PicoBlog

TLDR: Do not read this manga. In 5 words, that is what my review tells you. This isn't the hidden gem you think it is. There is a very good reason this is not widely popular. This does not get better after the first 50 or 100 chapters. This is long. It will take a lot of your time. Don't waste your time. If I had seen a review like this, I probably wouldn't have read this and wasted my time, and this is why I am writing this. This obviously is my opinion, but I think that you will be disappointed if you are looking for good storytelling.

TWIM is the 3rd manga of Arai Hideki. It was published between January 23, 1997 and March 15, 2001 in Young Sunday. It tries to meditate on some complicated topics such as society, politics, violence and human nature.

I will cut to the chase, I do not see how anyone would write or read this and think it is well written. The story is disjointed and lacks a coherent structure. There is little to no build up and everything happens very abruptly. Things that happen, happen out of nowhere, and make absolutely no sense. There are a lot of wasted pages just included so in order to look cool and profound, with which you surely will agree after you read a few chapters. It ignores the very fundamentals of storywriting to be able to deliver emotionally provocative scenes to the reader. These scenes seem hard to understand not because they are complex, but because they appear profound on the surface while actually saying nothing, and TWIM fans don’t notice this only because they project rationality onto the manga and confuse their own overanalyzing with the work’s actual depth. Whatever that people think is deep about TWIM, has no reason whatsoever to be in the story. This makes the author look like an idiot rambling ambiguous stuff to look smart. A good piece of fiction, as well as how and what, must also provide an account of why.

I was shocked when I first read TWIM, it looked like something my hyperactive nephew would write and draw. And he gets scolded for his behavior every day at home and school

One minute Toshi is crying, next minute he is Jeffrey Dahmer, and that is supposed to be character development. Mon goes from the worst piece of shit who ever existed, to a combination of Bob Ross, Jesus, Keanu Reeves, Elon Musk and Romeo. This obviously is pulled off to explore some themes in a particular fashion, but TWIM fails to explore in depth any of the themes that it brings on the table. It has nothing worthwhile to say. Only interesting characters in this manga were the hunter and the president, and both of them were still terribly written.

A lot of TWIM fans praise its extremely violent, 'hype-inducing' action scenes. It deserves none of the praise, because while those scenes look cool, they do not have anything they want to tell and therefore fail to evoke any emotion in the reader. The biggest accomplishment of TWIM is exactly that, some cool panels that look like they should make you feel things. This is the reason why people like TWIM, it deludes people into feeling things. It induces no more than a placebo effect. This manga is closer to a shitty picture book than a manga. A story can simply not exist without having something to tell. The foundation of TWIM's storytelling is built on asspulls and nothing else.

Anyone who has ever written a story can tell you that TWIM's structure, or its lack thereof, does not work. It shoves itself too far up in its own ass and people conflate this with quality. To me, it all looks like the author has brought together some unrelated sketches that he drew in his free time, then glued them together with mayonnaise and wrote some random and vague lines of dialogue on them. The story looks like it was something that he came up with on the spot, because it is devoid of consistency and structure. The social commentary makes you curious as to whether it was written by Dr. Fauci.

The story was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey (as well as other Kubrick works), Taxi Driver, and a lot of Sci-Fi classics from the 20th century. Calling it inspiration would be downplaying it, the author has directly stolen ideas from works some of which you can call very famous and influential. The stolen ideas and how they are mish-mashed together manage to provide an illusion of depth, but that is all they do. The authors from whose works this mangaka has stolen knew what they were doing, he does not. You can always cite this manga as an example of that you can steal ideas, but not executions.

The art style is terrible, and I would be very surprised if someone who didn't have any visual impairment were to claim otherwise. It gets better as it goes on, but the progress makes him look like he is a kid drawing some random shiet to see if he has any talent for art. He is a better artist than he is a storywriter, and if you look at the art style, you would probably understand the feelings that I have. I don't think the author took this manga seriously. Whenever TWIM comes to his mind, he probably thinks of it as a menial experience that he had when he was young, and then the thought goes away.

It is fine to rate it low even if you have read 160 chapters of it. When I first read TWIM, I was so embarrassed of reading it that I did not log it on my MAL account for months, because I thought I was a fool for falling for it and wasting my time. But then I accepted that I had been naive. Because I am strong. Far stronger than most people. Strong people accept their weaknesses.

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