ccp

After so many years of not reading manga and only being vaguely aware of what the current generation of shonen is via tumblr and what my brothers are reading, getting back into it and finding stuff that gets me as excited as the stuff from back then is an amazing feeling. I felt this with Chainsaw Man (though now that it's been a few months I think my time away from manga probably made it seem better and more original than it actually was) and all the more with tpn which is a unique shonen, and an engrossing read that had me binge-reading in my bed until morning. Actual tankobons too, since my bro had them (I really should've listened all these years when they said it was good ahah) and yeah, definitely reconnecting with teenage me there. Anyway thoughts:



I think the best thing about tpn is that it's a condensed saga that tells a different kind of story every arc, and all of them are good. The general (and captivating) story of a group of children raised as meat trying to find their freedom is the same all throughout, but narratively it starts as a break-out plot with psychological elements, then it's an adventure where we discover the completely unknown universe with the children while they're running away from their pursuers and tracking their goal, then it has an absolutely brilliant fighting arc (Goldy Pond, a highlight of the manga), and then we're following a more classic revolution plot. All this in 20 volumes. So not only the manga moves fast (which is good!) but it's also reinventing itself in exciting ways (except for the last part which I was less into but was probably an obligatory conclusion for a shonen) which I think is the reason it's so exciting.

Another reason is that the stakes are so high. Your usual shonen character fights for ideals, and the writer usually gets us emotionally invested by making the bad guy extra bad, but all of it is fairly abstract and you're reading all of it from afar. Here our main characters are literal children being hunted by monsters a hundred times stronger than them and they're literally getting eaten if they're caught. Haven't been so emotionally invested in fights in my life lol.

And tbh making children the main characters (and I do mean actual children from ages 7 to 11, not just your usual shonen middleschooler) could've been an awful choice and resulted in the most annoying manga in the world so I'm just giving points for the fact that it works. It's like one of those children-against-the-world books we had as kids, except with more mature themes obviously, focusing on their competence (i'm always down for competence porn) and kindness. Obviously it's all very idealized and artificially conflict-free (the fact that they're bred to be intelligent is the in-universe excuse I suppose) but adding even a hint of annoyingness would've made the entire thing unreadable because no one likes annoying kids lol, so good.

The number of characters (we start out with 20 runaways and it keeps growing) could also have been a put-off but I think it also works in the manga's favour in that everyone other than the mains gets a screentime of 3 pages total so the writer doesn't feel obligated to give everyone a personality/archetype and it feels less artificial that way. When secondary characters with more personality are introduced they do actually pad out the world nicely and make it richer, especially the adults, and everyone from other farms. (tho i'm still laughing at the fact that they introduced one leader guy at the beginning of goldy pond as a new important secondary guy and he completely failed to have any kind of role whatsoever in favour of another chara whose personality was just "has a hat" lmao)

The main character trio are shonen archetypes but the fact that two of them are placed in completely different positions in the narrative and that they move it forward in different ways keeps things more elaborate, while the third one also has his special place in the beginning, though he's quieter for a big chunk of the story.

I do also like that the writer doesn't overdo it on the character deaths, I really expected a manga like this to go for shock deaths and honestly I prefer that the writer chose to balance out the horrors with wholesome instead.

Now this is a bit more awkward to say because I don't actually require media to be moral but since it's a shonen and it does go that way I feel like I need to remark that it's surprisingly coherent morally. It does wrestle a bit with that because in a manga where children run away from the barbarism of being raised for meat, and where we're then introduced to even more terrifyingly barbaric human farming practices, them eating animal meat in turn is kind of the elephant in the room. In the end we reach a relatively coherent position where hunting (even humans) and enjoying meat is considered ok if it's done in the respect of the life taken, and it's farming that's evil, especially in a context where it's purposefully controlled by elites to starve out and control a country's population (!). I do think it then purposefully steps around the issue by turning "demons crave human flesh" into "demons actually need human flesh to survive" towards the end of the manga and then removing that hurdle via messiah and having everyone just accept it (where it completely drops the anticapitalist argument), and then simply segregating demons and humans, but it's something.

I don't have much to say about the art except that the style you'd expect more in a shojo or young kids manga + the children characters is a big part of what makes it look really different as a shonen, not that that makes it better or worse, but maybe the manga would feel like less of a unique manga in Jump with a Naruto art style. As it is the art really contributes to the "children's story" feel, and I hope no one mistakenly gave it to their young kids to read because oh boy the nightmares lol. At the same time, the artist does the scary scenes perfectly, there are some genuinely terrifying moments that still give me chills a++ and some of the demons are so scarily good, including the very final Big Bad. Honestly it's a good team, I can see them continuing their collaboration in the Ohba/Obata way.

This hasn't got anything to do with anything but since blogging is about recording your life then I just need to say that the name I use for this manga in my head is "croc croc", because I was mildly horrified after reading the first chapter (genuinely had no idea what the manga was about) so I was like D: in the sibling group chat and my bro just replied "ahahah croc croc les petits enfants" (lmao om nom nom little kids) so yeah that's our name for it now lol

Anyway I'm putting it in that category of "current generation shonen that my brothers like", of which the other one is Dr Stone so I'll probably read that eventually as well, as opposed to "current generation shonen that my brothers think are meh" which includes bnha (which I did try to both read and watch, and found meh myself), kimetsu no yaiba and jujutsu kaisen. Not sure if I'll attempt these but I might, if only to have a finger on the pulse of what's popular now.