Monday Manga Review: Tokyo Akazukin

Basically

This manga is a light-hearted romp through the happy and cheery world of loli-guro fantasy and myth. Spun from the thread of the timeless story of Little Red Riding Hood, Tokyo Akazukin asks the question everyone has privately been wondering about since hearing the iconic old story: what would it be like if Little Red Riding Hood wanted to be eaten by the Big Bad Wolf? Also, and perhaps more importantly, what if she slept with random pedophiles in order to find the wolf that would eat her? Oh! And she can’t die and being shot with guns is a sexual thrill for her. Why not?

Apparently Benkyo Tamaoki thought this was the greatest fucking idea ever and ran with it. And I mean ran with it! This shit has 19 chapters.

I’m not joking.

First Impressions

To put this review into context let’s go over what happens in the first chapter: we see a few pages of the manga’s basic concept drawn with rough inks with the classic-looking red riding hood and big bad wolf exchanging the famous lines “Why grandma! What big <noun> you have!” and “The better to <verb> you with!”. This goes on as one would expect until the wolf gets to the “THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH!” part and little red riding hood strips naked and invites the painful death that she would no doubt receive. Upon viewing this you are expected to make the correlation that this a twisted homage to a classic Western tale and then pretty much forget about it. I got 6 chapters into this shit and nothing red riding hood-like is ever uttered throughout that entire span of time. Instead we see an eleven year old girl having sex with a greasy man she found on the streets, a raunchy sex scene with some demon boy who only kind of regrets his pedophilic tendencies, the owner of a “meat shop” that seems to sell human body parts, a four-armed assassin moe character girl, and what is basically Zenigata from Lupin if he were completely depressed and suicide prone.

The plot is a hideous mess because it relies on shock value to keep the reader entertained and I must be completely broken inside because none of the so-called shock ever really hit home with me. Some of it was kinda fucked up, like way red riding hood invited violence upon her seemingly fragile young body (which always repairs itself somehow), but for the most part it’s nothing you haven’t seen before if you’re the kind of sick asshole who’d watch Bible Black, Crimson Climax or Urotsukidoji. And if you have watched any of those titles all the way through you’re one sick fucker already, let me tell you.

Because there is so much reliance on shock and kiddy porn the story is boring, full of plot devices you’ve seen in thousands of anime before it and contains “twists” that are so easy to spot that you can’t really call them twists to begin with. Gee, is the kid named Lupo the big bad wolf? I fucking wonder!

Art

Benkyo Tamaoki knows how to make a sex scene with children look awkward and gross, so brownie points to him for understanding that the subject matter is revolting and completely fringe entertainment by making the young heroine about as sexually appealing as a furless dingo with big brown eyes. Of course, I suspect that part of the idea here is to appeal to a particularly fucked up crowd of people and that this rather honest depiction of a young girl’s body is so hot that they don’t notice how hideously disgusting they are for enjoying themselves. Surprisingly, the art quality isn’t half bad, though it’s rough around the edges, like Benkyo was fapping while he drew and didn’t care to really correct his mistakes. I guess that’s his style or something. He’s a messy inker, but that leads to some convincing blood and other bodily fluids.

Oh, Christ. I can’t believe I wrote that.

Summary

If you read this manga you operate under one of two schools of thought: that this stuff is sexy and the lights have to be out and blinds have to be closed when you sit down to “read” this shit or your gag reflex is so strong from being exposed to other Japanese filth that you honestly want to see if this thing ever goes anywhere. I didn’t finish it so I don’t know. I quit around the time the four-armed girl had to bang the meat man in order to have a place to stay and Lupo (fucking Lupo) was going over how he had no past and blah blah blah. You’re in it for the pornography or you have a habit of stealing the gum from the mouth of a victim of a car crash before the ambulance arrives.

All in all a pretty terrible manga. If you happen to be into loli-guro then it’s right up you’re alley but if you want a quality manga then this is obviously not where you want to be. And why you’d even bothered looking for a quality manga in a loli-guro story I have no goddamn idea.

Arbitrary Grading Score: 1 malnourished pre-teen out of 10.

~ by KT Samurai on June 30, 2008.