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flowerymoments · 2 years ago

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My horror manga readings pt. 4

(part 1; part 2; part 3)

Baptism, Kazuo Umezz: My first long-form horror manga by Kazuo Umezz! I was very skeptical that such a long horror story could keep me interested for its entirety but I was proven wrong. I found myself binge reading it. It was one of the most surreal, unsettling and thrilling reads of the past year for sure but! nothing is perfect. I almost considered dropping it lmao.

[SPOILERS!!!]

The edition I’ve got consists of 3 volumes. The first volume introduces Izumi Wakakusa, a highly successful actress obsessed with her beauty, however, something torments her, an eczema that covers her face. After many failed attempts with the help of her trusted doctor to get rid of it, she retires from the scene and gives birth to a girl, Sakura. She then starts a new life with a new identity away from the spotlight.

Izumi becomes an overbearing mother, very protective of Sakura’s beauty.

Later on, Sakura discovers her mother’s evil plan, a medical experiment that will strip her of her being forever. Once Sakura’s head is the same size as her mother’s, Izumi’s brain will be transplanted into Sakura's skull so she can fulfil her dream - a new chance at life with the perfect face and to marry. Her victim? Sakura’s teacher.

The trusted doctor performs the procedure and it is successful! Sakura no longer exists as her brain is smashed and Izumi’s body is buried.

Now, everything is set for the upcoming events to unfold. Volume 2 is just sequences after sequences of the most unsettling scenes. Some are very graphic in its violence, others are more into being gross or just distressing mind games.

Kazuo Umezu nailed it in creating the most devilishly protagonist ever. She really started to get on my nerves with the way she got away with everything and I just wanted to see her get taken down! Her expressions, that damned smile when she knew she won, or acting all innocent... please, someone take her down! This was my mood throughout this whole nightmare.

I don’t remember exactly when the reporter character was introduced, if at the end of the second volume or already in the third one, but I was not feeling it. I felt it was too late to add a new character so why bother, but then, when the twist came it was clear that it was for the purpose of adding clues to lead up to said twist.

The twist, honestly, I did not see it coming. The brain transplant did not happen!! It was all in Sakura’s mind! She was the one doing all the horrible things, not her mother! The trusted doctor was long dead!!

My initial reaction was “you’re fucking kidding me, everything we were made to believe, everything we saw, we just throw it out the window??” But once I finished and let it sit with me, it was kind of genius, dare I say? Only because it changed my perception of Sakura as a character. All I took from the very first few pages before she was “killed” was that she’s fond of her mother, she’s a good friend and student and that her mother’s words regarding beauty didn’t seem to affect her, but it did and adding to that her shock from the reveal of her mother’s plan it was enough to fuck with her mind. So the gist of the story turned out to be about a mother and daughter relationship from a toxic and twisted perspective, to put it shortly.

Although, I think the ending was wrapped up too fast. Izumi was buried, that really happened, but it turns out that she survived lmao!!

I want to highlight two other characters, first Ryouko. She’s best friends with Sakura and I found her scenes amusing. She was loyal to Sakura and was ready to do anything for her, no questions asked. Poor girl, she was horrified by Sakura’s confession so she felt she had no other choice but to say yes. You could feel her despair. And the second character is one of the schoolmates who is suspicious of Sakura and decides to investigate on her own. But poor girl, she had no idea who she was up against. That was amusing as well.

What made me almost drop this manga >>> There was a bathroom scene between the teacher and Sakura, because remember, Izumi/Sakura plan was to marry him, and that was too uncomfortable to read/see due to being kind of graphic. I think there could be another way to convey the length Sakura was willing to go to make her plan work but honestly miss me with this shit. If my memory serves me right, another scene later came up, but the art was more symbolic so it’s up to interpretation to what the hell may have happened there... I don’t understand why teacher didn’t put a stop to that, anyway... at the end I ended up continuing my read.

#long post #my horror readings

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a-scary-lack-of-common-sense · 3 months ago

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Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

#OKAY SO YOU KNOW THAT ONE SCENE IN THE BOOK OF BILL OR SMTH WHERE THEY SHOW ALL THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE VERSION OF DIPPER AND MABEL #WHEN THEY WEREN'T AS LUCKY AS THEIR ORIGINAL COUNTERPARTS #THAT'S WHO STAN MEETS HERE #I need you people to know that I had to rewrite this whole thing like 3 times because my dumbass #was writing a whole ass fic in TUMBLR DRAFTS so obviously it kept deleting itself <3 #but it was worth it for the Stan angst <3 #watch how many trigger warnings I can fit in this post #tw child death #tw death #tw dead animals #tw graphic description #tw graphic violence #tw graphic #tw body horror #tw scopophobia #tw gore #TELL ME IF I GOTTA TAG MORE!!#gravity falls #gravity falls au #HWINEBHABWNAJCAHOWEEATOWEUB AU #stanley pines #stan pines #grunkle stan #dipper pines #mabel pines #pines twins #absolutely not beta read- so if there are any grammar mistakes or plot holes... shhhhhh you saw nothing...#my writing #my fic #my art

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