h1 fontsize: 100px h2 fontsize: 100px p fontsize: 100px Trail of Blood borderradius: 8px Trail of Blood is a Psychological Domestic Thriller/Horror about a shy boy named Seichi with a mother with an overprotective nature that hints at something more possessive and weirder in nature If you think about it theirs no deeper intimate unknown than that of our own parents they arent strangers but in many ways they are usually depending on your main character in a story depending on the type of story your character can make all the influence of the tone because the main character will typically be the eyes and perspective of which you view any story so thus they become your foothold into that world and the way in which you see that world Seiichi the main character is not able to do anything in the circumstances he finds himself not cause hes an observer but because due to the position of being just a kid the world is an unknown as you cling to your parents to help guide and protect you but the idea of those parents being unknown or alien to you can elicit an unknown dread of inside as a child. h1 fontsize: 100px h2 fontsize: 100px p fontsize: 100px HORROR borderradius: 8px A great Horror narrative is a precarious act of threading the needle you set up a clear or somewhat understandable danger to the character and present it to the audience then you play on those expectations and elevate them in natural ways playing on the tension like a bow calmly moving across the strings of a violin the music like the creeping angst of fear steadily builds. Most horror typical can be derived from a perceived threat in the 1972 movie Alien the threat reveals itself in the form of the Xenomorph a predatory and intelligent lifeform with a lacquer exoskeleton frame that hunts down the crew of the Nostrum With classic Horror like Alien the nature of the threat is an obvious one but with Trail of Blood its a bit different as it revolves around the people closest to you how you react around them can feel like an act of willing obedience even when at times they make you feel uncomfortable and you cant say anything Seichi is introduced as having an overprotective mother but the way the story utilizes this early setup gives us only a peak into how far that overprotectiveness may go. Gaslighting and other manipulation makes this kid question his own reality and the art even turns surreal and dreamlike as hes being pulled by a pendulum in a series of events he cant control in the end hes trapped for the time being a lot of times Ive heard similar experiences with friends where they simply bided their time to leave their own families due to not feeling comfortable at all around them one of my friends never told his mother his new address. family dynamics can sometimes feel like a cage and in here there is no clear method of physical escape or maneuvering away from the threat using intelligence and adaptability. borderradius: 8px h1 fontsize: 100px h2 fontsize: 100px p fontsize: 100px ARTWORK The artwork in Trail of Blood has a grainy sketchy and lifelike mannerism like captured photographs and the faces vary wildly with subtle yet different expressions that communicate much of their inner emotion and turmoil or curiosity each character has in their eyes and mouth movement or intensity in the face. If youve ever played Omori the style feels reminiscent or similar due to the similar method of line shading as if the shadows move from image to image giving it a photographic quality which in Trail of Blood seems almost stark and creepily alive and an atmosphere as if the images are like breathing memories of painful nostalgia and remembrance that you honest to god wish you could forget borderradius: 8px borderradius: 8px its hard to put into terms what some of these panels make me feel its a fleeting type of horror Seichi looking out onto a beautiful landscape like hes almost yearning to leave and its simply haunting knowing that at the end of every day of school Seichi simply has to go home and it can almost seem as if theres a strangled cry for help that he wishes to express but cant even say borderradius: 10px h1 fontsize: 100px h2 fontsize: 100px p fontsize: 100px Prologue this manga actually touched a deep part of me with my own mother who had a bipolar temperament and it screwed my perspective on my mom and made me afraid of her it was like living with two different people one who loved you and one who seemed fade in seamlessly with horrifying screams at me and rants that would pick me apart this is not to make my mom seem like a. bad person she is who she is and I learned that my mom had shit happen to her that hat screwed her over in ways I could only experience secondhand through her shes a strong person but also broken a bit. shes switch between personalities and purposefully minimize my feelings and when Id upon up about not having trust for people and friends around me shed feed my fears with cynicism and shed say things like your right you cant trust anyone and shed try to isolate me from not only friends but other people like other family members whether it was aunts or even my father and brothers all the while trying to advocate her bleak outlook on life and the world to me as at the age of 1314 she communicated to me her unfiltered life story with raw detail in the car on the way to Karate practice. Shes not above using guilt as a manipulation tool to get what she wants and the only reason Im her favorite son is because my genetics are closer to hers which is essentially to say my looks and she undermines my brothers who either have more mixed looks of our parents or look more like my dad in aspects. which is why I feel like this manga succeeds amazingly at recapturing and instilling this type of dread.