500https://i.ur.com/wQ3ByhB.jpg Wow. What a nice looking treOH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE. 500https://i.ur.com/j6OZe8u.png Jacaranda is a horror manga by Kotobuki Shiriagarihttps://anilist.co/staff/111241/KotobukiShiriagari and its its horrible. Its just unbelievably awful. Almost to the point where I cant even review it. But yet its so unbelievably bad that I saw it floating at the very bottom of my manga list and I thought No I have to. Itd be an insult to all of the other awful horror series Ive reviewed over the years if I gave this thing a pass just because I think theres not a whole lot to say other than well its awful. Thats the entire review. Its just awful. It just starts immediately with a woman brutally beating an old man to death because he leaned against her on a train. Or at the very least she hurt him pretty bad. Im actually not sure if she just killed him. Its really hard to tell whats happening at any point in this series. 440https://i.ur.com/PLKUh3x.png Its not like this is a bad way to start off your series. Granted yes it is a pretty downer note to start out on. Yet my issue with this is that it doesnt matter at all? Actually the manga itself basically states it doesnt matter. As the newsperson just immediately fumbles to the next item of news which is a bikini model posing for some daring photos 440https://i.ur.com/zr4Acrb.png Dont you get it? Its like real life society man. The newscasters are so grim and only care about their ratings. Death sells Talk more about people dying And once you lure them in with news of tragedies and death hit them with the gossip of the bikini model Keep them hooked I cant even tell which would be worse. If this manga is actually a view into how this author sees the world or if theyre just fucking with us. Im genuinely unsure which one it is. Like say what you will about newscasters I dont think the majority of them would just so flippantly skip past a story about a woman brutally assaulting an elderly person. Or that literally nobody on the train watching it happen would intervene. 440https://i.ur.com/HvzjDnH.png Like how little hope in the human race do you have to have to think that nobody would defend an elderly person being attacked in a crowded place like a train? ...Anyways what this manga is actually about is a killer tree that explodes. 440https://i.ur.com/UKio1ft.png ...Yeah thats right. The old person getting assaulted literally doesnt matter as the actual focus of the manga is this weird tree that just sprouts up randomly and starts exploding the city. But that intro bit about how this person sees society is way way more interesting than an exploding tree? Or rather the roots of the tree are fucking up the gas lines and thats whats causing the explosions??? 440https://i.ur.com/3lGxhuG.png Theres no character its not a monster its just a fucking giant tree. That causes explosions. 440https://i.ur.com/raQNbus.png Rather than a plot or characters this manga is 300 pages of violence explosions vehicles wrecking and just death. And you know what? Even though theres absolutely no substance behind it I would have been completely fine with this except The art is really bad. 440https://i.ur.com/2fst9Px.png If your manga is gonna be nothing but gore and explosions your art really needs to be on point. Instead Im just looking at a pure mess. We see one or a couple of characters for a page or so an explosion or wreck happens and then it shifts to a new bunch of characters and then another explosion happens and so on. As I was reading this manga I just found myself thinking back to when I was a kid and would just doodle stick figures killing each other. This entire manga just reminds me of that. Like I can just imagine the author whipping these pages out. 440https://i.ur.com/JlfNDqz.png Okay what if like a car flies into the air and crashes into this other one or like a badly burned woman wanders down a train tunnel and then oh no here comes the train And skyscrapers just fall one after another Even if I wanted to take this manga seriously it is impossible for any of the catastrophe to have an impact because it never stops. You have to give the reader at least a little breathing room but instead... its just explosion after explosion... it just comes off as so comical when it should be anything but. 440https://i.ur.com/LdiMuNJ.png Though the true punchline of this manga is definitely the authors afterword. https://i.ur.com/VXFHqN9.png ...Thats not at all the afterword I expected to read after the manga I had just read. As a matter of fact if this afterword didnt exist I probably wouldnt have felt the need to actually write a review on this. You cant have it both ways. You just cant. You cant do a manga of this caliber that is basically just 80 explosion and then start going on about interpretations. 440https://i.ur.com/beYbFRO.png Also that bit about like him boasting about not including any sort of narrative device and like this manga essentially being a 300 page long 4koma strip? I cant even fathom thinking either of those things as good. When I do negative reviews I do genuinely try and understand what the creators were trying to go for but I just cannot wrap my head around... For one a narrative device could have helped a great deal. Or at the very least I may have not had a roaring headache by the end of the 300 pages. Secondly theres a reason why 4koma strips are strips. If you take a singular 4koma strip and for some reason expand it to an ungodly 300 pages... what would that even be? Like how would you be able to stretch it out to 300 pages without it getting incredibly old? 440https://i.ur.com/ZQsY9i6.png You would just end up with this manga. Like a nonstop 300 page long series of explosions and gore sounds like itd be great and fun in concept but its not. It fucking sucks. Its not interesting. Its not very pleasant to look at. Theres no end of apocalypse manga out there. Though this isnt an apocalypse manga to begin with since the jacaranda tree only shows up in Tokyo I think. Several of which actually possess characters narrative devices plot interesting settings twists All sorts of things If I had a gun put to my head and I was made to choose between reading this or another horror manga thats just absolutely fucking disgusting and filled to the brim with offensive content but that manga still possessed characters and a plot...? I would choose that manga over Jacaranda every single time. Jacaranda is a 1 out of 100 and an absolute and utter waste of time. 500https://i.ur.com/VLuZ00L.png