Anyway, on the same bookstore trip where I discovered "Tomodachi Monster" (still in the mail, by the way), I also ran across a relatively interesting-looking new series called "Real Account".
In a world where nearly everyone is online and linked up near-constantly through a social media site called Real Account, a loner named Ataru Kashiwagi lives alone with his sister, consoling himself with all of his many online friends. (Gee, I wonder where we've seen that trope before?)
Anyway, all of a sudden, people from all over Japan (and I think the world, too) find themselves sucked into their phones and into a mysterious new world called Real Account (I think). There they meet our antagonist, pictured above, the mysterious Marble.
In the "real world", Marble is just the cute mascot for the Real Account site. Here, however, he is a misanthropic, near-omnipotent yet playful force akin to Koro-Sensei from Assassination Classroom (one of my favorites). One by one, Marble kills and judges the users, slaying them with tentacles at blinding speeds whenever they fail at one of his sick, deadly online games or hits a total of zero followers.
Along the way, Marble exposes online frauds for public shaming and forces the greedy and the desperate to beg on bended knee and promise the world to their followers if they don't unfriend them (but if their online friend dies, the followers will die as well, so it's a sadistic choice if ever there was one). He laughs at these actions, claiming that "this is how humans really are".
Basically, it's like a cross between "Doubt", ".hack" and "Battle Royale". We don't know what Marble is or who is doing this or how, but that's just part of the fun. And there's a really creepy-cool part at the end of Volume One where Marble (up to this point a solely virtual being) appears in the real world to come after Ataru's sister.
The story is the main focus here, really: following Ataru and his fellow users as they struggle desperately to survive through Lord knows how many deadly online games while despairing over who could betray whom. And Volume One also has a nice scene where a hottie strips down to her underthings and tells all her followers that she'll take it all off once she reaches a certain number of them.
It pretty much hits every target, save for martial-arts fantasy violence. (Sorry, ladies and germs, but that's just the way it goes.)
Hope you've enjoyed this special double posting, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
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