Mahoutsukai no Deshi ga Warau Toki.
When a Magician's Pupil Smiles.

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Genre : Supernatural, Mystery, Shounen

I found this manga, Mahoutsukai no denshi ga Warau toki today and I already read around chapter 5, I know it's still to early for a review but I really want to talk about it.

So the title in English are called, "When a Magician's Pupil Smile". Just like the title, it is pretty much about a boy named Ouka Namae, who has no emotion, he can't feel anything at all and wanted to feel emotion like other human being.

CH1 spoiler,he also want to DESTROY THE WORLD. what?

After an unfortunate event happen to him in the past,he work with a ... badass magician to obtain emotion. Everything got weird as I continue reading, basically from what I read so far, this boy need to have someone important to him that he can cherished to obtain a specific emotion by "killing" that important someone and he can only feel the emotion for a split second.

" He is my friend so I kill him" said Ouka with his emotionless face. But he wouldn't kill if he hated someone(which is also an emotion). It's kinda confusing but it's pretty addicting to kept on going with the story.

The "Magician" is actually the bad guy, they kill human because of job? not sure myself. There's also tons of cute familiar...Which isn't cute when they start eating people!(sweat) The manga play with your emotion a lot, one second you smiling the next thing you start to flip the table.

In conclusion, this is a pretty dark, confusing kinda manga and maybe a bit of romance in the next few chapter. It's not that gore and you might get pissed off a lot with the main character. But it's a refreshing feeling in Shounen genre which is always about the main character doing good thing.

So a fucked up main character? I think I can handle with that.

Rated
Story: 9/10
Art: 9/10
Character: 8/10
Enjoyment: 10/10

Overall: 10/10

tl;dr: A character focused manga with characters that are almost all offputting. 

This story in terms of tone and atmosphere felt like it made no sense. Magicians in this world are in general terrible people that don't care at all about killing others. It’s possible to write a story about such characters in such a way that the reader can stay invested in such them, but the heroine Shou just being a normal person simply caught up in the insanity keeps the reader grounded in normal common sense and hence magicians just seem unlikable. The protagonist, Ouka, furthermore, is someone whose goal is to get close to ... people and kill them because that’s the only way he can experience emotions. Once again, this is something that it is possible to write in such a way that the reader can get invested in such a character, but this work didn’t really accomplish that at all. At best what I felt for him was pity, but even that wasn’t especially strong. I had no investment in him actually changing because it wasn’t clear what such growth would look like and the manga really didn’t make any sort of argument for why he deserved it. Thus, the only main character that wasn’t off-putting was Shou, but she wasn’t particularly likable either. There’s a plot thread surrounding her and her desire to be a hero but it largely didn’t go anywhere. For the most part she is pretty useless too so it's hard to really get invested in her. Her change in attitude towards Ouka also felt like it didn’t make any sense. All of that builds up to an ending that was incredibly abrupt and forced and felt like it barely explained anything, so even for how little investment I had in the manga at that point it still felt unsatisfying. The art was okay.