Reviews Manga / Akame Ga Kill

A manga that takes you for an idiot.

Akame Ga Kill is one of the worst-written shonen manga of all time.

I'm not kidding, and let me explain why I think this way.

See these Designated Evil and Narm tropes on the YMMV page ? (I added the latter one, by the way.) They encapsulate absolutely everything that is wrong with Akame Ga Kill.

The manga is a festival of cruel, gratuitous violence (both in the physical, mental and sexual sense of the word), very predictable character deaths for the sole sake of shock value, shallow and clichéd characters fined-tuned to maximize the gratuitous violence, and a world so crapsack that even the writers of Warhammer 40K would find it a little over-the-top.

And you know what ? I could be fine with it all. I can appreciate a violent, exploitative story once in a while, one of these stomach-churners that nonetheless make for a mesmerizing read. I don't find the crapsackness of the world repulsive in on itself (hell, one of my favorite mangas is Berserk), and the character designs, clichéd as they can be, look cool enough. The fights and powers are rather cool as well (in the manga, that is.), which is really the least you can ask of a Shonen series.

But Akame Ga Kill isn't satisfied with just being that kind of series. Because Akame Ga Kill manages to be pretentious.

It had to try and establish Grey and Grey Morality, thus taking any reader thinking about it for more than five seconds for a complete idiot. It had to try to have its shock value-filled cake and eat it too. Even if her design is cool, Esdeath is such an invincible Villain Sue that it makes her appearances boring. Even the "good" members of the Jaegers are working under such patently evil assholes with precisely zero wish for reform that it makes you wonder if they are supposed to be delusional (special mention to Wave, whose only reason for siding with the Jaegers instead of Night Raid is becaue he got saved by someone once.). Anti-Villains can work, and work quite well indeed, but I lose my sympathy for them when they serve complete psychos instead of more reasonable employers.

In a few words: if you want to read Akame Ga Kill, turn off your brain completely. Just stare at the violence on the pages - but if you're like me and tend to feel pissed off when media tries to pass itself as something much smarter than it actually is, go read Berserk.