Nare no Hate no Bokura
The Shadows of Who We Once Were

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tl;dr: A manga with a weak plot and unlikable cast, but that moves fast enough to stay somewhat interesting.

A group of high school students and their former teacher return to their elementary school for a class reunion. However, things quickly turn into a nightmare when one of the students, Mikio, announces that he has placed deadly traps at all possible exit routes, trapping them inside. Then, while brandishing a pistol, he tells them that he would be using them for a series of social experiments. A series of painful and potentially deadly social experiments that would put their bonds to the test and unearth traumatic ... pasts and lingering grudges.

The central premise of this manga is fundamentally flawed in that a single teenager with only a handgun maintaining control of over twenty people despite forcing them to do horrible things they don’t want to do is absurd. For the first half of the manga, it’s not too hard to suspend your sense of disbelief enough to ignore this because the focus of the manga is on other things, mainly small scope experiments. Especially as the pacing of the manga overall is really fast so it’s easy enough to get swept up in things and ignore all the issues the manga has. However, as the manga progresses things get more complicated and start involving the premise more, at which point these issues make the overarching plot feel full of holes. Ultimately, I wasn’t really satisfied with the resolution to the plot at all.

Still, that’s not a deal breaker because this is a manga much more focused on characters than the overarching plot. Unfortunately, the cast was also incredibly weak. The early experiments were pretty interesting, but as things progressed characters felt like they made less and less sense. The vast majority of the plot is driven by characters doing something completely unexpected, and then the reader being provided background on why they did so. But this background is often forced and full of contradictions as the background is inconsistent with how the character had been acting earlier in the manga. There are sometimes forced attempts at smoothing over gaps, but it’s obvious that they’re being shoehorned in and often cause more problems than they solve.

Characters are also incredibly inconsistent personality wise. Characters will behave one way, but then suddenly start behaving a different way without any build-up or explanation for why. The cast is pretty big and the narrative generally involves everyone at the same time. As such, it naturally focuses on some characters but not on others. As such it has to minimize certain characters by essentially erasing their personalities and just having them go with the flow in order for things to progress. But holistically it just makes characters seem erratic. As a result, it’s hard to really get invested in anyone and thus the ending and epilogue aren’t all that satisfying. I think the manga tries to address this point explicitly by having a character remark about how people can change in unpredictable ways. But regardless of how the changes may seem to others around them, for stories such as this the writer should convey enough to the reader that the way characters change make sense.

It also feels like the manga didn’t really have any sort of underlying message. That’s not a problem in and of itself as every manga certainly doesn’t need one. But the way this manga was written was like it desperately wanted to have one but couldn’t figure out how to actually do so, so it just threw everything it had at the wall hoping something would stick. The manga has all sorts of morals and themes, such as how power can corrupt, how people act under extreme stress is not their ‘true’ selves, people can be deeply traumatized by things that seem inconsequential to others, or that teachers are grossly overworked and overburdened. But they’re all incredibly shallow to the point it doesn’t feel like they have much value. They also completely lack subtlety.

The art was okay. Some of the cover art looks pretty nice, but art of the manga itself wasn’t particularly good in terms of style or quality. The designs were pretty boring too, though I don’t consider that much of an issue considering the setting and the manga trying to seem grounded. What was handled really well was the paneling as the manga flowed really well and was easy to read through really quickly.

The premise alone is questionable to say the least. A psychopathic teenager locks up 30 teenagers who used to be his friends in a school because he's curious about how they will react when they are under pressure: whether they'll be able to keep their humanity and test the human nature. And... he only has a fucking gun that he has never used to threaten them and make them do whatever he wants. Well, out of 30 people, no one is capable of doing absolutely anything when half the time he doesn't even have the gun on his hands, other times he gives weapons to ... them to hurt each other, other times he has both hands occupied having 10 guys stronger than him behind, and on top of that with his back turned to them. And it's not like the perpetrator kept them all confined in a room and they couldn't communicate with each other; he lets them roam the school freely and, instead of coming up with plans to get rid of the killer or escape, they talk about silly stuff.

Also, it is not that they are simply kidnapped, but that they are literally forced to undergo experiments that slowly kill them. But hey, let's not try to attack him when his back is turned and his hands are occupied, lest he shoots someone with a gun that he has never used in his fucking life and we all avoid dying in a horrible way. By the way, no one fucking thinks of using ropes to escape through the stairs or windows, using corpses or tables to protect themselves from the sulfuric acid traps, burning things on the roof to attract the attention of people from the outside, attacking the perpetrator while he sleeps or is distracted, using objects to protect themselves, etc. Look, I get teenagers, especially under pressure, may not always take the best decisions, but these idiots somehow manage to ALWAYS take shitty decisions despite having plenty of time to reflect on most of them, even if some of them are stated to be calm, collected, and smart. It's infiurating.

The characters, leaving aside how utterly stupid they are, are not that bad for this kind of story, but as often happens, many of them are very much left aside, without development or agency in the plot, and some other just die before getting a chance of being interesting; furthermore, many of them make sudden changes that make no sense and make truly incomprehensible decisions even when there is nothing to motivate them, just for the sake of entertainment/advancing the plot. The perpetrator, even if the plot makes him look like someone very intelligent and unstoppable when the reality is that he simply manages to do what he wants because all the kidnapped people are idiots, at least has an interesting philosophy, which is ultimately ruined by the apparition of a certain character who feels shoehorned into the story, in a series of turns of events that are each more ridiculous.

It's especially dumb when a certain character does the same the perpetrator of the incident did and threatens the survivors with a gun so they help them finding a certain individual who killed a person dear to them, and then the rest decides somewhat they've gone crazy, they don't want to help them, and they oppose them far more than they did with the psycho who kidnapped them all, despite what they're doing being absolutely right. This is also the point when the manga becomes just pretentious, overexplaining its messages for like 15 chapters with little to no subtlety despite them being extremely obvious, contradicting at times, and not particularly thought-provoking, since these lessons are basically common sense that any average teenager would be able to deduce. It's good it's not just mindlessly killing, but seriously, this manga strives so hard in order to avoid that, it end ups falling in the exact opposite issue.

It is an entertaining read, but the quality of the writing is low, it has zero subtlety in dealing with its themes, characters that are mostly forgettable, inconsistent, or both, ridiculous plot twists, and egregious logical errors.