Scumbag Loser
Initial Rating: Chills
Themes/Genres:
Mystery,
Horror, Shounen, Supernatural, Psychological; Humans vs Humans; Societal
Commentary; Mystery with Monsters
Main Characters:
Masahiko Murai, Haruka Mizusawa
Overview:
Masahiko
is a 16 year old school student who sits back and judges the world, religiously
snapping photos of every person he deems a 'scumbag loser' of society, without
realizing his own problems. One day
during school, while self-assuring himself that, no matter how low he gets, he
can never get lower than a fellow classmate by the name of Yamada, that same
classmate suddenly reveals his new girlfriend and becomes the talk of the
class. This sends Masahiko into a hallucination-induced
panic attack about suddenly becoming their class's 'scumbag loser'. When faced with this idea, he pulls out his
own picture of a girl he has several photos of and reveals her to be his own
girlfriend, who happened to be an old classmate of theirs that had moved 5
years back. He assumes he's safe, now
that his girlfriend has officially been named better than Yamada's, and
relaxes...
Until
the very next day, when she shows up to class and, after being prompted by
another student, backs Masahiko's story up.
Clearly to the shock of Masahiko.
After school he confronts her about it, getting answer after answer
about the situation… until he finally reveals that Haruka Mizusawa didn't move
5 years ago, she was killed, but nobody knew about it except him. Even once she suggests that she may not be
human, desperate to still not be the class's scumbag loser, Masahiko then
agrees to do anything she wants as long as she continues going out with
him. What he didn’t expect, was that
what she wanted was a weekly sacrifice of someone else considered to be a
scumbag loser, someone who would have 'no reason to live', according to him.
Main Review:
Scumbag Loser, boy was this an interesting one. Another piece I found on a ‘Top 10 Horror’
list, except this one was ‘Top 25’, this wasn’t actually my first choice for
the first manga review I wanted to do.
However, unable to find the other two at first, with a name like
‘Scumbag Loser’, how could I resist looking into it? This was both exactly what I expected to find
and not what I expected at all from it.
Other than the one list I found it on, I had never heard
of this manga before and, even after looking further into it, it seems decently
under the radar still. It does have a
6.8 on Anime List, under the Japanese name of “Saiteihen no Otoko”, but it
hasn’t quite even hit 1500 reviews yet.
Beyond that, there isn’t much talk about it. It’s not really hard to see why.
Right from the get-go you can tell this is isn’t your
basic manga, honestly it’s hard to tell that it’s even a horror, I almost
skipped right over it from there. But
you know the old adage, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ and that’s a pretty
relevant lesson for this one. Going from
the cover and looking further in, the visuals are already odd and off-putting,
but that sort of response is just the thing the story, itself, goes for, and
thus compliments it well. It does its
damnedest to make you as uncomfortable as possible and to show you the true
ugliness of every character, a horror in a new light, and succeeds pretty damn
well. There were several times I had to
just stop reading and ask why I was even still bothering with this. The main character was absolutely disgusting
and not the sort of thing I was really into, but I pressed on, mostly for a
lack of Fourteen. It doesn’t take you
long to realize this manga has no problem showing the goriest of details where
they’re needed, even if it isn’t normally the kind a horror fan is looking for. The art style works really well to portray
the overall feel of the story, show it how it’s meant to be.
But at points you actually have to wonder what the
overall feel of the story was supposed to be in the first place. While the story likes to jump around and
sometimes lose focus on the main point of the story in favor of go-nowhere
fluff, there’s also a bigger air of mystery around it all. The past of these characters are left in
relative shadow besides the big reveal and you’re left wondering, rather than
focusing on the weekly sacrifices, what exactly happened 5 years ago and if
that’ll ever be answered. You get
hint-by-hint throughout the story, what may have happened, and thus makes it
feel far more like a mystery with monsters than a true horror. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that
the characters and expressions in
this manga send consistent chills down your spine whenever you look at them for
too long.
Or just makes you want to burn your panties so no one can
ever touch them besides you again.
Either way.
Masahiko is, especially for a main character, hard to
tolerate through a good half the story. He
made it hard to finish this story because he’s just so unbelievably unlikable
the entire time. Between his
panty-sniffing, obsession with Haruka, overreactions, and constant lack of
self-awareness, he’s hard to stomach, and that never really makes for a great
main character. Even once the story
tries to gain sympathy for him and tries to explain his motives, that over-arching
feeling of disgust is just incredibly hard to get away from. He just never really becomes much of a
likable person, even in the final chapters.
By the end he manages to finally gain some insight that turned this
manga from ‘dear god why am I reading this’ to ‘okay, I’m glad I at least finished
this’, but you can never really even pity the main character, let alone relate
to him in any way. But I also think that
was the entire point, they’re all scumbag characters in one way or another.
The only character I could ever really feel pity for was
Haruka, however, even though she was a scumbag-eating monster and a really
bratty kid. Ultimately, her punishment
was far worse than she ever deserved and, even in the ending, I feel like she
deserved better than that. Somehow, the
inhuman creature ended up being the least detestable one.
The final couple chapters of the manga are some of the
most confusing pages, though, aside from the not-ending when Haruka attacked
Masahiko. It draws in two new characters
who realistically have no effect on the storyline whatsoever: They didn’t really even need to be there in
the first place and exist almost entirely as fluffing, but they do at least
circle back to the actual story eventually.
It still felt a bit anticlimactic, but it was the turning point for me
on the manga, even though it left a lot still unanswered. But the look on Masahiko’s face when he
finally realizes that he is, in fact, also one of those ‘scumbag losers’ makes
it all worth the while. It forces that
self-awareness he’s been utterly lacking since the beginning into his face and
it’s honestly just such a generally fulfilling
moment that it makes reading it at least worth it. On top of that, it gives Masahiko a second
chance to save his childhood friend and gives Haruka a chance to say what she’s
needed to since then. It’s not the best
ending in any stretch of the word and it cuts off fairly short, but overall the
series’ shortness is what makes it tolerable enough to get through in the first
place, so I can look past that.
Scumbag Loser is, in general, a confusing and
disgust-driven story, but not ultimately a bad series. It takes a lot of chances and, while
it doesn't always work out for it, I can respect a story that pushes
boundaries. It was a story about judging
others and evaluating yourself told in a very unique way, and while making the
main character intolerable usually doesn't work out well, this is one of the
few contexts it works in. It's still
incredibly difficult to get through, but it's short enough that you can
probably shove through it until the end.
It's not exactly a story I'll ever be going back to and it certainly
wasn't something I couldn't put down, but I think it's at least worth a glance
just for something different. Especially
if you're tired of unrealistically perfect main characters. I’d definitely peg this one a bit more as mystery
than horror, but the elements are there and this one causes your stomach to
churn in a whole new way, making for an interestingly different kind of
horror.
