axelmania's manga / #shounen(191)

one of the most fun isekais ever made!

i have to read this for my volunteer job. has the occasional interesting story and a couple characters i really like, but overall embodies all the weaknesses of the battle-focused shounen genre. often very boring, characters are mostly one-dimensional, but ship erasermight everyone

apparently theres some gay shit in this lol

its hard to applaud a shounen for making the protagonist female when she is indistinguishable from every other cheerful, rough and tumble male protagonist produced in the last twenty years. i want to rate this manga by what its intending to do, not what i want from it. so i wont say its a bad thing that there is no slow reveal of the true nature of the house, even though that would have made it much scarier. ill even say that the mother starting out monsterous and gradually being humanized was wonderful, the way by the end every single character is morally entangled in inescapable guilt. the problem there is that secretly, this manga isnt interested in depicting rehabilitation, many adult characters preferring to die to atone rather than start making different choices. i did cry reading this. i was dazzled by the action sequences, overwhelmingly most of all during the goldy pond arc. but i was never shown the depth of suffering that should have been happening, making it feel rather bland. so many deaths glossed over, the horror and sorrow of them quickly run past into the next battle, even though the plot showed many months of safe rest. promised neverland may not have a traditional shounen jump plot, but it is dripping with reminders every panel what magazine it is being published in. (in terms of non-obvious content warnings, the most prominent black character is frequently drawn like a grotesque caricature even more so than the main terror of the mother.)