If you’re not into heavy violence, gore, and smut, turn back. This manga isn’t for the soft ones. It’s full of psychological trauma that makes you question how humans can be capable of such atrocities amongst one another. While the situations the characters find themselves in can be absurd, the motivations that drive the characters to move the story are believable.
A snippet from Wikipedia:
Dead Tube is a manga series, written by Mikoto Yamaguchi and illustrated by Touta Kitakawa. It is being serialized in Champion Red since April 2014.
I tried browsing some pages of the manga just to share the shock factor you can get with turning the pages but I just dropped the idea midway writing this post. Part of its appeal as a suspense, thriller, and near horror is how much graphic the scenes are drawn. The manga isn’t really for the soft hearts and if you google some of the images you’d get exactly what you see there and much more story wise.
DeadTube was a manga I came across years back (probably around 2015 or 2016) but dropped because the updates were slow and not a good candidate for binge reading. I’m still into edgy stories and aren’t bothered by the heavy violence provided that there’s an actual story to sift through. I won’t be mentioning spoilers and will keep the images shared to a more reader friendly. This manga has a lot of nudity and rape scenes because what part of showcasing the dark side of humanity do you not understand?
Plot:
People are lured into the site through a mysterious app with the promise of money if their videos generate a lot of views. The videos can range from benign content to extremes of violence that only those that have gone over the edge could deliver. Once you’ve used the app, you’re in the game. The last person with the least amount of views gets to be eliminated weekly. Our protagonist who has a fascination for filming meets up with a mysterious girl who asks him to film her no matter what happens. It was all fine until she starts to show her part time gig and he finds his kink.
The plot explained above sums up the introduction but this manga was a roller coaster of violence, gore, suspense, mystery, and plot twists. I mean, if you really went passed the murder, death, kill to film routine, the story has a lot of unpredictable plot twists.
The initial chapters would take you to a mystery of the week feel as the duo try to navigate through the game which foreshadows their dynamic in future chapters. The stakes get higher as well as the sacrifices they make. There's some character growth actually here and even cameo roles get that privilege before getting killed off.
Characters:
The spineless boy protagonist gets hooked up with a yandere becoming an unbeatable duo in the game. I did got bored with the spineless trope until the following chapters showed some progression to his character depth while still reminding the readers it’s Mai Mashiro’s show.
If you’ve heard of the show Mirai Nikki, Yuno Gasai has been setting the bar for what an effective yandere character is. This is only true because DeadTube has not yet reached an anime adaptation at the time of this writing. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term yandere, the crude definition is someone that has an unhealthy affectionate obsession enough to drive them to commit atrocities for the sake of pursuing their object of affection.
The Yandere as a character is effective only when they have mystery surrounding their affection that brings them to the brink of insanity. On Yuno Gasai’s case, she was treated badly by her family through neglect and abuse that led her to admire someone that treated her nice at school. Once the conditions have been stated and dumb down like that, Yuno’s impact as a yandere dramatically decreases throughout the show.
It’s sort of like once you know how the rainbow is formed, the magic that comes along with it wanes. Mai Mashiro as a yandere never wanes throughout the manga even when the mystery was revealed and it just led to more questions.
There are characters in the story that last only a few chapters but made me wish they lived on. This made me realize how much the author has made the extras believable and likeable enough for me to care about them to some degree. The manga has a habit of turning your belief in humanity to 360 degrees whenever you find something redeeming here and turn the next page to see what a piece of shit some people can be as a representation of our dark sides.
One of the X factors that made me enjoy the story is how realistic people motivations were when doing something horrible even if it started from good intentions. Some people do commit bad things because they really need the money and lived a shitty life and that part of their backstory can’t just be understood by someone who lived a sheltered life kind of deal.
After finishing the first arc of the manga, I was convinced that there was nothing further that could be added more to the story but the author seemed to have smoked the good stuff to add more layers of plot twist that made the next arc a page turner. There were times I had to pause for a moment and process the plot so far and there were also times when I just had to appreciate the art done on the panels.
Conclusions:
As an artist, I like the art style similar to how Junji Ito would make his horror comics. The heavy crosshatching and thick dark lines with grotesque human forms really brings a new dimension the scenes showcased on the panels. It would be a shame to put this on an adult anime adaptation given how such aesthetics doesn’t translate well with animation.
If you have a thing for stories that showcase how fucked up the world can be yet still find some redeeming qualities in our humanity, DeadTube can entertain you once you’ve overcome gore, violence, smut and absurdity. I like the meta message the mangaka has made and I only realized this after making the review, we as the audience are also the same patrons that support DeadTube as we keep turning the pages for more content.
If you made it this far reading thank you for your time.
