Dead Tube review

Angra-Mainyu14
Apr 06, 2021
Breakdown:
Story 3/10, Art 6/10, Character 2/10, Enjoyment 3/10, Overall 3/10

Overview:
It is another situation where skills of a very experienced artist are wasted on a poor story, unconvincing characters and weak and unimpressive attempts to shock the viewer with gore, violence, nudity and sex. There's rape, murder, dismemberment, gore, sex, but somehow it avoids becoming Guro or Hentai title.

In essence, this is somewhat similar to Kakegurui(anime) or Mahou Shoujou of the End (manga) and is as bad as both of those. The central idea of the work is apparently to demonstrate "horrible" and "monstrous" qualities of a human, i.e. how greed and fear turn humans into monsters, so they start killing/raping anything that moves. As it often happens with such works, it is full of "Jester villains". A jester villain is a villain who acts in the most despicable way possible, dealing as much damage to anything he or she can, all the time laughing like a lunatic... except they look like a caricature seem to have no motivation of any kind, and do not resemble a person. A purpose of a jester villain is an attempt to shock the viewer, but this usually fails. In addition to jester villain there are supposedly "horrible" scenes of dismemberment, bunch of crazy faces (you know where character smiles in a crazy way and is made to look as disgusting as possible), etc.

Except that none of this works. They author(authors?) went too far going after shock element, and as a result the world does not look like a real place, and characters do not resemble real people. As a result none of this is scary or believable or "disgusting", and most of the time I felt nothing.

To be honest, second arc felt like it was going somewhere interesting, but then it had to do a "major reveal", after which it very quickly became quite stupid, and everything that was good about it shattered.

Detailed breakdown below:

Story: 3/10:
As mentioned above, it is never ending stream of attempts to shock the reader. However, because of how far they go with their attempts to depict "horrifying" scenes, the world does not look like a real place, and look like a decoration. The first and second arcs for a moment looked like they were going somewhere, but at some point in the second arc where they performed "major reveal", it fell apart and became a farce.

Art: 6/10
The art is quite good, and well drawn. Well drawn, visually interesting characters, nice and interesting designs (except that those characters are often wasted as cannon fodder, almost on Terra Formars level), filled backgrounds without any obvious attempts to cut the workload. The situations with excessive gore or when somebody is covered in blood from head to toe usually look worse, because blood is not really drawn well and looks like dirty splats on pages (ton of them), aside from that it is quite well drawn. Not the supreme masterpiece level, but good.

Characters: 2/10:
Do not resemble real people, are not sympathetic, and are not believable. Too many people flip into "crazy mode" too often, and as a result they look like caricatures and it is not possible sympathize with any of them. Main character is especially bad, because it switches between at least 3 different personalities, neither of which are well written.

Enjoyment: 3/10:
The art is good. Anything that is not art is not.

Overall: 3/10:
If you want to read it, the best idea is to shut off your brain, pretty much. The work is of poor quality story-wise, but has nice visuals. It probably won't appeal to anyone who wants even remotely believable characters or a story that is actually scary, and it doesn't work as a farce.

Honestly... I've seen "shocking" material handled better. For example, "Black Joke" worked incredibly well for me as "over the top" farce with fights, slaughter and sexual or near sexual situations. This title didn't work for me.
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Dead Tube
Dead Tube
Autor Kitakawa, Touta
Artista