RaW Hero is a superhero manga I guess, but that’s not quite right. Rather, it’s a really difficult manga to describe because it’s entirely nonsensical. It’s world building is centered around how in Japan people with special abilities had appeared, but the government was covering it up. As a result a group called the Special Ability Liberation Front (SALF) came into being demanding the release of information on special abilities. They became incredibly aggressive in their demands and somehow gained the ability to gain special abilities through surgery, though in the process becoming what are called Monsters. As a result the government put together a team called the Justice Management Team (JMT) composed special ability users called Heroes to combat SALF as well as fight crime in general.
OK, so that sounds like the set up to a standard superhero vs supervillain story with the supervillains possibly having a point, though barely. The thing is that it makes absolutely no sense within the context of what SALF actually does. SALF literally never does anything except hand out flyers and throw around paint. They’re pretty much just protesters and not even violent ones. It makes absolutely no sense how they gained the technology to give their members special abilities. It also makes no sense why they would use said technology because nothing they do ever requires it. And thus it makes no sense why the JST was made to combat them. Especially considering how extreme JST gets in trying to stop them, generally doing far more harm than SALF ever does.
I suppose you could it a parody of superheroes but that doesn’t quite fit either because the superhero aspect is pretty much never relevant. The story actually focuses on a regular guy named Chiaki, who desperately needs a job to take of his two younger brothers. Thus, he accepts a job request from JMT to go undercover as a part of SALF. On top of that due to various circumstances he ends up going undercover as a woman, and thus needs to cross dress whenever he goes to work. But once again, his work doesn’t involve any of what you would expect from the henchman of an evil organization. Rather, the vast majority of work he does do involves printing out, folding flyers, and putting them in mailboxes. He occasionally gets swept in other things, but they’re really random without any sort of cohesiveness.
As such, the overarching plot in general doesn’t matter whatever it is. Rather, what’s important is more so the characters, their interactions, and their relationships. The characters certainly aren’t written all that deep. Rather, they’re all pretty flat with no real character arcs or anything like that. Despite that, they’re still a lot of fun because the manga is jam packed with humor and unexpected nonsense. Even when things are supposed to be kind of serious they’re still wrapped up in comedy. This results in things at a lower level also making as much sense as they do at a higher level, which is to say not a lick of sense at all. But it’s still amusing to read. On top of that, the art is fantastic to the degree that this is a manga that might just be worth reading just for the art. It’s incredibly high quality throughout with a unique style that’s used incredibly well in such a way that characters come through really well.
All of that’s enough to make you like a few of the characters and get invested in them and where their stories, however little sense they make, will go. That’s what makes the ending such a gut punch. The manga definitely got rushed into an ending. That isn’t that big of a deal as it’s pretty common and often out of the mangaka’s control. Thus, I don’t blame the mangaka for it being rushed. What I do blame him for however, is that the ending felt intentionally malicious to it’s characters and thus an F you to the readers that got invested in them. Yes, I know this author is known for bad ending, but this is definitely his worst, or I suppose I should say his worst so far. This was a manga that never made sense in the first place. Plot wise it could have done anything at all and it wouldn’t have felt out of place. But what it chose to do was an ending that did incredibly wrong by the manga’s best character. Seriously, one of the panels in the last chapter is going to haunt me forever. I suppose that’s an achievement in and of itself, but it’s one that a manga like this should not have.
