The Manga That Breaks People

Let's say Geo Sabay is 13 years old and is spending a sunny afternoon walking in the mountains with her extended family, her grandparents, her aunt and uncle, her cousin, herself, her boyfriend, and her mother, Seiko, as the family climbs the mountain. cliff. Oh, Cives' cousin pretends to push him. of the trail only for Seiko to grab him she panics as she clings to her son the rest of the family laughs at her overprotective nature after a while oh sub a and she grew up she separated from the group and began to explore a nearby forest and They discover a small clearing that leads to a vast ravine, but as they do, OSA BAE's mother emerges from the forest behind them warning the children to stay away from the cliff, but the guru ignores her only to lose his balance by staggering over the cliff. edge of the threshold, but only Before he can fall, he is saved by OSA BAE's mother who grabs her nephew with her chest closed and for a moment there is a strange silence and he falls on the clearing while his guru walks away and watches staring into his mother's eyes, a look of terror spreads across his face and he says. a single frightened word Aunt Oh climbs up, frozen in silent horror, watches as her cousin's body disappears over the edge of the cliff, her terrified eyes slowly moving towards her mother before she turns to him and just smiles, this It's Chino Adachi or trailer blood a Shuzo story oh she published me in big top comic and it's horrible, this is the kind of story that crawls inside you and whispers that the world is a scarier place than we ever knew I would have liked to admit, since OSA Bey is forced to live with the knowledge. of what his mother has done and for fear of what she might do next in a story that conveys the simple human horror that can exist in the

people

around us, but maybe you don't like horror, maybe what ended To describe it sounds like a very, very bad time and you know what, although in a way you are not wrong, you are also the person I am making this video for.

I think for a lot of

people

horror is still seen as a cheaper or less form of entertainment than something designed. to scare and startle like a rickety ride at an amusement park and hey, I recently saw a movie about a haunted elevator. I love me some good horror popcorn, but the idea that that's all horror can be is what I think keeps a lot of people away from the genre. And that's a point of view that I've really tried to defend myself against with these videos, so before we dive into a blood trail, I first want to answer a little question and that's why, when you're ready, peel it off, there's two .

The instincts that have kept the human race lost and fear, lust, have kept us existing, but it is fear that has kept us alive. Without fear, we would never have escaped our natural predators or devised the means to overcome fear. It is an intrinsic part of being human and all that horror is is the commodification of that fear. Since humans have become the undisputed champions of the food chain, our relationship with fear has changed a lot, outside of some very unusual and specific circumstances, most people will go through their lives without ever having to face fear. .

Pure terror from a natural predator, and while not eating people is a very good thing, it means we've lost touch with an ancient, intrinsic part of who we are, and what horror does is reconnect us with that part, allowing us to discover things about ourselves. themselves in a way that no other type of entertainment really can. Specifically what I want to talk about today, however, is horror through images. Horror can be incredibly powerful just through a still image and you can see this throughout history in any number of sitting in classical paintings or even ancient medieval sea maps that featured detailed drawings of horrific sea creatures potentially lurking. in the cold darkness of the ocean.

My extensive research shows that these creatures didn't actually exist, but the reason they were there was probably to scare sailors to keep them away from more mundane dangers like unknown or turbulent waters, possibly my favorite example of historical horror-based imagery. , however, are the hell paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly by the artists Hieronymus Bosch and I love these paintings. I mean, imagine you're a medieval farmer who's spent your days toiling in the fields tending your livestock without ever having seen anything that wasn't part of the natural world, and then imagine the sheer paralyzing terror you feel.

Seeing these paintings, you would feel how much more terrifying and real the existence of a horrible afterlife would become at that moment. His images even had a boom in the '50s and '60s, appearing on the cover of pulp magazines and in the pages of Western horror comics. a movement that was unfortunately killed off by a massive public and academic backlash, something I think Western horror comics have only just begun to recover from in the last two decades, but where you can find horror images that are still alive and prosperous is in the pages of the Japanese.

manga

like the U.S.

Japan in the 1950s experienced a massive horror comics boom fueled by titles like Kotaro of the Graveyard, which introduced audiences to the creatures of Japanese folklore, but without the same conservative backlash, that scene was able to grow and prosper and produce many incredible horror authors like Kaz Oh Amazo Hoshino or Sewer Hero Maro, all with their own distinctive brand of visual horror and this is something I love about horror

manga

. I think horror is best when it's intense and personal and because manga can be produced by a single person at a relatively low cost at least.

Compared to games or movies, it means there's more room for personal, experimental and strange types of horror, allowing each author to create their own distinctive fear front. For example, one of the best Genji Ito of all time, he is a master of distortion who takes things from the natural. world and corrupt them domestic cats aquatic life the human body the horror of its images comes both from the perspective of facing these horrible unknowable creatures and of becoming them the sensation that our own bodies are deformed, distorted and slowly turned against us trapping us in prisons of our own flesh, is a very specific type of fear, but compare it to the images of Koji Matsumoto, whose illustrations capture the simple morbid horror of encountering creatures much larger and more dangerous than yourself, creating these nightmarish images where the Humanity is no longer the apex predator, but small, weak and scared, both artists are incredible at creating strong visual horror, but the type of horror those images convey is totally different and, with that in mind, I want us to ask ourselves what it is. the horror of the blood trail and the response to this is the simple intimate horror of human emotions.

Many Ashima stories focus on emotionally vulnerable people trapped in horrible situations that slowly push them to break, please, like Inside Mari, a body-swapping story about a young college dropout who wakes up one morning to find himself in the body of a high school girl, but where the setting is usually used for romantic shenanigans, within Mari there is a haunting look at the obsession with identity and the feeling of losing yourself in another person and this is a common theme with her, writes . about characters who go through disturbing and terrifying changes, whether they are direct allegories of puberty like his vampire manga, Happiness or more subtle series like Ohana, the flowers of evil, the story of a teenage love triangle that gradually turns its characters into darker and more violent versions of themselves. cut, it had a big paragraph about evil flowers because it didn't flow with the rest of the video, but it's really good and you should read it and not watch it and that's okay, and what makes these stories so disturbing is how Amy is able to takes these intimate, terrifying moments in people's lives and draws the reader into them, making us feel everything these characters would feel and to show you what I mean here, I want you to imagine that you are a little boy walking through the park with your mother, but you her little legs can't keep up with her and she yells at you to hurry up and she gets further and further away and starts to disappear on the horizon, you call to her only for her to stop and look at you like it's this fear .

I'm going to hit everyone differently, but when I read this panel it filled me with what I can only describe as pure pants terror and what makes this scene so terrifying is hello, she, me, we're visually caught in these moments. , the entire scene develops from the first person, forcing us. to embody this little boy, which means that this first page carries the uncomfortable feeling of losing your parents in a supermarket, but then, when we turn the page and reveal this angry, contorted face in the haze, this woman is not looking to a character in the story that is. she looks at us and it's terrifying, but it's this kind of subtle visual horror that makes a shirt work so unsettling.

There is a disturbing duality in many of Oshima's illustrations. He is an incredible painter, capable of creating works of truly impressive beauty, but it is as if that other always existed. Next to his paintings there is always some small visual aspect that feels strange and wrong a girl looking at the viewer with her cheek stained with droid blood a woman staring at you whispering something to a child against a flesh-colored background a young face covered in shadows melting into the distorted darkness that surrounds it and a lot of it is so subtle that I can see that people don't find these images scary, but to me what's creepy is that a lot of them feel normal until you stare at them for a while and slowly something unseemly begins. to surface, it is these images that form the pillars of Oshima's stories, whether he is drawing a small town at sunset, the exterior of a family home or simply a figure standing in a doorway, he knows how to create panels that quietly whisper to you that Something is very wrong here, but it's more than just these images that are creepy in their own right, as throughout these panels, the trail of blood increases its tension.

Most concerns in horror come in two parts, the gradual buildup of tension, like a character wandering around a creepy house. and the release of that tension with a real scare, the revelation of something supernatural or a serial killer or whatever, these cycles of tension and fries are the basic components of horror and how a media outlet handles them is going to define a lot about the type of fear it creates and this is where Trail of Blood's distinctive emotional type of fear really shines when Trail of Blood was first released. It was announced as a new series full of chilling silence and what they meant by this is that much of Trail of Blood.

It's occupied by silent, empty pages passing over whether something would really happen, but because the panels of the shirt are so good at conveying this awkward, strange feeling, when you combine them into pages, it creates this unsettling atmosphere of dread that centers in the small details of a scene. But in doing so, we speed up the pace of the story and force ourselves to experience every little sensation and emotion, every little jolt of panic and every little twinge of fear, which is why some of the Blood Trail's most disturbing moments can be so Subtle as a hand tightening on a shoulder, a startled and terrified look, or an eye peering through an open door, it's not uncommon for several pages to pass without a word of dialogue or anything significant happening and it can be agonizing, but it is. that tension that catches you.

In these settings you are forced to feel everything these characters feel, but what is so uniquely terrifying about Trail of Blood is how it offsets that tension with the terrors themselves, which often consist of nothing more than the intimate social horror of the human face as There are many things with a trail of blood that may not seem scary right away, but think about it this way. A person's face is the most expressive part. Studies have identified seven core facial expressions that occur naturally from birth across all races and cultures, meaning we are biologically. programmed to express ourselves through our faces, the small folds were skin and subtle movements of our muscles that indicated not only how we feel but who we are and whether we should be treated with trust, caution or fear, which is why it is so important that artists have a strong understanding of the language of the human face and how to use it, as in the right hands it can become a truly powerful narrative tool, conveying fictional creations as feeling and thinking people, allowing us to empathize with them on a primary emotional level.

This is something that Oshima is reallyincredible because he is incredibly skilled at drawing the human face and is able to capture all these subtle flashes of emotion that can seem so genuine and chilling that he is able to give the characters the glow of someone who has just fallen and been alone for the first time , but also the paralyzing terror of someone who has just witnessed something indescribable, even small obscured flashes of their characters' facial features, are so adept at communicating their mental state that it is difficult not to empathize with them, not to feel their fear, their pain and his anger, and where this turns. a tool for horror is when it is used as a window into who these people are, revealing things that are horrible and terrifying, for example after witnessing what happened on the cliff.

Oh Savais is tormented not only by horror at what his mother has done, but also by guilt at having lied. to protect the ships from him, there is also the small problem that OSA BAE's cousin actually survived brain damage and was left in a coma, but it is a lie, but as he begins to recover, the truth begins to leak out. Rosso Bay is not slowly piecing together what really happened and when one day. she appears in front of us at a school offering to take him home, it's already a little horrifying that the two of them write in silence against a growing sense of dread until finally she casually confronts Oso Bay about what really happened and when a survey comes back to lie, she looks at him like thisThis is the face of a woman who just realized that her sister-in-law tried to kill her son and that her nephew is lying to her about it and it's horrible, this is how the trail of blood scares you, believe these disturbing and terrifying scenarios that build the tension of these scenarios through their panels and then increasing that tension with these horrible revelations about their characters conveyed purely through their facial expressions and it is this cycle of horror that makes Blood Trail be so unique and uncomfortable and there is one more example of this that I want to talk about, but this time it touches on the central horror of the blood trail.

It begins with OSA Bay returning home from school, but as she does so she hears angry shouts coming from the back of his house and as she approaches him she finds his parents arguing. Her father, furious that Psycho hasn't visited his nephew in the hospital, leaves furious. Saeko falls to her knees in silence, but after a moment she begins to mumble something about wanting it all to go away, but then she begins to speak in a strange voice as if to a child waving her hands in the air as if she were caressing someone and loving them. hug him, telling him to put on his shoes and that it's time to go, he realizes with horror that he's talking to a delusional version of himself as a child and like him.

He looks into her eyes and sees this. This is the face of a woman lost in a wonderful and terrifying deception, one whose grasp of reality has slipped and now they have fallen into a deep, violent madness and now there is no telling what they might do to her family. her husband to her own son and everything can be read clearly in her face, there is no nice way to say it, but Trail of Blood is a story about a mother who slowly goes crazy and potentially hurts her own son, and That's such a taboo subject that very few horror pieces come close to it, and, reasonably, parents harming their children is a deeply disturbing and unnatural concept, and if you're sensitive to material like that, I think very carefully about whether this it's a story that you want to experience as the The reason I spend a lot of this video talking about how horror is conveyed visually is because of how intimate and terrifying it makes it feel and particularly around the psychopath OSA BAE.

OSA BAE's mother is easily scary, one of the scariest characters I've experienced in horror. and a big part of that is how she presents herself to us as a mother. The first chapters are full of panels and scenes in which we see her in first person as she watches us from the edge of a classroom, looks down at us as we hold her hand, or as she looks deeply into our eyes, filling the page and making us feel as if her face was just a few centimeters away from ours and it is from that intimate perspective that the horrible collapse of this woman occurred, someone who for years has adored a life she never wanted.

The passing of the day pushes her closer to her breaking point, opening her slowly and letting something evil and horrible in. That's why I think the moment on the cliff is so horrible. It's a moment where, for a few seconds, oh, BAE, this kid sees what he is. mother really is he sees that the person who has touched and protected him all his life is also something terrifying and hateful and there is real pure horror in those moments, but there is also something human there too most people spend their childhood idolizing their parents seeing them as these infinite heroic protectors who will fix everything, but as we get older we realize that they are not that, that they are just people as imperfect, fallible and capable of doing evil as anyone else, and that is a quite terrifying realization for most.

What people and every trace of blood does is take that feeling and drag it into a horrible and burning life, and in doing so, it exposes it and confronts us with the uncomfortable truth that the people we love are just people and that in them resides the ability to commit great evil. That's why I would love horror. It can be silly, fun, and cathartic, but it can also allow us to engage with the darkest parts of being human and, in doing so, help us understand them. That's why it bothers me when I feel like there are still misconceptions about Horror If you look at the list of the most profitable movies of all time, horror or horror-adjacent stuff takes up almost half of the list and in the almost 100 year history Of the Oscars, only six horror films have been nominated.

Best Picture and sure who cares about the Oscars, but I think the disparity shows that for many people horror is still considered cheap or less, but for me the opposite, true horror can be anything but distorting reality and breaking the taboos that allows us to experiment. existence at its most terrifying and in doing so it opens us up and reveals truths like nothing else can and that's what I think a trail of blood does friends thank you for joining me today. I hope you had a good time with this video and if you did. and maybe you want to help me create more like this, you can do so on patreon.com slash super wolf with eye patch, where for a single dollar you can have your name listed here, as well as the chance to have your name read aloud like these. friends, orc fighters, rhinos, e-shelf e eric VG, grizzly hair, brittany Elston and Shadow Badger, as always, find me on D, let's fight a boss, gaming podcast or on Twitter at I pass, wolf friends, take care and See you next time.