14/07/2021: thriller manga with plotting and mind games

1) My Home Hero

A salaryman tries to get rid of his daughter’s abusive boyfriend but ends up embroiled in a battle of wits against a yakuza gang, which quickly spirals out of control. The plotting in this manga is extremely complex and there are lots of cunning traps and tricks involved.

2) My Dearest Self With Malice Afterthought

A university student wakes up with amnesia and next to a beautiful girl, who reveals that she is his girlfriend. This is really weird because it turns out that he’s the son of a serial killer and this is usually a turn-off for most girls. Anyway, some shit happens and he has to do a lot of things to thwart a gang and rescue his girlfriend and then a series of deeper mysteries are revealed. I really enjoyed the plot of this series and am always excited for the next upload!

I really like the art for this series as well!

3) Kimi ga Shinu Natsu ni

A boy starts seeing the ghost of his crush. It’s weird because she’s not dead. Yet. Anyway, using the girl’s fragmented memories of the relative future, the pair try to avert her death by solving the mystery. This mystery is a bit lighter-hearted because it’s mixed in with a romance so there are nice and sweet moments as well.

4) Ijimeru Aitsu ga Waruinoka, Ijimerareta Boku ga Waruinoka?

A bullying manga following a former bullying victim who becomes a teacher, whose student is the daughter of his tormentor from his school days. With this manga, not everything is as it seems! (That’s a bit of a spoiler, but that knowledge kept me going through the manga.) Anyway, we follow the story from the perspectives of both the teacher and student, and they both have a lot of mind games and plotting. It’s not bad! There’s a bit of sex but it’s not very intense.

5) To You We Were Demons

This is an extremely NSFW manga with a lot of violence and sex and horrific imagery. Basically, a bunch of bullies who grew up to be very successful but someone starts targeting them and ruining their lives. It can be a bit fun to watch them suffer but the violence, sometimes of a sexual nature, is really intense so it can be too much. I feel like it’s actually calling out manga that like to fetishize “revenge on bullies” by making it so intense that it becomes grotesque.

That aside, the mystery really is quite interesting. More than once, I thought they were leading in a certain direction but they switched it up in a very surprising way!

6) Montage

A pair of childhood friends (a boy and a girl) go on a thrilling adventure to solve the mystery of the boy’s father’s death several years back, uncovering a mystery surrounding a seriously-big robbery. I remember reading this back in my Year 1 and really enjoying it, although the updates have since ceased. Although I’ll probably never discover the ending, I think the journey was well worth the time!