The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Slasher Maidens

What's It About? 

Around the world, a phenomenon is observed where those whose mental stress reaches a peak transform into monsters called "Kaijin" and succumb to murderous impulses. Such supernatural events were completely unrelated to proud pervert Asuma Sudo, but after he transfers to an all-girls school while chasing the girl of his dreams, he discovers that the school was actually a front for an anti-Kaijin special agency!

Slasher Maidens is drawn and scripted by Tetsuya Tashiro. Yen Press will release both print and digital versions of the manga's first volume on December 1 for $13.00 and $6.99 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I was initially going to give this a higher rating (not much higher, but still), but then I got to the second half of the volume. That would be when protagonist Asuma, fighting the kaijin alone, realizes that his enemy is female and decides that the best plan of attack is to grope and rape her. It never gets to the latter and the book has attempted to lead up to this by saying that the only thing that can counteract Thanatos (death) is eros. But monster or not, nothing justifies sexual violence, and although the story tries very hard to frame Asuma's actions as at least partially comedic, it made me want to throw up.

Even without that sequence towards the end of the volume, Slasher Maidens' premise is not going to work for all readers. The idea is that kaijin – monsters born of suppressed human desires and/or frustrations – have been wreaking havoc on the population. Their depredations are largely regarded as urban legends, though, because one very special organization is doing such a good job at keeping things under wraps so as not to spread panic. That organization is one that looks like a prestigious girls' high school from the outside, and the teenage heroines are all equipped with “mementoes” from defeated kaijin, which allow them to take on the monsters at equal power. The problem? Sometimes they get carried away by the kaijin whose mementoes they've put on. Enter…eros!

Yes, that's right, the only thing that can stop the rampaging powers of psycho killers is a boy shoving his head up a girl's skirt, kissing her against her will, or grabbing her breasts, because only lust can defeat death! From a certain perspective, that does make at least a little sense, what with sex being how the cycle of life continues from a strictly biological perspective. But the idea of a girls' school recruiting the horniest teen boy they can find so that he can specifically creep on their students to snap them out of murderous rages…let's just say that that would be more likely to put me in a murderous rage than the opposite. It's the sort of story that's really not intended to be remotely realistic but still manages to make it seem like the creator never interacted with a real human female ever. (He has; he mentions his child in the afterword, which drives home the idea that this is meant to be funny on some level.)

If we look at this purely as a work of ero guro (erotic grotesque, think Edogawa Rampo's “The Caterpillar” or “The Blind Beast”), there's really interesting imagery and the idea of a cult claiming that kaijin are the next step of human evolution becomes something fascinating. The problem is that it tries to be both ero guro and a teen sex comedy, and those two things, while not mutually exclusive on all levels, don't sit comfortably together. This has its moments, and for the most part Asuma is trying not to be a bad guy anymore, but it just takes things a step too far to be a book that I can recommend to a general audience.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

You know, I've somehow managed to get through the last six years knowing nothing about Akame ga KILL! despite its popularity, and after reading Slasher Maidens, I think I'll keep it that way. I despised every single one of its three hundred pages – because of course it's a double-length volume – and by the end was practically counting the panels until I could be done with it.

This is a story where our “hero”, Asuma Sudou's penchant for molestation isn't a flaw, nor a neutral trait, but is actually an advantage. After a lifetime of committing light sex crimes like flipping up girls' skirts, he gets recruited to what he always believed to be a high-class girls' school but turns out to be an institution devoted to fighting kaijin, mutated humans who develop superpowers and wreak mayhem. The girls of the school don weapons made from kaijin they've killed previously which grants them powers of their own, but they run the risk of losing control.

This is where Asuma comes in. See, he's not just normal human-level horny, he's a sex kaijin, whose power comes from eros, which makes him the opposite of other kaijin. If the girls lose control, he must initiate sexual contact with them to break them out of it – you know, kissing them, blowing in their ear, grabbing their boobs, and so on.

I have so many problems with the concept I could probably write at least a thousand words, but I'll spare y'all and keep it brief. For starters, there's the issue that Asuma's “eros” is the opposite of violence, even when sex and violence are linked with an alarming frequency. In fact, he's been committing sexual violence since he was a small child, since that's what peeping and flipping up girls' skirts is: sexual violence for beginners. Later in the volume, he even tries to rape a female kaijin. I'm supposed to root for this nasty little pervert and believe that the girls he battles with like and trust him? No way. Screw that.

Sure, Tetsuya Tashiro is a decent action artist, and the fight scenes are easy to follow and have a strong sense of motion, but there's no making up for how rotten to the core the concept is. I refuse to give it even a half star for that. His concept falls apart if you pick at it even a little; does he really expect me to buy that a boy who has disrespected girls for his entire life is not only trusted in an all-girls' school, but that the girls like and respect him even though his entire job is to violate them?