Hey gang! You all know the drill at this point. Monday means a new general thread. Let’s hear about things you read this past week, things you dropped, things you finished, all of it.
Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).
Rottcodd@ani.social 1 week ago
After wjs018 mentioned the adaptation - Heavenly Delusion - in an anime thread last week, and more specifically after I looked it up and discovered that the original manga is by Ishiguro Masakazu, I binged Tengoku Daimakyou.
Ishiguro Masakazu is the author of one of my all-time favorites - Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru. It’s a fairly straightforward SOL with a particularly good cast of characters, but it also has a certain amount of overt weirdness scattered here and there.
Tengoku Daimakyou is pretty much exactly the opposite - a thoroughly bizarre and brutal post-apocalyptic mystery with a certain amount of SOL scattered here and there.
In part it’s post apocalyptic SOL in the vein of Girls Last Tour or Usuzumi no Hate, as the protagonists explore and try to make sense of the crapsack world in which they’ve found themselves. But mostly it’s a bizarre mystery thriller alternating between the story of the two protagonists in the outside world and the “students” at a sinister research institute, and the odd connections and overlaps between them.
It’s ongoing at 63 chapters currently, but feels like it’s getting near the end, since there are only a few mysteries left to be cleared up. And it’s terrific and highly recommended. And I’ll be linking the new chapters here as they come out.
wjs018@ani.social 1 week ago
Glad you like it! I had first watched the anime, having gone in completely blind other than knowing from visuals that it was a post-apocalyptic setting. The anime does a great job with the adaptation and got me super hooked. The animation was stellar, the way they pace out the mysteries and foreshadow things was great, and the OP was killer.
After the anime finished and there was no announcement for a season 2 (still no announcement 😞), I went ahead and binged what was available of the manga at the time. After I did that, I haven’t read any of it that has come out since because I felt like this was a series that benefited from the binge. Reading it all in one go keeps the foreshadowing from multiple volumes ago fresher in your memory, so that when the reveal happens, it is more satisfying. When I am reading a story like this 1 chapter/month at a time, I often just end up forgetting things and get confused.
I think I will re-binge the series now to get caught up to current. Being able to take part in the discussion threads will hopefully help keep things more top of mind going forward.