Bloody Maiden: Toomarimiki no Shima

Edit

What would you like to edit?

SynopsisBackgroundAlternative TitlesPictureChapters/VolumesPublishing DatesRelationsTypeExternal Links  

In the 16th century, a group of bandits known as the Kidoshu wander around Japan, plundering whatever they can find and storing their vast treasures on Toomariki Island. However, they don't escape the law for long and are eventually caught, crucified, and burned alive. Over time their legend fades, leaving the island and the museum on it as the only monument to their memory and the only proof of their existence.

A few centuries later and we arrive in modern times as Onitsuka Miaki and Koizumi Suzuka, along with with the ten other girls from the naginata club and their advisor go to Toomariki, go to ... a retreat to hone their skills. However, the gruesome past of the island quickly makes itself known and soon the members of the club get brutally killed off one by one by an unknown force, with the survivors having to band together to find out who the killer is before it's too late.

Bloody Maiden is a supernatural tinted slasher film distilled into the form of a manga and it doesn't try to be anything else. There's no fluff and it gets into the action almost immediately. It's filled with gratuitous amounts of violence, blood, gore, nudity, and lesbians, and it even has it's mostly female cast decided to change into their swimwear randomly out of nowhere and for no reason. It's sleazy but it's not pretending to by anything else. It knows exactly what it wants to be and runs with it, having fun with it's silly premise and going all in with just how absurd the whole thing is.

I can't even talk more about the plot beyond it's initial premise because I would end up spoiling it, that's how little to the plot there is, but nobody is here for the plot outside of it being an excuse to have a killer going around killing people and for the female characters to show off some skin. The manga is only one volume long and it's a fairly quick and breezy reason, and could probably be read in the same time as a 2 hour slasher movie.

The killer even has an iPod filled with bands and artists like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper, easily setting the tone of just how campy it is. Both the design of the iPod and song titles are all just conveniently covered up just enough to now get sued, but clear enough to make it obvious as to what it's trying to get across.

If you're into slasher films like Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, or Child's Play, like sleazy campy horror movies from the 80s in general, or could easily name at least 3 films that John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and/or David Cronenberg has directed or written, you'll get something out of this. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you should probably avoid.

The fact that I'm starting to love even more survival horror stories made me read Bloody Maiden.

Twelve girls of a Naginata Club and their adult adviser went to a training camp on an island belonging to the club president's family. Long ago it was a hideout for a famous and extremely violent group of bandits, meaning that their goods were still on the island. However, when the girls are going to sleep their first night before training, the adviser and some few members start to disappear and get brutally murdered by a masked man. It is up to the remaining girls to survive...

The story is ... quite simple and straightforward and what I mean by that is that the mystery being the killing is not complex at all and easily understandable, even though for me, the "answer" was a little bit weird and creepy... And we got the typical survival progress where little by little, girls of the club end up dying and some do anything to (try) to survive.

When it comes to art, well, I was expecting some ecchi right before reading, because it is a manga about a group of girls, so naturally, you will see some ecchi scenes between the girls but they are not big deal at all, but it makes somehow sense because we are talking about girls, and even in real life, some of them like to compare or show their physical attributes, am I wrong? Sometimes some of their body parts are somehow a little "hidden" and sometimes they are not at all, what was the writer thinking? (xD) You can also see the girls naked when they get murdered (what a pervert killer!!! xD) and the bloody moments are fair enough, as I was expecting from a survival horror story. The girls themselves are not badly drawn even though sometimes I had some difficulties in distinguishing some of them in certain moments...

Since we are talking about a 11-chapter story and having so much characters, it is natural that some of characters are not interesting at all or don't have a unique thing in their personality, mainly because they end up dying early or they don't appear very much. However, you can see some few traits and personalities within the most important ones, which are fair enough.

I somehow got myself enjoyed because I always want to know who's the next one to die, who's going to survive and the mystery behind the murders in any survival horror story. It is mostly enjoyable you love this kind of stories or else it won't be that much for you...

Finally, my final words... Bloody Maiden is not terrible but is not that good, still somehow a little enjoyable. Read this if you are fond of survival horror stories or if you are looking for something fast to read.

Warning: Minor spoilers about the flow of events, but tl;dr: you aren't missing anything special by reading the reviews for this one before you accidentally waste the better part of an hour on this schlock.

The characterization and story really fail to show any potential, at any point in this manga. The entire cast of characters is unceremoniously dumped upon the reader almost immediately and with so little meaningful exposition (and although an attempt was made to dump a bunch of it on you early, none of it feels of consequence when you are expected to actually follow along with over a dozen same-y characters ... introduced to you within 40 pages), some of the characters even fail to live up to a single bad, cliched trope, and clearly almost all of them exist simply to further make us feel bad when something happens to them. It begs the question of why the author chose to use so many heroines in the first place when making more than a handful of them even just one-note characters was beyond their writing capabilities for this piece.

The story itself is a joke, too. Horror and tragedy rely upon the reader feeling some semblance of connection to the characters or buying in to the atmosphere of dread the author is constructing, but the core story idea is so poorly mismanaged that the actual tragic events (and the in-character reactions to them) easily slip past the barrier between tragedy and into pure comedy. Some of the only times the characters can be seen exercising a degree of common sense is when it occurs to them to strip to avoid unfortunate environmental hazards, which begs the question of why the author didn't simply make an h-doujin instead of trying to string together such a shoddy story.

Not to say it would be salvaged by being pure hentai, either, as the art is far from the "not great but better than average" I was led to expect coming in based on the work's MAL rating, but I suppose weighted ratings help obscure just how below average something really is. The faces are really all over the place, *especially* early on, and in several instances some liberties were taken in adding detail to the background art, which may have been the saving grace in pulling any aspect of this manga to the average category. It IS ecchi, and while the girly bits aren't stand-out, it wouldn't be out of place for an amateur h-doujin. Alas, this piece tries too hard to make the reader care about a poorly constructed plot, and misses the chance to just be a silly dumb pseudo-porn manga.


I can't in good faith rate this manga a 1 because it lacks anything that grotesquely offends the reader's sensibilities, but to even call this simply mediocre is an insult to the mediocrity I've still had the good sense to take some joy out of. A thorough waste of time for anything besides the occasional TnA (can I recommend just reading hentai instead?), and the memes that come from consuming really bad media for shits and giggles. I had more fun writing this review than I did reading the manga.