in a restaurant!?
No, I can’t. Gigant is slightly less trashy than Gantz but not by much - Hiroya Oku is such an insultingly bad writer with a child-like mentality that I can’t continue on with this title.
No comments:
Post a Comment