I fucking hate Karakuri Circus
it's as terrible as (probably more terrible than) Souboutei was good, despite a shitton of similarities.
Description from MangaDex:
Katou Narumi (19) suffers from Zonapha Syndrome, a rare ailment that stops his breathing unless he makes people laugh. He's been forced to abandon his training in Chinese kenpo and return to Japan, where he now works as a clown. The only problem: he's not very funny.
One day he meets Saiga Masaru (11), the recent inheritor of a huge fortune, who gives him the first laugh he's gotten all day. When he realizes Masaru is being pursued by assassins, he steps in to protect the boy, only to discover that instead of conventional weapons, the assassins wield huge, eerie puppets. They soon encounter the mysterious Shirogane (age unknown), who controls a puppet of her own, and claims she was sent from France by Masaru's late grandfather to protect him.
Their paths intertwine and diverge, splitting into two stories: Karakuri and Circus, puppets and performers, tears and laughter. The strange circus of living dolls that spreads Zonapha Syndrome, the human puppets known collectively as the Shirogane, and the puppeteers whose undying grudge set in motion both sides of this performance.
The similarities:
- nasty narrator
- adult male protagonist is a professional funny man who tries to make boy protagonist laugh, is bad at it
- white-colored (white hair etc) fighter lady
- specially trained ninja lady who gets naked a lot
- white-haired fighter lady and/or specially trained ninja lady protecting the boy protagonist
- three witch sisters
- several irises in one eye
- puppets
- old women abusing a girl, she then can't be happy and needs the hero's help to get over it
- airplane incident, plane lands rekt and with monsters on board
- spiral attacks
- magic water gives superpowers
- international team of monster-hunters with personal tragedies
- old woman controls a puppet
- military action against a supernatural horror threat, they get wiped
- nuking an evil mansion, it fails
- a government plan to bomb an evil mansion with protagonists in it and a countdown, win the battle in time or get bombed
- a character with half his body blown the fuck away, alive, doing stuff, helping the hero
- last enemy is bad stuff in the water/air which is about to destroy humanity
- main villain is an artist who artificially prolonged his life but got cucked by the protagonist's relative, and commands the bad stuff
- main villain falls in love with the protagonist's current girlfriend
- hero convinces villain to stop the bad stuff
- villain decides to die afterward
- very nice spoilery cover of the last volume that you'd love to get a poster of if you liked the book
The dumb shit:
Karakuri gives no impression that it was planned to any extent. I can't even say there are plot holes, because there's no plot, just wisps of thread here and there.
Let's proceed, god help me.
The main conflict is good human clowns and their nonsentient puppets vs evil robot clowns created by a mad alchemist cuck. The main story is set in 2000-2001 on Earth.
- The bad stuff is a robot virus (hereafter e-HIV) that's disabled by a specific song of a specific woman. e-HIV can also spy on people, presumably it has a camera and an antenna.
- The villain uses the capability exactly once.
- The good guys have robot viruses of their own, which they use for spying. The narrator, a human on the side of the good guys, used his robot viruses to spy over centuries of real human history, which he can show on video.
- The narrator also has a backdoor to remote control every train in the world, among other things. This is a throwaway line in the comic.
- There's a guro bait blond chick whose blood cures all diseases and grants near-immortality when drunk. The good guys decide to go to spaaaaaace, and specifically a group of circus performers is chosen for the mission because they hung out with her and I guess breathed in her dead skin cells or something? So they're immune to e-HIV. Meanwhile the chick gives everyone her blood to drink (that grants e-HIV immunity), and there are US army soldiers who drank some.
- To go to space, the clowns go from not-Liechtenstein to the Far East of Russia to ride a rocket. They ride a train with a shuttle on it. (US soldiers can't go because they're not immune.) Once they arrive, they're immediately met by US soldiers, who flew on helicopters.
- e-HIV easily destroys technology, including bombs.
- For whatever reason, at the only cosmodrome not yet captured by robot clowns, there's a rocket prepared for launch but no Russians around. The robot clowns immediately find out the good clowns are going to spaaaaaace, and they have e-HIV all over the world, but it doesn't occur to them to destroy the rocket or the train tracks or both.
- US army helicopters are protected from robot clowns (not just the e-HIV – human-scale, too) by small wave emitters. Yet the train was not equipped with one, and consequently gets attacked by robot clowns. Some characters die, others get death scares.
- The narrator concocts a pregnancy fetish horror story about the blond chick love interest and tells it to the male protagonist, who decides to kill her. The narrator then corrects himself. The dude still wants to kill her.
- Everyone is terrible to the blond chick because of the narrator's lie, even though it's not promulgated anymore, and the girl is nice to everyone. But they think she's in league with the robot clowns.
- Then she sings a song, and everyone is nice to her.
- My theory is this is used to launder the villains' atrocities w.r.t. the reader's PoV, because the same shit (do a performance – everyone loves you) happens to the mass murderer robot clowns. Like so:
- Everyone believes Eleonore is a monster → she performs → everyone loves her.
- Everyone thinks the robot clowns are monsters → they perform → everyone loves them.
- The catch is, the reader never believed Eleonore was a mass murderer, and when everyone realizes she isn't one, even if the plot is stupid, the reader thinks, fucking finally, that was retarded but I'm glad we're back on track. But when everyone thinks the mass-murdering robot clowns are hecking adorbs, from the PoV of the in-world characters it's the same situation, but to the reader it's an atrocity. This absolutely doesn't fly.
- Her "friends", who have no reason to hate her, choose to see her memories (she's extremely uncomfortable with it), including presumably the NSFL stuff (see below).
- The plan is to go to spaaaaaaace and ASK THE nihilistic VILLAIN to stop the e-HIV. This may involve beating him up, and the one chosen to go to space is world's strongest person, the male protagonist. Even assuming he wins the fight, he has no way to make the villain talk.
- A boy (not the protagonist, but a good guy) promises a dying woman to care for her retarded newborn baby (the Eleonore from above). THEN HE ABUSES THE BABY FOR 90 YEARS. The story lets it slide.
- It turns out he spied on Eleonore and the protagonists during the initial, not-completely-terrible storyline, so the horror shit retroactively ruins the only good bit.
- The villain is the boy protagonist's biological father. He points out the boy has seen, in full immersion VR, the villain fucking the boy's mother, as well as the boy's adoptive grandfather fucking his wife. This is in plaintext. The _implication_ is he also watched, through e-HIV, the boy sprout hard-ons.
- The boy has the villain's memories and should know how to stop e-HIV. But he does not.
- The villain is an alchemist who knows how to make a philosopher's stone and already successfully made one. He can make another one, no special ingredients needed, but he doesn't.
- There are robots with human brains uploaded into them. For no reason, only one copy of the brain info exists. When they die, they die for real. (There's a lot of brain copying going on, and copies are explicitly non-destructive.)
- Most robot clowns are unique, and there are hordes of them. Who makes them? Who comes up with the designs? (Usually, the point of using robots as enemies is they're mass-produced.) Who extracts the resources, given that the whole world is backdoored by the good guy narrator?
- The robot clowns' goal is to make the robot clown queen laugh. Having been created using a philosopher's stone, she's the liveliest of them all, but she could never laugh, only producing a weak smile right before her destruction. But other, more primitive robot clowns, are extremely emotional. They laugh, cry, and exhibit every human sin and some virtues, and have a whole range of facial expressions. (Again, the point of using robots as enemies is they're not emotional. The story says, over and over, how robots are allegedly unfeeling and humans are so much better. But it's a bald-faced lie.)
- Male protagonist can't project ki, having lost all his fleshy limbs – you can't ki through robot limbs. A martial arts robot clown he's fighting points this out ("it's impossible"). But the robot himself can project ki, and beats the protagonist to near-death. Then the protagonist gets an _unrelated_ revelation, and does project ki through his robot arm, and defeats the robot clown.
- The premise of the mango is a disease (e-HIV, but I don't think it was planned) kills you unless you can make another person laugh. If you make someone laugh, the fit passes, otherwise your lungs get paralyzed, you choke and die. This gets thrown out after the first storyline. No one is saved by laughter, e-HIV turns people (reversibly) into potatoes that can be safely stored for several years before they go bad.
- As the rocket takes off, there's a clown howitzer far away which attempts to fire at it. But it had gotten into a fight with some humans and only has one shot left. Suddenly, a healthy and hale human assassin appears and shoots it with a magic bullet. Then that assassin is shown missing half his body.
- How did the assassin find the howitzer, given that it is dozens of miles away and there are hordes of other robot clowns? (it's not the e-mpox, the assassin says he found it himself)
- How did the assassin get there?
- Whom did the howitzer fight that he's out of shots but is unharmed? There are no conscious humans except the protagonists.
- Who wounded the assassin?
- Male hero and his squeeze reunite in a church. Then, a one-legged robot that fell off the train and got destroyed many miles behind, finds them and swoons, then shuts down and "dies".
- How did it find them? (no access to e-HIV or e-mpox).
- How did it get there on time?
- The villain spends a lot of time trying to possess the boy protagonist's body, even though he can clone the boy protagonist's body and kill him, he only needs the boy's appearance (to groom retard baby Eleonore, it's a very stupid plan).
- The villain is on a space station, where he's built a cozy quarter of medieval Prague.
- wait what?
- The comic says it's a normal-sized modern-tech international space station that he occupied very recently, he can't have Prague there.
- The space station self-destructs somehow (despite being under the villain's complete control) and is about to fall in less than an hour, out of all places, on sexy grandpa's home village. (They divert it.)
- There are four characters named "Arlequin". Two of them are identical battle puppet units (one damaged, one pristine), but the other two are completely different robot clowns. No one comments on this or anything. The two robot clowns even fight each other.
- There are good robot clowns! But all robot clowns except the queen feed on human blood; and specifically the unlimited amount of healing blood generated by Eleonore, or the blood of any human healed by Eleonore, is a deadly poison to robot clowns (for whatever reason). So they must be feeding on weak humans.
- Battle puppets and controlled with strings. Characters rarely attack the human puppeteer, and almost never attack the strings. Cutting the strings, or entangling an enemy with them, is an oh so clever plot twist that happens a few times.