Part 1: Introduction

I’m a big fan of Mieruko-chan, Liar Satsuki and School-live! If there was ever a sub-genre of slice of life that I adore, it’s that of high school girls going up against supernatural phenomena.

Anyway, Furyou Taimashi Reina, a manga about high school girls going up against supernatural phenomena. It’s not good.

Part 2: The story and the characters! Are they any good?

The story isn’t that deep. It’s just Reina and friends going to one supernatural phenomenon, performing an exorcism, and moving on to the next. Sometimes there’ll be an attempt at an emotional moment but those fall flat whenever they are tried.

Here’s an example: Tendou grappling with the fact that he couldn’t save his sister.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Except he doesn’t actually grapple with it, there’s two pages about it and we move on. There’s also a plot line about Reina failing to save her friend from an abusive father, but then she visits an alternate dimension in which the friend is fine and has a loving dad, which certainly doesn’t undercut any emotional weight that a story about domestic abuse could have. Speaking of domestic abuse, this manga pushes the insane idea that it, alongside some other complicated issues like gender dysphoria, aren’t actually that nuanced, but just really bad cases of ghost possession. For the love of God, either commit to your serious tone or don’t. Either try to have social commentary on domestic violence or write it out entirely in favor of the uncomfortable fanservice.

This manga has so much fanservice! I mean, the first volume of Mieruko-chan was bad, but it is a chaste saint compared to this galore of gratuitous boob shots of teenage girls. By far the grossest offender was a joke about one of the characters feeling ashamed of her small boobs (which is always funny) because that means that she can’t seduce her teacher.

One more thing to note is the final volume. The manga got axed before the author was ready to end it, and it shows in how rushed and incomprehensible it is. Any sort of character development was skipped in favour of exposition textwalls about what the characters are like and where they are. Reina also suddenly has magic powers, there's alternate dimensions and it's all dumped onto the reader so fast. The aforementioned textwalls are genuinely painful to read.

Anyway, uh, characters, yeah? This is a segment about story and characters.

Basically, there’s Reina, the mean blonde, her manic pixie tomboy friend Riku, the uptight class president Kokoro, grief-stricken Tendou and their women-fearing teacher. As far as “personalities” go, that’s it. As I said, there’s a lot of fanservice here and it always takes precedence over any sort of character building. This is because the author either thinks that fanservice is more likely to grab people, or he can’t really write character development. Seeing how empty the emotional scenes are, I assume it’s the latter. Tendou is the one who lost his sister and feels guilty about not being able to save her, which is always an interesting premise, it just sucks that a character like him was stuck in a manga this bad.

Part 3: These monster designs are jokes, not funny ones either

After reading Mieruko-chan, Bibliomania and several Junji Ito stories, you could say that I have developed a standard for monster design in manga. I really don’t want this to sound pretentious, I’m not saying that you need nightmare fuel design, but if you’re going to make a monster manga, please don’t make the monsters look like rejected designs from The Mandela Catalogue.

Sure, these would be pretty frightening if you saw them in real life, but in a horror story? They’re just meh, and leave a lot to be desired. Most of them are just a spooky face or a spooky humanoid.

My favourite design is this Bach portrait monster:

I don’t think it’s scary, I think it’s the fucking stupidest one and it got a little chuckle out of me.

Oh, that’s not to mention This Man!

Yeah, one of the main villains they face is internet sensation and infamous urban legend This Man. In a manga which is supposedly about fighting other-worldly creatures beyond our comprehension, what an uninspired and actually garbage choice for the antagonist.

Part 4: Conclusion

Furyou Taimashi Reina is a painful, insulting, transphobic manga. I think it’s unfunny, I hate it, I never want to think about it again and I don’t even like it.

Not recommended. Good night.