Shitsurakuen is an incredible story (negative).

I didn't have particularly high hopes for this, but I had apparently read most of it at some point and completely forgotten... so I figured I would start over and finish it properly this time.

So I did. And I kinda wish I hadn't.

The following review is more or less spoiler free, unless you consider "the plot of a shonen manga escalates" as a spoiler, or discussion of the plot structure.

CW: Domestic abuse talk (as you may expect from the premise)

Starting Off... Well Enough

For the most part, the story goes exactly how you would expect it to based on the summary: The girls are being abused, the boys are at fault, and the boys are very "hell yeah!" about their circumstances. A shallow set up, but it was fun enough and the characters were charming. It later introduces some nuance with some of the boys being like "no I hate this situation it sucks." and I was like "oh okay, I can work with this."

Despite me picking this up in the first place, I don't typically gravitate towards stories like this, where one sex is good and one sex is evil. Like, that's boring! So I welcomed this little bit of nuance, this idea that humans are not immune to peer pressure and how being in a situation where toxic behavior is enabled and encouraged will often lead people to engage even if they never thought they would.

The Beginning of the End

But this is also a shonen, so the stakes have to increase, and given that the set up is what it is, this means that the villains (the boys) get more monstrous (against women), more abusive (to women), more of a threat (to women). In any other story, "the villains get worse" is just kind of like "yeah no shit," right? But here, the set up is basically "school endorsed domestic violence against women" so the layer of fantasy between the villains and their actions is paper thin. Like, this is just Tuesday for a lot of women in society, unfortunately.

So this is all par for the course at this point... and then they start trying to redeem one of the boys who is framed as The Worst, with a lot of commentary on how he "destroys" girls which... they don't specify what EXACTLY that means, but we do get to see that uh. He definitely beats the shit out of them at the very least.

But he has his reasons? He was very stressed out? He feels REALLY BAD so it's fine I guess????

From here, the manga REALLY goes downhill. It throws its whole body weight into "WELL THE BOYS DIDN'T WANT TO BE TERRIBLE THEY FEEL BAD ABOUT IT :(" and everyone's like "oh ok" as if that undoes the previous 20ish chapters? It's patently absurd.

At the same time, we're getting some backstory that explains some things, but also adds a hundred more layers of confusion and melodrama. It just doesn't make any damn sense? This review is more or less spoiler free because it was so utterly incomprehensible by the end I can't even BEGIN to summarize it to comment on it.

This LOOKS Gay... Is It?

Short answer: yes and no

Long answer: When I was first looking over the anilist page for this, I opened up the spoiler tags and was like "haha, why is THAT a spoiler tag? That's silly."

Turns out: that tag is EARNED. It is IN FACT a spoiler and the story swerves WILDLY to pull this off. It's incredible, and that's not a compliment.

To elaborate on the spoiler text: Over the course of the story, the protagonist gets a sort of harem of girls as you might expect. There is zero suggestion that any of them are into boys in any sense... which makes sense, given the situation. With that said, while I did not expect the story to end in a lesbian harem or something, I was expecting uh... something else. Definitely not the girls ending up with boys that were like MAJORLY ABUSIVE with POORLY EXECUTED EXCUSES TO JUSTIFY IT. The one het ship I EXPECTED to happen did not, because MC does end up with one of the girls at the end which was a sort of pleasant surprise...? I don't know how I feel about it, due to some nonsense spoilers I won't be elaborating on.

There's comments to be made here about women who stay with their abusers, but I'm not getting into that, because by the end the abuse is handwaved as being ENTIRELY circumstantial, and I'm pretty sure the writer did not INTEND for this to read like blossoming abusive relationships at the end? Like it feels like abuse will be a non issue going forward, simple as that.

Tl;dr this was a baffling experience. I don't recommend it, though it gets some points for holding my attention for most of the story, and characters being charming enough for me. There's also some concepts that could've been GREAT... if they'd been handled with any degree of competence. God. What a weird manga.