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Sep 14, 2013
I have read only the 7 scanlated chapters so far, so, this review is based only off of them, but I do believe they are enough for me to judge the manga, because, based on the summary of the untranslated parts, there doesn't seem to be much more to it.
Pupa claims it's a lot of things - "Horror", "Drama", and, most ridiculously, "Psychological". It's none of those things.
Basically, it's a guro hentai manga without any sex or nudity.
Well, no, that might be a little unfair of me. I have read guro henti mangas with better story, characters and art.
The manga tries to handle a
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difficult subject right off the bad - domestic abuse. Of course, it fails to do so in any meaningful way, and uses domestic abuse just for shock value, and as a plot device. The father who abused the main characters is not presented as a complete person, but just as a psychopath, plain and simple, which is the easiest way out when you don't actually want to deal with the implications of domestic abuse.
So, the domestic abuse is used as a reason for the main character being so protective of his sister.
Oh, and his protectiveness clearly veers into incest territory. Of course, this is never addressed, and it's played for comedy/fetish, to the point where he even enjoys her eating his flesh. Now, I would have no problem with this at all, if it wasn't so fetishized. I don't find that gross or disturbing, I just find it kind of...boring, and tired. Uninspired, if you will. It's just there to appeal to people who like that, and it isn't adressed in the story at all. Thus, the comparison I made before to a guro hentai manga.
Also, I have no problems with incest...when it's handled properly. But here, it isn't even addressed - it's just there. Same as all the other stuff.
All of the characters are really...flat. None of them have any sort of depth. The main two characters sure as hell don't, and the side characters(specifically the classmates of the main characters) might as well not be there, as their presence doesn't make too much of a difference.
The main character is the typical shounen protagonist - not to smart, but full of determination and will - that's rather bad, but I've seen worse.
His siter is...well, the stereotypical little sister, that clings to her brother, depends on him for everything, and can't live without him...so, a character made for little-sister fetishists, basically.
The other characters are not even worth mentioning. I already did mention their father, who is just a psychopath and nothing else, really.
I usually dont' care much for the art, but since this is supposed to be a "horror" manga, I do have to mention it.
In short, it's rather bad. The majority of doujins I have seen have better art. The majority of the aforementioned guro hentai mangas have better art.
The gory scenes are, well, ok for what they are though. I have seen better, but if you like gore, you will probably find them to be fine, at best. But there's no horror here, just a lot of gore.
In conclusion...this is pretty weak manga. It's got gore, if you like that. It's got some little-sister/incest fetishism, and guro fetishism, if you're into that. But, that's about it. I would even say that reading a guro hentai manga might actually be better than reading Pupa, because at least you can masturbate to those. They might even have a better story and characters. In fact, they probably do.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Sep 5, 2013
UPDATE: Completed it now. And everything in this review still stands.
The review contains some spoilers, past the first two paragraphs.
Let me start of by saying that this series is quite bad. Let me explain why.
In short, it's a series that tries really, really hard to be Madoka, but doesn't really understand what made Madoka really good, and thus only imitates it on a surface level - namely, the artstyle and overall dark tone. However, it's story and characters are painfully shallow and succumb to all the Mahou Shoujo clichés that Madoka managed to avert.
The characters are all Mahou Shoujo stereotypes, through and through. All of
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them. Most of all, Seira and Akari - everything about them is predictable and cliché. Luna is also rather cliche, and what happenes to her in episiode 9 was obvious since around episode 6. Ginka is the least cliche of the 4 main characters, but that's not saying much - she also gets the least screentime.
The villain himself is uninteresting and bland, something we've all seen a hundred times before. By the end, he resorts to basically quoting the Anti-spirals in every second sentence.
The story is also really cliche, and essentially a standard Mahou Shoujo story, despite the attempted dark tone. The quasi-lesbian relationships between characters, the slightly-effeminate shape-shifting villain, the Daemonias that feed on people's dark emotions, the evil counterparts of the main girls...it's all been done before, and done better. Most of it was even done better in older shows like Sailor Moon, which is saying a lot.
This anime also has some of the worst pacing and directing I have seen recently.
First of all, the cuts between scenes are sometimes incredibly bad. It usually resorts to cutting from a calm, talking scene, straight to an emotionally charged fight scene, with no buildup or interim, and it does so multiple times per episode. That just becomes tiring, and it really shows the lack of direction in the story.
Big events and "twists" that happen also have no buildup whatsoever, or they just get a tad of obvious foreshadowing. The death of a character in the first episode barely has any buildup, and is not shocking at all, because we barely knew the character, and it was obvious that she was going to get possesed and die. Again, kind of an attempt to ape Madoka - but Madoka had proper buildup to a death that happened in episode 3.
Moreover, this anime attempts to fix this in flashbacks that happen later on, and try to give the dead character more depth, but the deed has already been done, and there is no fixing it.
The events in later episodes also have little to no buildup. Counterpart Cards just come out of nowhere, as they were not foreshadowed at all, and the events that happen to Ginka seem incredibly rushed.
The events of episode 9 also lack any subtlety, because Luna was really underdeveloped as a character. The episode itself tries to cram in as much backstory for her in an attempt to fix that, but fails to do so. All of the twists there were also incredibly obvious, and clichéd - moreover, there was no buildup to them, they just happened. They have the subtlety of, let's say, a knife to the stomach.
Everything that happenes later is just the same - no buildup, no explanations, no subtlety. Moreover, the anime makes almost everything that happened almost insignificant by the end.
All in all...this is just a terrible attempt to copy Madoka, without actually realizing what it was that made Madoka good, past the cutesy-weird artstyle, dark tone, and deaths. Watching this anime almost feels like reading a bad fanfic. Like something an inept child would make after watching Madoka and saying "I can make a thing like that too!".
The artstyle is nice though, I'll give it that.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jul 30, 2013
This is possibly one of the worst excuses for a horror/mystery that I have ever seen.
The visuals were nice, the music was mediocre, and the voice acting was slightly above average...and that's where the good things end.
Let me start with the plot - it was horrible.
Of course, I should elaborate.
It was painfully predictable from the outset, and most "twist" were obvious several episodes before they happened - and I'm usually not even good at predicting what will happen in gorror/mystery stories. Do to nearly everything being so predictable, the tension needed for a horror story to function was nonexistent.
There is one "twist" I could
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not predict, mainly do to how stupid and nonsensical it was. The ending. I won't give it away, but let me just say that it's a false twist, because all the characters in the story - ALL OF THEM - already know this, but the information was not given to the viewer simply in order to create that false "twist" at the end. The piece of info is something that one would think would be rather important to the characters, but they still never mention it while struggling to solve the mystery.
The way the mystery is solved in the end involves this crucial piece of information that everyone knew, but just never bothered to take into consideration, plus some handy Deus Ex Machina. Really, an incredibly intricate "mystery" with an even greater resolution.
And the characters themselves...oh boy. The blandest bunch of two-dimensional death-fodder I have seen in a while. Really, most of them exist simply to die in a gory and bizzare way - which might be amusing for some people, but not for me. The Final Destination type deaths just can't make up for lack of character and story - the deaths are not impactful or meaningful if I care for the characters about as much as I would for mannequins.
The only character who gets any sort of development or personality is Mei, and even she ends up being a stereotypical Rei Ayanami clone, a type of character already seen many times over.
The main character himself is barely worth mentioning - he is the blandest of the bunch by far, in both personality and looks.
All things said and done, this is a predictable "mystery" with a horrible resolution, an ineffective "horror" that relies on gore as its only horror element, akin to Final Destination, and like that film series, is just full of bland characters that are there only to die.
I am unable to fathom how anyone, in their right mind, can give this series any score higher than a 5.
From me, this shitstain on the horror/mystery genre gets the lowest score possible. I was curious at the beginning, but by the midpoint that turned into sheer hatred, which was only amplified by the ending.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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