Scumbag Loser Review

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.