Sekai Oni
Sekai Oni is a shockingly good story I'm surprised has so little traction. There's not even an official English translation!
I'm going to be touching on some relatively significant spoilers, though I'm going to try to keep them minimally explicit. It's a good story, one I'd hate to seriously hurt the enjoyment of.
It's a story in which one cannot judge based on appearance -not as an explicitly intended message that fails, such as when a story simply flips around the usual 'light=good, dark=evil' into 'light=evil, dark=good', but as a genuine baseline element of the story that keeps recurring. It's so effective at this that when one particularly evil-seeming character dropped into talking like they were a good and sympathetic person who happened to be forced to do evil by circumstances, I was genuinely unsure whether the story meant it as the honest truth or if it was this person acting. Usually when a story does that, it's obvious to me which of the two the story is doing.
It's a story in which mental illness doesn't relegate a character to being a target of pity. In fact, the core cast is heavily biased toward having fairly serious issues -and there's a recognition of varying levels of coping. Some of them are more-or-less functional in a day-to-day sense, such that an acquaintance wouldn't necessarily notice their issue. Others have had their lives seriously negatively impacted in a much more obvious way. Still others can mostly 'pass for normal', so long as key points are avoided. Regardless, no one is treated as stupid or incompetent just because they have an issue of some kind or another, nor is their level of difficulty coping treated as either a barometer for overall competence or a barometer for the severity of their personal issue. They have issues, they're coping to some level or another, simple as that.
It's a story that doesn't lock itself into a singular, static framework. Is it a 'death game' manga? Sure, if you like, but it doesn't limit itself to that. Is it horror? Terrible things happen, to be sure -and they are terrible, this is a story that deals with underage rape, child abuse, and implied malnutrition, and that's just one character- but while the story doesn't downplay the awfulness of the bad things that happen, neither does it wallow helplessly in them the way a lot of horror does. Is it wish fulfillment fantasy? Sure, there's shades of that, but no more than the internet is wish fulfillment in various ways for various people; here is a thing, it changes how the world works, how your life works, and maybe it works better for some people than for others but there's more to it than making someone happy.
It's a story that is unafraid to touch on ugly topics, but doesn't revel in them either. People are allowed to die. Rape happens. Main characters are allowed to die. But that's just a part of the flow of the plot, not something to spend page after page wallowing in. Sometimes, things that seemed sure to end in an ugly way, or at least a bittersweet way, instead go in a surprisingly clean direction. The story isn't committed to misery. It's a pleasant middle ground that's hard to find, where so many stories either shy away from acknowledging that genuinely bad things happen at all or have every situation end in the worst possible manner, no matter how implausible.
It's a story in which emotions have power, and not only when it's narratively convenient. There are strong moments where characters we care about find new strength thanks to their feelings, but there are also moments where the vagaries of emotions are inconvenient... and it's not just the protagonists who can gain power from emotion.
It's a good story, one with few things I dislike or wish to criticize. It avoids contrivances; when a terrible thing happens at the worst possible moment, you can see how it's not surprising that it happened at all, let alone when it did. It avoids author fiat miracles; in every case where a character Takes A Third Option instead of choosing between a list of options that are all terrible, it makes sense within the rules we see and is not simply ignored and forgotten after that one time. It has a diverse cast of characters that are all very different people, and who feel like people instead of narrative constructs.
It's a story in which a victim lashing out at their tormentors is neither villainized as pure evil nor flatly cheered on as heroically good. Merely sympathetic.
It's a story whose ending is perfect. (... well, aside one thing, I suppose) A rarity, when so many stories simply stop without a proper ending, or their ending runs contrary to the themes the story has been building up the whole time, or their ending fails to wrap up dozens of important plot threads, or something makes the ending unsatisfying at best and disastrous at worst.
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The story does have a few weak points or missed opportunities, and here I'm going to be delving a bit more explicitly into spoilers. Maybe go read it yourself before coming back to this part of the post.
For starters, its fight scenes are a bit shaky. There's a fair amount of shonen-esque battles with back-and-forth and trying to figure out the enemy, and while sometimes, particularly early on, this process involves figuring out what's going on and coming up with a plan to exploit an enemy's weakness, a lot of times fight scenes could've been better. This is an understandable flaw, though, both because of how obvious it is that the creator is developing their craft as they go -the art at the beginning is almost unrecognizable when compared to the end, for example- and more importantly because the primary reason fight scenes suffer some is that genuinely compelling plot points undermine the entire dynamic of critical thinking under fire. For useful narrative various reasons, 'power level' is highly variable, leading to situations where some characters are struggling with a fight and victory comes about when a powerful character is convinced to actually fight, or a character is maneuvered into the psychological position that lets them access great strength. It's unfortunate that this can make the actual fighting less interesting, but it's a cost imposed by other narrative benefits rather than just a failing of the story outright.
The only part of the whole thing that could be argued as a fully avoidable error is that characters being able to generate anything in their battles so long as they understand the thing well enough gives them too much flexibility. And even then, it eventually pays off in a manner that makes me hesitant to suggest that the story should have made that particular capability more narrow.
Something that's not precisely a criticism or flaw but is something I had mixed feelings about is how by the time the story is over with all the weird power stuff is gone. It's an example of a pattern I see periodically where a story has people with strange powers dealing with a screwed-up situation those strange powers are rooted in where part of the happy ending is having all those powers go away, and it always feels a little off to me. The main difference between Sekai Oni and most such examples I see is that the characters within Sekai Oni don't validate the removal of the special power stuff as the correct/good result; it's a consequence of how things get handled, not an end in itself. Nobody seems to particularly mourn the loss of magical powers and the potential for immortality in a dimensional space that lets people readily reshape the world to their own ends and so on, which is most of why it bothers me a little, but unlike other examples I've seen no one sits down and outright says 'the magical powers are what's making everything awful, so I'm going to make the magical powers go away' or anything in that vein. I'd probably be more bothered if the story wasn't so clearly not going to have a sequel -the story is very much about the characters, not so much the crazy situation they find themselves in, and a sequel following the familiar cast would detract from the ending, while a sequel exploring the strange world and powers and whatnot would be a story placed in the same setting but utterly divorced from Sekai Oni itself. So... mixed feelings, but nothing I'd place as an actual mistake.
The biggest disappointment for me -and overall it was a minor disappointment, to be honest, just a bit mystifying that it happened this way- is that we never see any of the core cast in their own full World Devil forms. Even when Azuma explicitly goes full World Devil to destroy the other world, we don't see what that form looks like. People from this side are at best seen in the halfway form. Azuma is the most frustrating case, since the story explicitly says she does it and the story has spent the entire time playing up how powerful she is, and while it's done a fine job of showing it off I still would very much like to have seen her World Devil form. A less bothersome but still frustrating case if when Pero is left behind and simply gives up and dies instead of going full World Devil. The explanation we're given for why nobody was going full World Devil is that there's some loss of control or something involved -which, incidentally, raises questions about an earlier event's handling, but they're manageable questions so I'll leave it alone- and the mission up to that point was infiltration and rescue, but once he's decided to stay behind... why not go full World Devil? But I can leave that case be overall; Pero has given up. That's explanation enough, really.
Returning to a positive note... I really do like the ending. The lack of seeing World Devil Azuma really is my only complaint. Azuma reunites with her mom, as she's wanted to do the whole time... and after living with her a few years she decides she's had enough with her mom and heads off with her friends instead. Reuniting with her mom is not And They All Lived Happily Ever After, but that fact is not itself treated as disastrous. Azuma got what she wanted, and it wasn't perfect, and she's survived the disappointment just fine. Life goes on, and Azuma herself is clearly able to bounce back.
It's one of the most genuinely optimistic endings I've seen in a story.
I'm going to be touching on some relatively significant spoilers, though I'm going to try to keep them minimally explicit. It's a good story, one I'd hate to seriously hurt the enjoyment of.
It's a story in which one cannot judge based on appearance -not as an explicitly intended message that fails, such as when a story simply flips around the usual 'light=good, dark=evil' into 'light=evil, dark=good', but as a genuine baseline element of the story that keeps recurring. It's so effective at this that when one particularly evil-seeming character dropped into talking like they were a good and sympathetic person who happened to be forced to do evil by circumstances, I was genuinely unsure whether the story meant it as the honest truth or if it was this person acting. Usually when a story does that, it's obvious to me which of the two the story is doing.
It's a story in which mental illness doesn't relegate a character to being a target of pity. In fact, the core cast is heavily biased toward having fairly serious issues -and there's a recognition of varying levels of coping. Some of them are more-or-less functional in a day-to-day sense, such that an acquaintance wouldn't necessarily notice their issue. Others have had their lives seriously negatively impacted in a much more obvious way. Still others can mostly 'pass for normal', so long as key points are avoided. Regardless, no one is treated as stupid or incompetent just because they have an issue of some kind or another, nor is their level of difficulty coping treated as either a barometer for overall competence or a barometer for the severity of their personal issue. They have issues, they're coping to some level or another, simple as that.
It's a story that doesn't lock itself into a singular, static framework. Is it a 'death game' manga? Sure, if you like, but it doesn't limit itself to that. Is it horror? Terrible things happen, to be sure -and they are terrible, this is a story that deals with underage rape, child abuse, and implied malnutrition, and that's just one character- but while the story doesn't downplay the awfulness of the bad things that happen, neither does it wallow helplessly in them the way a lot of horror does. Is it wish fulfillment fantasy? Sure, there's shades of that, but no more than the internet is wish fulfillment in various ways for various people; here is a thing, it changes how the world works, how your life works, and maybe it works better for some people than for others but there's more to it than making someone happy.
It's a story that is unafraid to touch on ugly topics, but doesn't revel in them either. People are allowed to die. Rape happens. Main characters are allowed to die. But that's just a part of the flow of the plot, not something to spend page after page wallowing in. Sometimes, things that seemed sure to end in an ugly way, or at least a bittersweet way, instead go in a surprisingly clean direction. The story isn't committed to misery. It's a pleasant middle ground that's hard to find, where so many stories either shy away from acknowledging that genuinely bad things happen at all or have every situation end in the worst possible manner, no matter how implausible.
It's a story in which emotions have power, and not only when it's narratively convenient. There are strong moments where characters we care about find new strength thanks to their feelings, but there are also moments where the vagaries of emotions are inconvenient... and it's not just the protagonists who can gain power from emotion.
It's a good story, one with few things I dislike or wish to criticize. It avoids contrivances; when a terrible thing happens at the worst possible moment, you can see how it's not surprising that it happened at all, let alone when it did. It avoids author fiat miracles; in every case where a character Takes A Third Option instead of choosing between a list of options that are all terrible, it makes sense within the rules we see and is not simply ignored and forgotten after that one time. It has a diverse cast of characters that are all very different people, and who feel like people instead of narrative constructs.
It's a story in which a victim lashing out at their tormentors is neither villainized as pure evil nor flatly cheered on as heroically good. Merely sympathetic.
It's a story whose ending is perfect. (... well, aside one thing, I suppose) A rarity, when so many stories simply stop without a proper ending, or their ending runs contrary to the themes the story has been building up the whole time, or their ending fails to wrap up dozens of important plot threads, or something makes the ending unsatisfying at best and disastrous at worst.
-------------------------------------------
The story does have a few weak points or missed opportunities, and here I'm going to be delving a bit more explicitly into spoilers. Maybe go read it yourself before coming back to this part of the post.
For starters, its fight scenes are a bit shaky. There's a fair amount of shonen-esque battles with back-and-forth and trying to figure out the enemy, and while sometimes, particularly early on, this process involves figuring out what's going on and coming up with a plan to exploit an enemy's weakness, a lot of times fight scenes could've been better. This is an understandable flaw, though, both because of how obvious it is that the creator is developing their craft as they go -the art at the beginning is almost unrecognizable when compared to the end, for example- and more importantly because the primary reason fight scenes suffer some is that genuinely compelling plot points undermine the entire dynamic of critical thinking under fire. For useful narrative various reasons, 'power level' is highly variable, leading to situations where some characters are struggling with a fight and victory comes about when a powerful character is convinced to actually fight, or a character is maneuvered into the psychological position that lets them access great strength. It's unfortunate that this can make the actual fighting less interesting, but it's a cost imposed by other narrative benefits rather than just a failing of the story outright.
The only part of the whole thing that could be argued as a fully avoidable error is that characters being able to generate anything in their battles so long as they understand the thing well enough gives them too much flexibility. And even then, it eventually pays off in a manner that makes me hesitant to suggest that the story should have made that particular capability more narrow.
Something that's not precisely a criticism or flaw but is something I had mixed feelings about is how by the time the story is over with all the weird power stuff is gone. It's an example of a pattern I see periodically where a story has people with strange powers dealing with a screwed-up situation those strange powers are rooted in where part of the happy ending is having all those powers go away, and it always feels a little off to me. The main difference between Sekai Oni and most such examples I see is that the characters within Sekai Oni don't validate the removal of the special power stuff as the correct/good result; it's a consequence of how things get handled, not an end in itself. Nobody seems to particularly mourn the loss of magical powers and the potential for immortality in a dimensional space that lets people readily reshape the world to their own ends and so on, which is most of why it bothers me a little, but unlike other examples I've seen no one sits down and outright says 'the magical powers are what's making everything awful, so I'm going to make the magical powers go away' or anything in that vein. I'd probably be more bothered if the story wasn't so clearly not going to have a sequel -the story is very much about the characters, not so much the crazy situation they find themselves in, and a sequel following the familiar cast would detract from the ending, while a sequel exploring the strange world and powers and whatnot would be a story placed in the same setting but utterly divorced from Sekai Oni itself. So... mixed feelings, but nothing I'd place as an actual mistake.
The biggest disappointment for me -and overall it was a minor disappointment, to be honest, just a bit mystifying that it happened this way- is that we never see any of the core cast in their own full World Devil forms. Even when Azuma explicitly goes full World Devil to destroy the other world, we don't see what that form looks like. People from this side are at best seen in the halfway form. Azuma is the most frustrating case, since the story explicitly says she does it and the story has spent the entire time playing up how powerful she is, and while it's done a fine job of showing it off I still would very much like to have seen her World Devil form. A less bothersome but still frustrating case if when Pero is left behind and simply gives up and dies instead of going full World Devil. The explanation we're given for why nobody was going full World Devil is that there's some loss of control or something involved -which, incidentally, raises questions about an earlier event's handling, but they're manageable questions so I'll leave it alone- and the mission up to that point was infiltration and rescue, but once he's decided to stay behind... why not go full World Devil? But I can leave that case be overall; Pero has given up. That's explanation enough, really.
Returning to a positive note... I really do like the ending. The lack of seeing World Devil Azuma really is my only complaint. Azuma reunites with her mom, as she's wanted to do the whole time... and after living with her a few years she decides she's had enough with her mom and heads off with her friends instead. Reuniting with her mom is not And They All Lived Happily Ever After, but that fact is not itself treated as disastrous. Azuma got what she wanted, and it wasn't perfect, and she's survived the disappointment just fine. Life goes on, and Azuma herself is clearly able to bounce back.
It's one of the most genuinely optimistic endings I've seen in a story.
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