Girl May Kill

You might read this series, perhaps get drawn into it, and wonder what the hell all the people who gave it such a low rating were smoking. Did they expect something else? Were they prudes and objected to some of the content? And then you come to the ending and it all becomes clear. There are happy endings, there are melancholic endings, there are tragic endings. Any of those three types would've worked here if done well. What we got instead was a troll ending, a big middle finger thrown to the reader. This short series started out as a 7/10, becamea strong 8/10 towards the end, and ended with the dumbest finale imaginable. I'm talking Gantz TV or Mai Hime finales dumb here, though in a very different way from both. Instead of the premise spiraling into dumb, here the main character does something so ridiculously stupid that you just stare at the page in shock and think WTF?? So I was enjoying it a lot until then, it had a lot of promise, and was only getting better, and then it got a rushed final arc leaving lots of unresolved plot points and ending with ... dumb.

This manga had some real potential, and I was like WOW how are they going to end this the next three chapters? Now I feel like I should've skipped the ending and stayed with that feeling. I would suggest this manga, but more in passing than as a priority read. There's a real issue where you don't realize this is a MATURE story till about chapter 7~9. That's when you have to move from the living room to your cell phone in your room. I would argue that if you can make it to that chapter you see the story and art style dramatically increase inquality. Then you should skip the last chapter. It feels rushed and out of character, and yes they do HINT at the twist but it just doesn't sit right. Not only that there are a TON of loose ends. I like that the manga starts taking it's mafia themes seriously towards the middle, but I just feel like the end doesn't offer any redemption.

This is the only series I've ever read in its entirety in one sitting. Girl May Kill is a bloody, dark, gangster mafia manga. The situations presented in the story are already disturbing enough. And then when you take in the fact that one of the main characters is just a fifteen-year-old girl, it makes it even more so. The story is told mostly told from Aki Gohongi's perspective, a 20-something-year-old guy returning to his childhood hometown to work at a video store. He thinks he's coming back to familiar territory, but he quickly learns of the underworld and dealings that goes on behind the scenes. Hepromises himself that he won't get involved. But if you know how these stories go, you can probably guess how well he keeps his promise... Girl May Kill is very reminiscent of classic gangster films; one scene even symbolically pays homage to the film Scarface. And although it draws from these older gangster films, the story itself is far from cookie-cutter. One twist in the plot in particular caught me completely off-guard. From what I drew, two themes are blatantly evident throughout. The theme of everyone having harboring evil inside of them. And "scorpion and turtle" theme (you'll know this is about when you get to that point in the story). It has been rumored that the story was meant to be much, much longer. Somewhere around 100 chapters instead of the 23 we ended up with. That being said, the last few chapters feel rushed and I admit that the ending is very abrupt with many questions left unanswered. If it had kept going, this had the potential to be a 9 or maybe even a 10 in my book. I highly recommend it.

This manga had interesting aspects but it completely squandered them. The setting and premise was interesting, in that it was a town close to the underworld with a major conflict unfolding, seen from the premise of someone normal that due to various circumstances gets involved. The characters were also interesting, in that they had interesting personalities and motivations, with Mei being the most interesting. However, most of the characters felt like they weren't used much at all other than Gohongi and Mei, and with the latter two while it was proceeding in an interesting direction, in the end it was nonsense. Mei's ultimate goal ceases to matter in away that made it feel pointless and like things were not resolved at all. Her new goal is then set up in such a way that I felt that while not really resolving the plot threads already established, it could end the series well enough, but then that gets thrown away too. Rather than take the path of trying to grow beyond one's sins, the path taken is one of forcing oneself to forget them completely, which just felt completely dumb and pointless all around to the point it put a damper on the entire manga. The art felt like it was pretty low quality and the style also didn't fit the atmosphere so that was also an issue. tl;dr: An interesting premise with train-wreck level writing.