Last night - out of little more than boredom and illness-induced inertia - I made yet another attempt to get into MPD Psycho. And d'you know what, folks? I just couldn't do it.

So the whole experience wasn't a complete waste of time, that means I'm now going to do a rant about why I couldn't get into this series despite making two (count 'em!) bona fide attempts to do so for no more reason than it sounded like it should have been interesting when I read about it the first time - and then, last night, wanting to double-check if I really had read a manga where some girl tries to suicide with bricks and knives or if I'd just read about The Great Sonic-Cide of 2007 while eating mac and cheese and then gone to bed.

Turns out it was the former. Well, that's MPD Psycho for you.

Anyway, I found out about this series through TV Tropes. It's also got a Wikipedia article, which is not as well-written but may be rather safer for general consumption. The premise of the series can be summed up - and I'm letting Wikipedia and the overexcited souls at Comixology do that for me - as follows:

Detective Yousuke Kobayashi's life is changed forever after a serial killer notices something 'special' about him. That same killer mutilates Kobayashi's girlfriend and kick-starts a 'multiple personality battle' within him that pushes him into a complex tempest of interconnected deviants and evil forces. After being imprisoned for murderering the killer, Kobayashi is released and takes a job with an independent detective agency ran by Machi Isono, investigating a string of murders conducted by serial killers with barcodes in their left eyes - something they share with Kobayashi himself.

I won't claim this sounds like exactly my kind of thing, because it doesn't. What caught my attention was that the series kicked off with someone abducting and mutilating the main character's girlfriend, Chizuko, and since it stated she was still alive when they found her, I wanted to find out what happened to her afterward. I really should have known better than this since Chizuko was a woman, but hey, this was a 'psychological' manga, right? Yeah, I'm clearly far too optimistic for my own good sometimes but I am, as my fanfic will probably attest, that kind of person - I'm more interested in seeing what happens to people after they undergo serious trauma than in the trauma itself. I really wanted to see where the series was going with this.

Turns out it was nowhere. As soon as the series really gets going her abduction, torture and subsequent death is - from what I saw - never brought up. Poor Chizuko gets quite literally stuffed in the fridge, then her boyfriend pulls the plug on her ventilator and that's it. Chizuko exists solely to induce Kobayashi's psychotic break. She doesn't even motivate him after he offs her killer. She's totally forgotten and might as well not even have existed.

This was the first sign that I probably wasn't going to like this series.

I carried on reading more out of curiosity than anything. There was something going on here, I could see it, and I was curious to find out what it was. I got through the first few volumes that way, constantly hoping that maybe now things would start to improve and something would happen to genuinely hook me, but all that happened was I got more and more bored and frustrated, to the point I ultimately gave up. This could have been fascinating. It should have been fascinating, I could see the series working overtime to try and compel and ensnare me and here I was utterly failing to be compelled, in fact beginning to feel - in spite of the conspiracy, despite the array of endlessly inventive serial killers - bored. Why, though? What went wrong?


The Story
Maybe I'm just too stupid to get it, but the whole conspiracy-theory arc plot connecting the more episodic Serial Killing Fruitloop Of The Week stuff just didn't interest me at all. What revelations were made in the first few volumes were doled out very stingily indeed. All I really got was there was something about serial killers with bar codes on their eyes registered at a central eye bank and also Modern Life Is Rubbish. The cod-psychology angle about Kobayashi's psychotic break and subsequent DID also seemed, to me, perhaps a little bit tacky. He's got DID and one of the personalities is a serial killer? As cliches about DID portrayals in the media go, that's gotta be one of the more offensive ones.

As regards the overall conspiracy-theory arc plot, I admittedly never got the feeling that the authors didn't know where they were going with this - but the revelations were doled out so grudgingly that I simply couldn't keep up the emotional investment. To me a mystery plot works best if a question, when answered, leads only to more questions. MPD Psycho, by contrast, seemed to be content to spend the first few chapters posing the same question - why do all these people have bar codes in their eyes? - over and over. No matter how good a question that may have been it got a bit repetitive, and left the overall arc plot spinning its wheels frantically but getting nowhere very much. By the time more information did start trickling out I'd long since stopped caring.


The Characters
That may have had something to do with the characters. Put simply? I just don't care about what happens to any of these people. The male lead, whatever he may be calling himself, came across to me as bland and uninteresting. The two main personalities I saw him exhibit are both tiresome cliches: Shinji Nishizono is a generic cackling psychopath; Kazuhiko Amamiya is an equally generic level-headed investigator. Neither struck me as particularly interesting.

(Speaking of: I understand detectives and investigators need a degree of cool detachment to do the job they do. I didn't like the Scarpetta novels precisely because Scarpetta seemed to spend half her time angsting about Oh Noes The Victim in a manner that seemed frankly overblown for an experienced coroner. Still, some suggestion that the Amamiya character actually had a basic awareness that, say, being abducted and having the top of your head cut off so some whackadoo could plant flowers on your brain while you were still alive was a really fucking horrible thing to have done to you might have helped.)

The rest of the characters were no more interesting. Machi Izono is a cipher and doesn't seem to have much in the way of any personality of her own at all; her little sister Miwa is the kind of sassy, innocently sexual high-schooler shonen manga is so fond of, and was incredibly annoying with it. Apparently she gets a little more relevant to the plot later, but that doesn't change the fact that at first all she does is hang around the main characters looking sassy and booby and contributing absolutely nothing save - you were there before me - occasionally being imperiled by the Serial Killing Fruitloop Of The Week. There's a photographer whose name I can't recall whose defining trait appears to be 'he's a professional gawker with an eyepatch', and a bunch of recurring characters - investigators, I presume - who come across as blander even than that.

I have yet to come across a single character who actually made any real impact on me. The closest any of them have come is Miwa and that's mostly because I have no idea why she's even kept around save 'oh, she's the female lead's hot kid sister'. It's like the story comes with a built-in Mary Sue.


The Artwork
Weirdly, this is just the last nail in the coffin for me - weirdly, because the artwork in MPD Psycho is actually rather good. The problem is - and this may sound horribly pretentious and unfair from someone who can barely draw at all - that I'm not entirely sure it's very suitable for the story it's trying to tell.

Though it's stark, powerful and often technically very impressive, there's something a bit off about the artwork that I, not being an artist, can't really put my finger on any more than generally. It just doesn't ever look quite natural. Something about it comes across as curiously inert, even when it's clearly aiming to look powerful or dramatic. Even getting shot or stabbed just doesn't seem to look that interesting, even to the characters themselves. Compared to the art for Death Note, which it has a passing similarity to, it falls flat. The Death Note art is a lot busier and often not as tidy, but it strikes me as a lot more natural, expressive and fluid - it looks like a story, not a photo montage.

The end result is a story that looks very clean and clinical, even when it's dwelling on murder and mayhem, and doesn't seem interested in trying to draw the audience in. The readers are kept at one remove: it just seems very obvious that what's going on isn't really happening and nothing's at stake, never mind the realism of the style. There's just something a little too tidy about it. It's technically highly accomplished art, but it's soulless.


Finally, and just to get it out there: I am really underimpressed by the way girls and women are treated in this series. Female characters are for the most part treated as disposable victims, many of whom don't even get names, with Chizuko simply being the first and perhaps most glaringly obvious example.

The role of women, in MPD Psycho, is to have their bloodied, mutilated and usually naked bodies discovered by (almost exclusively male) investigators who, for the most part, treat discovering disfigured female corpses as just another day at the office. The female murderers are mostly emotionally damaged, easily-led girls acting on the instigation of a man. Even Machi isn't immune from being victimized if the plot demands it - she lost two fingers in a bomb blast before the story even began and, in the few volumes I got through, has already been held hostage by a psychopath at least once.

Even when they're not just turning up to die (or, for that matter, turning up dead) women don't get a lot more respect. Despite being competent and driven enough to set up her own detective agency which should imply that she is no slouch as both a businesswoman and an investigator in her own right, Machi, the most prominent female character in the story, is presented as only semi-capable without Kobayashi holding her hand. Miwa flashes her breasts at Kobayashi when she thinks one of his personalities is lying about being sightless.

If you think I'm emphasizing the negative in terms of how women are portrayed in this series, trust me I'd say something positive about it if only I could think of anything positive to say. From what I saw, I honestly don't feel like it's too great an exaggeration to say that female characters in this series have a fifty percent chance of showing up in the story dying or dead. Sure, I didn't read the whole thing and the portrayal of women may get better later, but frankly I'm tired of waiting. I plowed through three or four volumes of this series and saw no indication of any change. Women, in the world of MPD Psycho, are victims. They exist almost entirely to be exploited, tormented and murdered by men. Compared to this Death Note is a feminist treatise.

So no, I didn't like MPD Psycho that much, and if all this update does is stop me from attempting to read the damn thing for a third time, then it's done its job.