Genre: Yaoi/BL
Age Rating: 18+
Price: $12.95

Quick quiz: suppose, hypothetically, that your very jealous boyfriend got so enraged by your entirely innocent relationships with your friends and your occasional lateness that he decided to lock you in your shared apartment and handcuff you to the bed. Is this:

a) totally forgivable, because it just proves that he hates the thought of losing you;
b) creepy as hell and grounds for calling the police;
c) never going to happen because you'd claw his eyes out if he tried?

If your answer was (a), World's End may just be the manga for you! If not, steer clear, unless you enjoy being horrified.

World's End is not actually the creepiest BL manga I've ever read, but the fact that the creepiness is apparently unintentional makes it worse by several orders of magnitude. Presenting a creepy relationship and acknowledging that it's creepy is one thing; claiming that the creepiness is totally okay because the guy holding the handcuffs is OMG TRAUMATISED is quite another. It's not even as if Eiki Eiki brings any particular flair or style to the disturbing subject matter; her art is undistinguished, with the figures drowning in tones and not nearly pretty enough to be distracting, while her writing is at best competent and at worst pedestrian.

I should give her credit for the central concept of the story, which is fairly original: a boy suffers amnesia after a traffic accident and falls in love, but he's warned that if or when he recovers his memories of his former life, he'll forget everything that's happened since the accident, so he keeps a detailed journal of everything important so that he can refer to it after he regains his original memories. But a good central concept is not worth the paper it's printed on if it's married to bad or dull storytelling, and World's End has both.

The pedestrian storytelling continues in the backup stories, "Kiss on a Honeymoon" and "Papa's 18", both of which aim to be funny and only succeed in being silly. They aren't objectionable in the way that "World's End" is, but they're not much good, either, with the same bland, cluttered art and forgettable writing.

In one way, I'm being a little harsh, because this kind of complete disregard for human psychology and romanticisation of unhealthy relationships is rife in BL manga; the only thing that distinguishes World's End from the pack is its utter lack of self-awareness and its unusally low level of aesthetic gloss. If I'm harder on it than it deserves, it's because I read World's End at a time when I'd come to believe that the BL genre had gone beyond the old unhealthy stereotypes and cliches, and it was depressing to see a story that plunged right into them, and without even offering much in the way of visual pleasure to make up for it. But it may not be entirely fair to blame World's End for the typical failings of the genre when my own BL experiences have been carefully filtered to avoid the more egregious offenders.

All the same, a bad story is a bad story, and World's End is a very bad story.

 

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