I... I just... I just can't even... process what I just read.
#THIS REVIEW IS GOING TO BE A FULL SPOILERS REVIEW. THIS MANGA IS RIFE WITH BOTH GORE AND MOST LIKELY UPSETTING CONTENT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF I LIKE IT OR NOT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF IT MAKES SENSE OR NOT. PLEASE ASSIST ME IN LOCATING THE NEAREST INSANE ASYLUM. I NEED HELP.#
#Everything is Rotting#
Until Your Bones Rot is a horror... psychological... thriller... mystery manga by Yae Utsumi. It's about five high schoolers and their super deep friendship! They are the best of friends!
And all of them are happy and this is a happy manga and that is the end!
...No, just kidding. Their friendship and bond is continued to be upheld because they all kind of played a role in murdering one of their dads. He was abusive, made his son crossdress because it would remind the father of the kid's mother who died, but he was still sometimes capable of being a good dad.
Except wait, did I just hear you talking shit about me to your little shit friends?
IT'S TIME FOR ANOTHER BEATING.
So basically, the protagonist's friends arrived at a certain conclusion. They needed to murder the protagonist's batshit crazy and abusive father. To be fair to them, they did attempt trying to go to their parents but they of course just told them to stay away from that fucking weird kid and his batshit crazy father.
Wouldn't be a horror/whatever manga if the adults weren't fucking useless!
And what a surprise, they actually manage to pull it off. With a meaty thwack with a hammer to the skull, the dad is successfully murdered. GOOD JOB TEAM, NOW I HAVE NO PARENTS.
But the truth is all the friends are completely fucking rattled by the fact they all just kind of committed a murder. Main protagonist kid just sorta blurts out
"we should come back every year and dig up my dead dad and look at him and see how much he's rotted each year and we can have a blood pact and everything. It's not a real friendship unless we have a blood pact!"
And like right out of the gate as some giant asshole who likes to nitpick every single plot detail that happens to nag at me, I have immediate and intense problems with this. Do you really want to tempt fate like this? I mean I've heard that criminals return to the scene of the crime, but this is ridiculous! Like I'm just now thinking about it and... they go to the cave with the dad corpse, dig it up, look at it, like reconfirm that they're still friends and are gonna keep doing this, and then put the corpse back.
They murdered him at a festival.
Like granted, they led him off into the wilderness away from everybody and then when he was dead they dragged him into that cave but... people saw him at the festival. Hell, he bumped into a guy!
There wasn't a search? You know, around the area? Five kids dragged the corpse of an adult off into some fucking random cave. Oh, I don't know, he just disappeared!
That's just what happens! Kid goes to the festival with his dad and.... his dad just disappears. Just like that! Whoops! Okay kid, since your dad's gone, you can just live on your own...? ~~There's like a timeline following one of the volumes and it says he went to live with one of his grandparents but he did just eventually end up living on his own.~~
Anyways, like five years in doing this stupid ritual of visiting dad, things go wrong. Somebody's found the bone cave. The mystery person has absconded with the skeleton left a phone behind to be able to call the group and threaten them into doing something for them.
Namely cutting up a corpse. Fun! And also pretty rude.
You murder one person and then people come up to you and start asking hey man can you please do me a solid and dissect this corpse for me? Doing something once doesn't make it a hobby!
They freak out a little bit but then they do calm down and get their priorities straight. Going to jail sounds pretty fucking bad, so of course they chop up the body--
Wait, no hold on. But why? At the end of the manga, the time most of them get is two years in juvie. TWO YEARS. And this is what they got, AFTER, they started dissecting corpses!
Like over and over again the idea of turning themselves in pops up, and the characters always end up shooting it down. But honestly they should absolutely turn themselves in. Two years is a pretty fucking light sentence when you take in consideration that the weight of the murder is really starting to wear away at them.
Especially one character, who, eventually, is so desperate to get out of the situation that he tries some bullshit and it leads to him...
...you guessed it...
GETTING MURDERED AND HAVING HIS REMAINS CHOPPED UP BY HIS OWN FRIENDS.
And also at one point, phone guy who straight up just officially gets named by the characters themselves as "Telephone Guy" has them all come over to the apartment where he had them dissect the first body and just straight up tells them all to strip and immediately I am just like oh for fuck sake
GOTTA INCLUDE THE REQUIRED HORROR MANGA NUDITY
And honestly I was already getting real bad vibes from this manga as it was.
As there's a flashback scene where one of the girl characters comes over to the main protagonist's house while it's raining and she... ends up having sex with him and afterward he tells her verbatim that he's never going to have sex with her ever again.
Okay, first of all, why would you say it like that?
Secondly, why? Everything about the main protagonist's character has indicated that he strongly likes this girl and also she killed your dad for you. Took a hammer to his skull and became a murderer for you.
And like later on after one of the largest and worst revelations of the series that I immediately predicted, he says some shit like "oh I actually said that because I felt bad because the only reason I slept with you was because I was lonely."
...I fucking hate this protagonist.
But speaking of unfortunate sexual content, there's also this random homeless woman who somehow becomes a major player in the plot of this manga.
And her price for giving the group for information is... kissing the... main protagonist. A high schooler. He is underaged. She is an adult homeless woman who later in the manga is shown to have been prostituting herself to the rest of her homeless community.
Even when the group's dealings with this woman are concluded, she straight up floats out the offer that if the protagonist ever wants to have sex with her he can always just stop back by whenever he wants.
Nothing wrong with this.
Nothing wrong with this. Nothing wrong with this. Nothing wrong with this. Nothing wrong with this at allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll.
Also, when she had them tied up with like bondage rope while she was verifying the somewhat false information the group gave her about one of her homeless friend who they dissected, a couple of other homeless guys materialized from the darkness because they saw two female characters tied up and you already know where this is going.
Yep. Had a whole extended scene with these assholes verbally confirming whether or not the girls are virgins and basically threatening them that if they don't earnestly request to be raped they'll just beat the male characters to death.
Thankfully, the batshit insane homeless woman character returns and has the would be rapists executed offscreen.
Literally.
Even insults their dying screams. You would of course hope, that this would be it for... the unfortunate sexual content. Following the almost rape, the other female character shows up at the protagonist's house. You know, the last time a female character showed up at the protagonist's house alone she--oh god no.
How many times am I going to have to say it?
How many times?
Like sure she already clearly liked the protagonist before this point, but no. No to every single thing about this scene. This is awful. But apparently the author doesn't think it's awful enough because when the protagonist refuses, she pressures him into doing it by saying she'll turn herself in for the original murder from five years ago.
Because she's rightfully tired of dissecting corpses, having to shoulder that original murder, and also she was almost raped by homeless men earlier.
Maybe the protagonist is going to talk with her? Point out that this isn't a good idea to be doing right now and try to comfort her in a different--nope he just straight up has sex with her.
Okay, so he's had sex with both female characters. One he liked but had a ~~fake~~ boyfriend and then rejected, and then one he straight up just did not like but he didn't want her to get arrested and face up to
TWO YEARS OF JUVIE
and I'm not even shitting you, after this, her entire character basically becomes, at least temporarily, "I want to have more sex with the protagonist." This could be excused because she herself straight up said she's using it to forget about their current situation which is understandable. All of them are a bit stressed and
She came over to try and have sex with him again and HE'S TALKING TO THE SKULL OF HIS DEAD FATHER THAT THEY MURDERED. SHE SHOULD BE CONCERNED WITH HIS CURRENT MENTAL STATE, INSTEAD, SHE'S ONLY TEMPORARILY SURPRISED AND THEN REMINDS HIM THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE SEX.
And he very angrily points out that he was in the middle of a conversation with his father WHO IS A SKULL and then
oh for fuck sake
...Everything I've described to this point so far is pretty bad, right? Well, what if I told you that there is also... like there's a point where their investigation or whatever the fuck it's supposed leads them to a teacher they had when they were in elementary school. He's hanging from the ceiling dead but that doesn't even matter. What does matter is that in his apartment, they find photographs...
A photograph... of one of the female characters... when they were still elementary students... and plenty more...
NOPE. NOPE. NOPE. NOPE. NOPE.
I didn't even go into the ending of the manga. How obvious who the culprit was. Didn't talk about how pointlessly convoluted their scheme is and how their goal is completely opposite of what they end up achieving but yet in the end they get everything they ever wanted anyways after serving FOUR AND A HALF YEARS OF PRISON TIME for everything they did...
~~Hey, they were supposed to have eight to thirteen years. They got let out so early because of good behavior and a willingness to atone. You know. For multiple murders and also having others literally dismember corpses.~~
Doesn't matter. Doesn't fucking matter. I liked the gore, I liked when the characters were beginning to crack and become broken, and this genuinely worked for me as a "page turner"...
But you know... when I saw that photograph. I just immediately fucking knew exactly where this was headed. I was just struck with an immediate sense of dread and as it turns out, I was right to be.
...Let's just say I did not feel that aspect of the plot was handled appropriately nor was it fucking necessary. It was already convoluted as it was. This entire manga was supposed to be about the original murder of their friend's father but it so quickly becomes the least of anyone's concerns. Hell, when the culprit gets caught, when asked where the rest of the goddamned bones (aka what they've been scrambling around to try and get back pretty much the whole manga) were, they just nonchalantly go
"oh well I just kind of threw him back into the cave. You know, where they were the whole time before all this shit started."
be warned! the following image gives away who the culprit is!
Spoiler, click to view
Are you fucking kidding me?
#Conclusion#
When I first finished reading this manga and before I immediately started writing this review, I set this series as an 8 out of 10.
Upon thinking longer than a second about the series I just read, I had to ponder if I myself had suffered someone hitting me in the back of the skull with a hammer without me noticing it prior to the act of writing this review.
Like just because it was a page turner does not mean it's good. And I think in the absolute bewilderment this series left me in, I temporarily forgot that. Again, I did genuinely like some parts of this series and some of the scenes (specifically the protagonist talking with his dad but he's just a skull) were cool. Everything else though? Absolute trash fire and I hate pretty much everything about it.
The maximum level of growth that any of these characters receive is that realization that pretty much everything they've done in this entire manga is probably illegal or at the very least wrong. And this is an exact quote directly from the culprit after having redeemed themselves via FOUR AND A HALF YEARS: "You really shouldn't kill anyone, after all."
~~...After four and a half years, that's all you got? YOU DID WAY MORE THAN JUST KILL SOMEONE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU~~
...I give this manga a 2 out of 10 with a disclaimer of I could probably see myself putting it even lower than that.
It's a roaring trash fire and now that I've used it to warm myself, I'm leaving it behind, and I hope I never think of it ever again. Would I recommend it? Yes, but only if you like trash fires.
