Manga / Good Night World

Good Night World is a Science Fiction manga by Uru Okabe, which was serialized in Ura Sunday from 2015 to 2017.

In a popular virtual reality MMORPG named PLANET, four of the top players have formed a guild named the "Akabane Family" and have become a Family of Choice to each other. One of the guild's ironclad rules is that its members shall never try to meet each other in the real world.

Taichiro Arima, the player behind Ichi, one of the guild's members, has a quite poor home life back in reality: he's a Hikikomori of six years with utter disdain for his younger brother Asuma and his distant father Kojiro, while his mother Miyabi seems very much absent. The family also used to have a younger daughter, Aya, who is now dead. Unbeknownst to Taichiro, every single member of his family also regularly escapes to PLANET. And he interacts with them every single day as his guild junior AAAAA, guild master Shiro and Team Mom May respectively.

A piece of in-game land held by the Akabane Family gets announced as the spawn area of the "Black Bird of Happiness," a Superboss with a big bounty of both real and in-game currency on its head. The game's large Pirate guild, led by Ichi's old friend from his early gaming years, has no plans to let it fall right into Akabane Family's lap without a fight. Hidden motives both on the part of the Pirate guild's own leadership and that of the game's main peacekeeper guild, Granada, get overshadowed by the Black Bird turning out to be a danger not only to avatars, but their players. What little mending the Arima family's situation has allowed for might very well be in jeopardy, also.

A 12-Episode Anime adaptation by NAZ was released by Netflix on October 12, 2023, releasing all its episodes.

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Tropes:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Kojiro is shown to get physically violent with his children when he considers they deserve punishment in flashbacks. The shown causes of punishment are almost accidentally spilling a drink on a computer keyboard and the breaking of a coffee mug that is implied to also be accidental. He's also revealed to have been quite controlling, ironically, during a conversation comparing him unfavorably to his in-game avatar Shiro.
  • The mother of Hinako, Pico's player, more accurately the real person whose memories served as her AI template, is shown to be the controlling variant. She asks her to be home as soon as she's done with her classes for the day while holding her arm and not letting go before she agrees.
• Acquainted in Real Life: Part of the tension comes from how likely the members of the Arima family are to find about each other, with Kojiro's position as a PLANET administrator being balanced out by his assistant Hana actively hiding things from him. The first discovery the audience knows of happens when Asuma needs to rely on Taichiro to call an ambulance for him and Taichiro notices AAAAA on his computer while in his room.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The Black Bird virus was an unintended side effect in PLANET's creation, and is capable of warping the minds of players into killing themselves before eventually taking on physical form and becoming a full-blown Reality Warper in full control of the real world. Its creation is just one of many sore points regarding Taichiro's negative relationship with his father. Moreso once Asuma gets infected and only just barely survives.
  • Discussed by Kojiro's assistant Hana while driving the Arima sons back home, using the car she's driving them in as an example. It only worsens the relationship the sons have with him.
• Appliance Defenestration: Taichiro throws his VR visor out the window over Pico seemingly abruptly cutting contact with him after promising to start a new version of the Pirates together, not knowing she's one of the A.I.s Kojiro needed to delete to make the Black Bird more manageable. By pure luck, this happens while Miyabi is coming back to the house for the first time a in while and she brings it back inside before it can get even more damaged.
• Big Little Brother: The size difference between Asuma and Taichiro is such that it's easy to make incorrect assumptions about their relative ages in both worlds. Taichiro also has much smoother features than Asuma, resulting him always looking baby-faced by comparison. Maturity-wise, the mere fact that Asuma is both still attending school and taking it seriously, while Taichiro has been a Hikikomori for six years, gives him the upper hand.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Both Taichiro and Kojiro are shown to not like feeling pitied, which ironically causes their attempts to be nice to each other in the real world to backfire. Taichiro is also shown to default to skepticism if anyone else tries to be nice to him, with all those from whom he accepts kind gestures explicitly being people he has come to trust over time.
• Dramatic Irony: When asked about his PLANET activities by another member of the Arima family, Asuma claims that he's an occasional player and merely searching for a friend he wants to bring back to the real world. The reason the other family member is asking in the first place? They saw AAAAA on Asuma's computer and are testing the waters to see if it's a good idea to tell Asuma that they are another member of the Akabane Family in-game. In other words, Asuma is unknowingly lying to one of the three people who are able to know he's doing just that.
• Evolving Credits: The ending credits, which center around Pico, switch out her avatar for the doll the avatars of logged off players turn into after she gets deleted. The last episode, which shows that at least her "player" was restored, goes back to using her proper avatar.
• Fictional Video Game: PLANET, the story's virtual reality online game.
• First-Episode Twist: Asuma, Kojiro and Miyabi are only shown logging into PLANET and revealed to be AAAAA, Shiro and May respectively at the end of the first episode.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There are a couple hints towards the reveal about Shiro and AAAAA in the first episode:
    • Kojiro is established to be having back pain bad enough to make changing a lightbulb a burden in his debut scene. May later needs to tell Ichi and AAAAA that Shiro won't be logging in due to needing to go to the hospital.
    • Soon after AAAAA needs to log off to do something, Taichiro's PLANET session gets interrupted by Asuma informing him that Kojiro had to go to the hospital for a hernia.
  • Kojiro at some point mentions that the suicide rate of A.I.s based on the memories of real people is 99%. The remaining 1%, which would mean the existence of at least one self-aware AI, becomes relevant later on.
• The Game Never Stopped:
  • Some A.I.s are made to look like ordinary players to the audience and themselves via this trope, with any instance of them seemingly being in the real world actually being an extension of PLANET that exists only for them.
  • The Black Bird can cause the purely mental variant of this trope to happen to actual players, in a way that can be best summed up as them hallucinating that they are logging off from PLANET, only to be promptly put through various psychological trials in a mental version of the real world that puts the entire Slasher Movie genre to shame. It eventually turns out that this space is also the "real world" in which A.I.s who believe they are human go when they "log off" from PLANET. From a real-life perspective, most people die almost as soon as the mental trial begins.
• GMPC: Kojiro is PLANET's creator and the Black Bird's nature more than warrants him using his privileges to make Shiro a rule bending, if not breaking, gaming avatar.
• Gory Discretion Shot: While the lead-up and aftermath are both shown with gristly clarity, Hana's death at the hands of Black Bird is mostly obscured in shadow.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: The Black Bird sends the player to the hospital the first time it kills an avatar. Getting contaminated by it isn't much better, as it leads to death by a mental variant of The Game Never Stopped.
• Wham Shot:
  • In the first episode, the montage of all members of Taichiro's family donning Virtual Reality visors similar to his own, logging into PLANET and spawning into to the Akabane Family's house.
  • In the third episode, sparks coming out of Asuma's VR visor and the character collapsing after getting his avatar stomped to death by the Black Bird of Happiness, suddenly making the latter a much bigger deal.
  • In the seventh episode, the Black Bird seemingly manifesting in the real world after Shigatera's player has logged off PLANET.
  • In the tenth episode, A news report shares reports of monsters from PLANET invading several parts of the world, including Japan, South Korea and New York.
• Your Head Asplode: Black Bird, having gained physical form demonstrates its power to the Arima family by turning Hana's head into a balloon before exploding it into a bloody mess.

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