Shounen no Abyss
Boy's Abyss

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This manga is an uncomfortable read, in the best possible way. it's early on in serialization, so this review is pretty premature, but the characters are wonderfully debased and they feel free to express the darkest sides of themselves. They feel sympathetic, even though you know they're making the wrong choices. It's cathartic in a way to see these characters be so darkly sexual.

There are multiple ways to see every story, of course, and some may see it as a simple harem fantasy with emo elements. I see it as a scary mixture of sexuality with some of the darkest emotions humans can have. ... in addition, it captures a corruption of adolescent discovery that wallflowers may find relatable. possibly upsettingly so. it's a powerful read so far. and i'm looking forward to reading it week to week.

Depression is a horrific thing. One that many of the most prior and coming generations will experience in large. Always apart of the human condition, it's something that bites so fiercely with nary a way to really bite back. Shounen no Abyss is a manga that aims to summarise and encapture that darkness that so much of the youth struggles through these days. It is not alone in it's attempt, so much media comes from pain and so much media tries to understand it, despite how impossible it may be to capture a feeling shared by so many but unique in it's vices to everyone ... it affects. Much manga, anime and other media in the past have tried their hand at recreating it and only the most elite amongst them have ever belonged to that club of higher media. Our manga in question is by no means a member of that club, although it may just have a toe in the door.

Shounen no Abyss is a Coming of Age, Psychological Drama Manga by Minenami Ryou, most famous for Himegoto: Juukyuusai no Seifuku, a drama of similar genre but wildly different thematics. In Abyss, Ryou attempts his darkest story to date with our protagonist Reiji Kurose and his suicidal tendencies suffering from an overbearing life, dysfunctional family and uncertain future. If you have read other Manga of this genre then this tiny synopsis will probably familiarlize you due to an abundance in the medium that have also tackled the strife of youth indifference, most famously Oyasumi Punpun. Shounen no Abyss makes genuine waves to stand on the same wavelength of the classic by giving very legitimate structure and reason to the nature of the manga and Reiji Kurose's issues. There is legitimate thematic weight to not only Kurose but the abundance of supporting characters, each with their own unique pain and reasons to their own problems.

However, sadly this Manga seems to suffer from it's affiliation with Young Jump and thusly it's purpose as a Seinen. Now, my speculation here is not to be taken for verbatim. However, there is little else that could explain the bizarre sexualization and characterization inside the series. Minenami Ryou has dabbled in ecchi in the past but to place nudity within Shounen no Abyss to the point where it dabbles on the line of ecchi/fan-service is a bizarre choice to say the least. Now, sex and romance (or lack thereof) is most certainly apart of Coming of Age and a massive causation of depression worldwide and of course most importantly, within Japan. Though, in no good mind can I find the reason for the female characters to be one minute rendering their soul apart in double page spreads of pure outbursts of sorrow, anguish and rage to the next issue be throwing themselves on our main character as if he was lathered in aphrodisiac. In order to justify these rapid moodswings and sudden appearances of intense thirst, Minenami Ryou has to apply rather tired character archetypes in order to placate the Young Jump crowd and editorial staff. Particuarly of note is the disillussionment of the teacher character, one that as previously noted, has a legitimate reason to be involved with Reiji Kurose and has a genuine feeling of sadness about them but is then degraded to having a far too familiar trope seemingly forced onto them in order to remain prominent in the series and satisfy some weird neccessity that far too much Seinen seems determined to have.

As for the other aspects of the manga, the art retains the familiarlity of the rest of Minenami Ryou's work, not exceptional but acceptable, except for some occurrences where there are mild flexes that show impressive talent. It can also be said that the character designs are unique to the point of everyone being instantly identifiable whilst still maintaining utter believability. Not easy by any means. The pacing of the manga is generally quite good and leads to an overall easy read (darkly humorous considering the subject matter isn't meant to be digestable), this could be consumed in one afternoon quite comfortably and the little plot hooks laid towards the end of chapters are firm enough to drag "just one more issue" out of you.

Overall, Shounen no Abyss seems to definitely have the wherewithal to achieve more and be better than the sum of it's parts. However, it's holding back and falling into safe zones that means it will please the small crowd it gains and probably fall into obscurity in a few years or under the radar to be later discussed as a "hidden gem". Ironically a theme of the manga is causing yourself pain to endlessly please those who don't really care for you, settling for mediocrity as it's best for those that have expectations. Shounen no Abyss will never escape the abyss of other endless average to good Seinen Drama if it does not forget that it doesn't need to be like any of the rest. It just needs to be itself.

For anyone reading reviews to see if they should pick up this manga, please for the love of god let me spare you:

Also, since it's happened in the past; before anyone says 'lol why read the manga if u hate it', I clicked on this because it was the most recently updated manga on the website I used to read it, was interested in the description, and read every chapter in like an hour, since there's really not a whole lot of thinking required.

- If you are looking for a 'deep' manga with some kind of underlying metaphor or overarching theme, read something else.
Before anyone ... tries to say that this manga is deep simply because it touches on themes like suicide, rape, depression, etc. please just know that even a middle schooler that is proficient in any language can write a story equal to this one, in terms of how deep those themes go. This manga is not deep, period. The story feels like the author just made a spider web of ideas that they wanted to write about, and pieced them into a book in no particular order, then spent a few hours coming up with some contrived, bullshit way for them to connect somehow. I have read 22 full chapters, and there has been maybe a chapter's worth of development on the main plot. It started off with some late-highschool aged kid living in a shit hole in the boonies, with a group of dudes who harass him, and a family life that's fucked up, and his goal is to leave the town to get away from all that. I don't want to go into explicit detail of what exactly happens, since this is a review, and I don't want to spoil anything on the off chance that someone will read it even after seeing this. With that being said, just go to the page for "Himegoto: Juukyuusai no Seifuku", which is by the same author, and read the description, then amplify the level of depravity that you would expect from it 10-fold, and that's what the actual story entails. This manga is about on that level, except rather than it being a story about sexually confused youth, it's about a bunch of random shit happening, and every character sexually taking advantage of one another (or trying to). The author uses these themes and soft-core hentai scenes to appeal to low-level curiosity, and, unfortunately, any other deeper meaning behind the things that happen can only be implicated by the reader. Good stories that touch on deep themes do not put the responsibility on the reader to fill in the gaps where there is no substance. It is the author's job to deliver on these implications that they intentionally put forth to begin with. (There are also implications of rape, blackmail, drug overdose, prostitution, and NTR, so if you're not into that shit, then definitely don't read.)

- If you are looking for a 'dark' manga that highlights some negative part of the world, or the people in it, read something else.
It's not to say that this manga doesn't touch on dark subjects, because it certainly does, but that's precisely the problem. So far it has only 'touched' on these subjects, alluding to or explicitly mentioning them as some kind of plot development that would be major in any well-written story, only to immediately move on to the next thing. These themes and subjects are used solely to evoke that 'butterfly'/'sinking' feeling in your stomach that you get when something really nightmarish happens to a character you like. And the subjects themselves are probably enough to elicit this type of feeling, but the author doesn't directly do anything for the reader to actually develop a large enough attachment to the characters for this to be possible. You might be thinking "but there's only 22 chapters! they'll go deeper!". If this was a valid point, I might agree, but I would argue back that it's the author's fault for writing these intended emotional kicks to the stomach in the first couple chapters. Even when you ignore the previously mentioned point, I would still disagree. There have been way too many instances in a 22 chapter sample size where the story just breaks from its path and starts a new one completely, only to randomly tie it in later. Also, based on this author's track record of cutting plot in favor of deplorable shit, don't be surprised when that same thing happens here. (also the pacing is just bad in general, everything moves really quickly, but lacks meaningful substance.)

- If you are looking for a romance manga that has hints of the previous two topics, read literally anything other than this.
There is nothing romantic about this story, whatsoever. Anybody who has read up to the latest chapter of this manga and can say with a straight face that this should be classified as romance has a really warped sense of what romance actually is.

- If you are looking for a manga with nice art, and don't give a shit about the story, read away.
The art is the only redeemable aspect of this manga, imo. A lot of the scenery is just filtered real-life pictures, which is common in most slice of life manga series, but there are actually a higher than average number of hand-drawn scenes that look pretty good.

- If you saw the 'smut' tag and wanna see the big sex, there's plenty of doujin authors that are more talented at both writing story, and drawing nipples for you to jack off to.

To sum up, I feel like this manga is really outrageously overrated by a lot of the people who have read it. This manga absolutely has the parts to potentially be something amazing, but honestly, knowing this author, I highly doubt they can piece them together into something amazing, given the erratic mess they've created thus far.

Side note: the last manga I read before this was GTO, and to go from that masterpiece to this was a hilarious contrast.