STORY
Btoooom! is yet another survival game. Except characters can only use bomb. I was skeptical, honestly. It's like making a martial arts tournament but one can only use a punch.... I mean, bomb fights are boring, you can see it for yourself by playing any FPS and use only bombs. It's just not varied enough to make fights interesting!
And it shows with the very first episode of the anime (which I assume is Chapter 1 or 2 of the manga?). Sakamoto takes so long to realize that the number on the bomb is its countdown, it felt like the author was trying way too hard to make bombs look complicated, when they're not.
So I was worried... at first. But the fights actually get incredible! The players have several types of bombs, although they all start with a single type each. The powers sometimes become unrealistic, but it didn't bother me. The variety in power keeps the fights entertaining, especially since the characters play strategically (using vacuum bombs to aspire gas from a zone, pulling the enemy near a zone with a previously set trap bomb, ...).
So, there is nothing wrong with most fights. The manga is really epic, the battles are spectacular.
... So what IS wrong? Well, several things took me off the hook:
1) Oversexualizing. Now I hate to be that guy. I see nothing wrong with sexuality in a story, especially when it is targeted at adults anyway. But authors easily fall in the trap of fueling their story with their personal fetishes, and honestly, Btooom often felt like a fetish dump. Why's that?
Because rape is a prominent theme all throughout the manga… even after it stops becoming relevant to the story. Now to be honest, I actually enjoyed that part, at first. Because the characters were truly affected, traumatized. It was interesting to see Himiko suffer from her trauma and how she was learning to live with it.
But if the point was just to tell the story of a rape victim, there was really no need to have her almost raped FOUR FREAKING TIMES! And I don't count all the sexual assaults, just the ones that objectively count as rape attempts.
Himiko gets raped every 25 chapters. And she’s not the only character to be sexualized. One of the support characters later on in the manga is a porn star. And it’s not to tell an interesting story about how porn stars are psychologically affected by their industry; no no, that character is only here for sex. She “offers her services” to Oda (her words literally), she makes sex jokes in front of a kid, her flashback shows how she enjoyed the attention thanks to her job… and her very first scene is her putting her butt on that kid’s face.
Even at the very end, this needless proportion of sex is still here! In one of the final chapters, a brand new character sends a phone call. Once the panels switch to his side of the call, we realize he’s having an orgy. That was uncalled for, especially in the tense context of that chapter. Imagine you watch a character in a zombie apocalypse, and suddenly they receive a call from a clown who tells him his pizza is ready. It’s THAT kind of out-of-context level.
And even in the very last chapter, once everything is said and done, what do we end with? A full picture of a naked 8 years-old girl. Yeah, no kidding.
“Ew, but there is nothing sexual in a kid’s body!”. Yes, I agree. Explain to me why the author felt the need to have her naked. In that scene, Kaguya is being treated by doctors for a wound on her belly. You don’t NEED to remove all clothes for an operation here. So, the author did not NEED to have a kid naked in that scene. But he still felt the need to do so. Therefore, I WILL count that as a fetish, whether that’s his own or whether he fought that was his readers’.
And all of that, how do they justify it? “Men all become pigs when pushed in a corner.” For real? So, err… here’s a quick reality check: MOST TRAGIC SITUATIONS IRL DO NOT TURN INTO RAPE. In this manga, men try to rape girls AS SOON as they’re in a bad spot. If that were true in real-life, every plane crash would turn into orgy rape, and guess what? That’s not the case. But the problem isn’t about respecting real-life: my real problem with that is it truly feels like an apology of perversion.
2) The center of the plot makes no sense.
To put it simply, a bunch of rich guys work in the shadows to control the world by controlling the Internet. To be fair, I loved the idea of “whoever controls the net controls the world.” The plurality of media has always been what has prevented mass propaganda (check out the story of radio piracy for example), and the internet is the paroxysm of media plurality, so it makes sense for hidden governments to try and control that world.
The major issue is their main plan. They make their death game PUBLIC entertainment, have it diffused publicly IN LIVE, and intend to control medias and politics to make the public opinion ACCEPT THAT as a good thing.
The problem is the manga makes absolutely no effort to show HOW people could just accept that. There is a reason real-life isn’t Hunger Games: even the most corrupt politicians today wouldn’t view “massacre for entertainment” as a viable plan. Because most people would objectively be against that idea. Even those who secretly like it would still act like it was a terrible idea.
Now the author had one good idea: to present this death game as a death penalty. The players are supposed to be scums, criminals. That’s why there is so many rapists/killers among them. So it COULD have been a very interesting way to bring up the topic of death penalty. There COULD have had dialogues where characters state that this is an efficient way to deal with crime.
But the manga DOES NOT do that. It never shows the characters ponder about death penalty, and never makes the readers think about it. And worse than that, it exclusively shows characters AGAINST that idea (outside the perpetrators of that plan). There is not a single character outside Themis who even says “maybe that’s a good idea to have criminals execute each other.”
There is no rationale behind that point, and the reason is it’s not possible to have one! No one would say it’s ok to show gory shows and rapes publicly on television. And yet, that’s the center of the plot! As a result, all of this feels meaningless.
3) The endings…
Speaking of meaningless. I have often met endings that make me feel like the entire journey wasn’t worth it. Never had I met a story with TWO endings where BOTH are simply lackluster. None of them resolve anything whatsoever, and none of the chapters bring anything meaningful to the messages the story apparently tried to tell. It’s just “we reach the end, Period.” It isn’t rushed, but it lacks anything meaningful to make it feel like the end. We don’t know how the world reacted to everything revealed publicly, we don’t know how the characters manage to survive in the shadows, we don’t know in which direction this world is going.
And, final nail in the coffin, the author ends with a note denouncing the “fanservice” side of the manga industry. Despite his manga being FILLED TO THE BRIM with fanservice!
… Wow, that’s a lot to take in. You get my point, the scenario is the major (and only?) problem with this manga. But even that isn’t a 0/10! Most characters have interesting stories… until they’re ruined in one way or another.
CHARACTERS
What have we got here? Rapists, hotties and religious people. That’s what I remember the most, and it’s not my fault so I won’t apologize.
The author decided it was a good idea to have half the main cast be rapists. Now, this is a horror story, so I didn’t have any problem with that. But… what the hell? Why is he trying so hard to have Kira and Uesugi look like good guys????? During the final arc, they are both treated like good characters, fighting for their friends and evil corporation. Even the first rapist of the story has a moment where he acts like a victim (“you’re the one that ruined my life!”, he says…). Ok, I get why the rapist would try to view HIMSELF in a good light, but why are Kira and Uesugi treated like friends???
Then, there is Oda. Ohhh, Oda… How come a character so cool get so dull and stupid? He even disappears for something like 40 chapters, right after the flashback about him. During this time, he doesn’t do anything meaningful the few times we see him, and once he comes back… suddenly, he is the final bad guy. And worse than that, what’s the reason for that? Why is he antagonizing Sakamoto this much?
Because Sakamoto was more popular than him WHEN THEY WERE IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!!!! Yes, no joke. The reason for him being so antagonizing towards Sakamoto is a girl asked him to deliver a love letter to Sakamoto back then. How much more pitiful, pathetic and stupid can it get?
Well, we could have all the characters worship a girl that supposedly can see ghosts. And… that’s what happens!!! Then, we can have a lot of dialogues implying that spirits are real and mediums aren’t rip-offs. Then we can have that cult leader be the Deus Ex Machina in every situation. For real, the final arc is filled with situations where Kaguya somehow has the solution.
I get that Japan has a lot of religious people. But never had I seen one of their stories feel like religion propaganda. It tries too hard to make a point out of that.
Now I actually loved the Sanctuary arc. Because Kaguya’s story was interesting to follow. I was just disappointed that the existence of ghosts didn’t have a bigger impact on the whole manga, if they truly exist in that world. If ghosts have so much power, why don’t they play a bigger role against Themis? Why don’t they haunt them, their system, outside the island? That’s what I meant when I said “religion propaganda”. If the ghosts had a relevance to the plot, I wouldn’t call it that. But the fact is, Kaguya’s powers come into play just to make the characters (and the viewers) want to join Kaguya’s cult. And that’s what the characters do…
Again, it’s not a 0/10 in that department. The characters are all awesome aside from their stories. I loved Kira because he reminded me of Shouko’s little sister in Koe no Katachi, and he was actually a great villain (before he turned into a hero…). Himiko was annoying sometimes, but touching. Sakamoto was awesome, although a bit stereotypical.
ART
I’ll end on a very positive note. Btooom is a great manga, visually. I see absolutely nothing to complain about. The mangaka knows how to make epic scenes through drawings, the chara-design is clean, it’s honestly among the best mangas visually, in my opinion.
CONCLUSION
Btooom is, like its name… weird. The idea of having fights with only bombs was weird, but that bet is actually a success. The rest though… is just a shame. The author oversexualizes its story, and while it WAS serving a purpose in the beginning, it somehow became a fetish dump. The characters are all interesting at least at first, but the author decided to take more time making an apology for rape than to develop the other characters. And the ending is so lackluster than even two of them don’t fill the plot enough for it to feel worthwhile.
That said, I’d still recommend you check it out for the fights.
