I read Mai-chan’s Daily Life. It’s just straight up gore porn for the most part. Definitely not my type of gore. I think I have said before that I do like gore porn but I guess apparently not if this is the “gore porn.”
The illustrations are over the top brutal. It’s interesting to look at but I wasn’t at all emotionally moved by it. It was kind of gross but nothing huge. The torture methods weren’t very creative or interesting. There’s maybe two chapters that I mildly cared about due to the emotional depth it offered amidst the nonsensical violence. I believe the author tried to make the other chapters appeal to emotion too but I just didn’t feel it.
I did find it funny sometimes but not because it was trying to be. Sayurin’s existence is just so absurd. She is such a weird character concept and I’m not a big fan of it. But it was tragically sweet to see how Mai and Sayurin find solidarity in the situations they were put it. I really liked that afterlife dream conversation they had. It was sad.
The other moment that stood out to me is how Mai is somehow eager to be a mother. She knows her life sucks and thinks it’s inhumane to give birth to a human with her condition given the environment the child will be born in. And yet she’s still hopeful her child may live a happy life. I know this was for “plot reasons” (the bigger the hope, the bigger the tragedy!) but this chapter genuinely got me furrowing my brows. This chapter is probably the most homogenized in terms of how much emotional depth is actually integrated with the violence happening. Suddenly I care about Mai as I watch her begging for the life of her child. I think the author was aware of this which resulted in this chapter having one of the more satisfying albeit still sad endings.
I guess in conclusion: gore for the sake of gore really means nothing, to me at least. You may think someone is being edgy when they say a certain gore media “wasn’t that bad”, but there are truly times when certain gore media mean nothing in the sense they don’t have a human message to deliver. That is, if they are written so plainly just to be jerk off material, I guess. Scary pictures indeed, but scary pictures alone don’t scare people. Context, human stories and dynamics are way more important if you want to leave a lasting impression on readers.
At least I learned something I guess. Therefore I did enjoy it, one way or another. Do I want to watch the movie? I have never seen a live-action gore movie before, so yes, I do.
back to library