(M)etamorphosis Analysis (Roller Coaster Warning)

 Look, I'm not trying to be all artsy and interesting, but I just came across some SCANDALOUS LITERATURE.

Apparently this hentai manga "Metamorphosis" is trending and, fair play, I was warned in advance and I still dove headfirst down this rabbit hole. 

It's pretty bad.

I'm not connoisseur of hentai by any means, but I dabble, and I have preferences leaning toward BL/Yaoi which is like a whole thing in itself; but in terms of genre, Metamorphosis is in a class of its own.

We all like different anime for different reasons, because each story is different. Hentai almost never has a plot; but when it does, as you can imagine its mainly OVER THE TOP in a funny way or in a really perverted fetishization of a taboo which is a little, to, a lot, more psychologically fucked up than your run of the mill shit. 

I tend to stay away from the latter.

I find it cheeky that the author, called this manga "Metamorphosis" and that the cover art for it, is actually really too fucking beautiful for the contents of the book. Seriously. But in the end, a change does occur. Well... It's more like a downward spiral to rock bottom, though, so in the end, I think the title was a simple nod at what the M really represents her "Metamorphizing" into which was a Masochist. 

I'll try and fly through this as specifically as I can, without being too gory about the details. There aren't a lot of main characters so it's fairly easy to keep up.

Saki Yoshida is a plain girl who has just graduated middle school and is entering high school when we meet her at the beginning of the story. She laments the fact that she has made 0 friends up until this point because she was just too shy and insecure. So at age 15/16 going into 10th grade or 1st year of high school, she asks her mom to help her with makeup and looks like a brand new bitch when she starts high school. 

She's regular normal 15-year-old-cute.

She gains a couple of female friends right from the start because she has a new look. Things are normal until she meets Hayato, who is very much a background character, even though he is the catalyst for everything that happens from this point forward that actually makes this manga a hentai. 

Hayato is also kind of a piece of shit. He's a grown man (maybe like 20 something) He flirts with her innocently enough at a convenience store and offers to buy her a fashion magazine that she wants because he thinks that she's cute. Simple.

The happiest moment in the entire manga

She said "I almost feel like I can feel good about myself" which is...honestly the only shred of psychological awareness, intelligence or existential sentience that this character ever contemplates before the fall. This is the turning point. This is the tipping point at the peak of a rollercoaster that didn't climb very high at all, but the drop is considerably devastating. 

Know that first. 

This person isn't a bimbo, YET. But the groundwork, for which, is laid after Hayato basically asks her out. It seems innocent enough, they go to a karaoke bar, and he's forward, but he's not really doing anything too fucked up beyond being a bad influence. He gives her a drink, he doesn't force or pressure her into drinking, she just thinks he's cute, and even though she's never been to a karaoke with any of her brand new girl-friends from school she's just made, she decided today would be the day she'd follow a grown-up guy, just because he was cute.

I know 15 year olds can be naive, but she chose who she wanted to be that day because she liked the feelings that came with the attention that was tied directly to her image of herself, which wasn't BAD before; but the only thing that matters now is Saki's hunger for being seen as desirable. It awoke in her all at once, apparently, because soon after they get to Karaoke, she becomes drunk and things heat up. They make out  a lot before he basically flashes her some molly or E and says if you want to feel a lot better, this will do it. She doesn't say no, but she doesn't stop him in the end, and she just swallows it while feeling like she's falling in love with him because she physically is enjoying everything that's happening so far. As this goes on, Hayato is talking dirty but also making some lucid points that give the reader more insight into what the fuck she's thinking at this critical moment:

1. She's losing her virginity to a stranger she just met the same day unprotected on her first day of high school
2. He's an adult
3. She's also done drugs and alcohol for the first time while taking a pounding 

He had her consent, but she was also enjoying it physically from being very high. Throughout the panels she says "I feel so...good...no... happy." She kept correcting herself to "happy" instead of "good" and then admitted that she enjoyed high sex and was okay with falling in love with this stranger at that moment even if it "was just a lie."

She was lucid enough to admit with all that happening at once, it felt good and that it was okay. 

Granted, not a great start, but in all reality, I'm sure this is some 15 year old's story in real life. It's not unbelievable. Some people are just waiting for the worst train-wreck of their life to be a slight offender, but they were pre-disposed to self-destruction just for the fact that they are easily influenced in the first place- because they WANT to be influenced easily but only by wickedness, because its easy.

I'm serious.

It's almost like when a person figures out they're Gay except this is not always inherently something that was ever labeled with such a neat ID tag. These types of people just live their lives from birth  as if they're waiting for an unknown bus to come that just one day showed up and suddenly they knew exactly the type of person they were supposed to be. But in this case it was a bus that read 'Masochist' on the destination heading. For Saki, it was her obsequious nature and people-pleasing manner when she just wanted friends and compliments, but all in ONE day,  AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT, it manifested to completion when she let a RANDOM cute looking guy tell her what to do and felt like giving him control was the only thing that made her feel significant.

But don't feel bad for her simply because of this.

This isn't necessarily a sign of neglect, just a dangerously weak mind and will as it pertains to self-esteem-linked-to-preservation. As a matter of fact, this is a sign that a person has made the wrong choice from the point of intention. Any actions following that will only exacerbate their fate if they never correct the first action that set off the dominoes.

So Hayato introduced her to sex and drugs all at once and she considers him her boyfriend, but Saki is playing both sides too. She loves Hayato, but it's obvious that their relationship is only fuck buddies, because she doesn't introduce him to anyone and he remains more or less a shadow in her life that NO ONE ELSE knows about, including her parents. (See the conscious omission means she's not as clueless as the doe eyes suggest) They continue having high sex and he's fulfilling the role as boyfriend and dealer, because there's an aspect of addiction, but it's not emphasized yet.

So far, this is just run of the mill, slice of life "could be anybody, anywhere" drama. Saki gets neat enough grades that her parents are not checking her even when she does come home late once in a while. 

One day at school she's talking with her girlfriends about shopping and they gradually get onto the subject of money. Saki does have an allowance, but her motivation for wanting money is primarily wanting to keep up with these girls, not for anything sex or drug related. So again, it's not the worst thing in the world to want nice things, but in Saki's mind, she's chasing an image and it's not to SELF satisfaction- but to the desire of wanting to be noticed and praised by OTHERS. Anyway her girlfriend lowkey tells her about a prostitute forum and claims she can just go on a date and get paid without doing anything for fear of the police getting involved on account of an underage girl. Even though Saki does seem dense, she does know what it is. 

She goes on a date with an old, fat, gross man without even consulting with Hayato (who SHE claims is her boyfriend, so thats strike 2 on sneaky and selfish if you really think you love somebody) and she has a decent date and he offers to drop her off, but she decides to stick around AFTER he goes and checks into a hotel and offers her way more money for sex. She accepts. The entire time, she hates how he smells and looks, but she clearly enjoyed the physical experience (without drugs) and existentially accepts that she "was born to have a cock shoved inside her." 

When she gets home later, she feels guilty and cries to her mother, but stays quiet about it. She regrets it.

So at this point, really are we dealing with a child? Are we looking at someone we should pity? So far, she feels slightly guilty which marks a shadow of a conscience, but in the end, I find Saki reprehensible, because common sense just doesn't win out.

From this point on, it's causation. She buys a new bag and gets to be the cool kid for 2 seconds before some boys call her out and begin blackmailing her with a photo one of them took of her leaving the hotel with that old guy. Things are spiraling, now, but she decides to handle it by exchanging sexual favors for them keeping her secret. Her girlfriends start to notice she's popular with boys and rumors are starting to surface, but nothing solid.

During this time, shit goes left at home when Saki's father loses his job. She tells him not to worry and reassures him that their family will be okay because she can work too, now. Her mom basically  supports this and adds that Saki's a grown woman now. At that moment her father takes a moment to look at her differently and Saki is covered, but he's looking at her like a woman (which I didn't notice the first time, reading) then he stands up and leaves to go buy some cigarettes for the first time.

Later he comes home stinking of alcohol and cigarettes and rapes Saki in her bedroom. This is where I do feel really bad for Saki, even though she does seem to physically enjoy it, it's made clear afterward that she's psychologically wrecked. So that part is not her fault- but she didn't wake or tell her mother, either, so another mistake made. Her father started using her and almost dangling it in front of the mom's nose too, it was fucked up.

Eventually she was caught at school when the sexual shenanigans progressively became worse in the school; cuz the boys didn't. give. a. fuck. Once she's exposed the students haze her, writing all these nasty insults and slurs on her desk and she runs home crying to her mother thinking she'll help.

But no. Her mother has been told that Saki seduced her father and even though she tries to tell her mother the truth, it's too late. Her mother beats her and Saki runs away to live with her piece of shit boyfriend. He feeds her E, sex and coke.

From here, basically Saki finds out that Hayato owes a drug debt and she offers to pay it out of gratitude for Hayato letting her stay with him. He uses this as an opportunity to pimp her out to whoever is paying. He also pierces her nipples, navel and clit and she starts tanning and bleaching her hair, and dressing like a 2 dollar hooker with his name tattooed over her left breast and all the traditional whore tats you can imagine.

Eventually she finds out she's pregnant, and of course she has no idea whose it is. Hayato convinces her to abort it, which, if I'm being fair, is actually the idea of a sound mind, considering he's barely able to survive and she's in the midst of PAYING his drug debt. He doesn't want a kid. He barely tolerates Saki, and she does everything he says.

Hayato tells her to get an abortion because he doesn't like the idea of it being someone elses' baby, and this charms her, because she loves him and only wants to have his baby too, but then he also pressures her into finding her own clients now, because he's a bum that can't even do that right. She is legit in love with him, though, because she will do anything for him.

The next day Saki gets an abortion and not even a few hours later is meeting with the first client she ever took which was that old smelly man that took her to the hotel in the beginning. He paid so well before, Saki was banking on his generosity, but he was being stingy on account of her "metamorphosis" because she looked like a slut now. He said he was willing to pay more before because she seemed more innocent, and so in the end she agreed to doing more depraved (and emphatically unprotected) acts with this man, for what she did end up earning, which was minimal behind a same day abortion! THE FUCK!?

 She likes being sloppy. I mean that in every sense.

She ends up giving the guy a discount and lying to Hayato, texting him that the client canceled on her. No reply.

Then she goes searching for Hayato at the bar he frequents where his drug dealer is. The barkeep/dealer says he hasn't seen him but there are 2 men there that he basically offers her to. She does resist, and insists she's only looking for Hayato but, the lure of drugs, sex and potential money easily disintegrates her resistance with relative ease.

He doses her with heroin for the first time and she is so high she is more or less tripping the entire time but she enjoys being "Chinese-finger-trapped" even if its overwhelming. In the end, she's always so spent, but coming down from Heroin, the guys simply throw her out back in the alley with the trash when they've finished. Which is apparently something that begins happening to her often, as she wakes up and realizes it "again" for some countless time now that she's addicted to heroin, too now.

Does Saki bat a fucking eyelash? No. This is her life now.

She wakes up in some alleyway realizing she's been  robbed of her drugs and money, both of which she's earning for her co-dependent boyfriend that she is in love with. So she goes back to Obata-san which is the dealer/bartender to make up for what she lost. She knows the deal, but he offers up a choice between drugs or money. 

She chooses the drugs.

She takes a hit and he fucks her while she's high. Once its over and she's all stars in her eyes and lying in ruins, he hands her one more baggie of Chiba for her to give to Hayato. He did her a SOLID.

She goes back to Hayato and basically is like "I got robbed and have no money" and he's like "Well why didn't you MAKE more money before you came back here then?"

He goes and looks through her purse thinking she's lying and sees the drugs. Then he basically tells her she's a useless junkie and throws her out, heroin and all.

She is then seen wandering the city aimlessly at night when she comes to sit on a slide at a playground and starts experiencing withdrawal from the heroin. She takes a hit to take the edge off, then, she starts masturbating in public...on a playground...for children. Two old, ugly bums walk up to her and basically are like "What's up with her?"

Again, the fact that she has no common sense, makes you feel like Saki tries to attract chaos. They don't  take advantage of her basically until she doesn't resist them both fucking her raw at the same time with dicks that LOOK, SMELL AND  EVEN THEY, THEMSELVES ADMIT ARE QUITE DISEASED.

She enjoys it. 

They take her in and feed her and she vomits and figures out she's pregnant once again, but this time she wants to keep it because she thinks it can help her clean up her life. As she finds the resolve we see an image of her from the knees up, with upchuck splattered on her clothes and skin as she vows to quit doing drugs.

 At this moment, I'm in disbelief and a little apalled that she thought this was the right decision considering the unprotected vagabond sex, but I admit, I was a little proud of Saki-chan, because she really spiraled deep. Now that she has this newfound conviction to take care of her unborn child, I have hope for her redemption and future. 

The next chapter page shows her very ripely 8 to 9 months pregnant while getting raw-dogged on her side by a random homeless man in a cardboard box 😀.

And I'm like... um..okay. Clearly Saki hasn't changed....at all... 

No. It's actually worse. This bitch said "I love it when you go so deep that you hit the baby."

Actually it's even worse than that because there are sectional shots in this manga and they're disturbing in general without seeing the image of this dick slamming into the wall right over this baby's head. Or the image of icing the top of this baby's head while it's still in-utero with a thin wall of placenta protecting it from gonorrhea-loaded-splooge, but not agitation; because the babies expression in the panel is absolutely pained as its cock guzzling mother is coming shamelessly in some random homeless guy's alley cardboard box.

But wait, there's more. He actually pays her "for once" in his words. When he thinks she's going into labor he's like "Leave" but she's actually jonesing for a fix and has been trying to use sex as a way to deal with withdrawal. It's not that simple, though, and she proceeds to shoot up, apologizing to her unborn child, while the man basically contemplates she's gonna be dead soon at this rate.

Later, she goes to buy more H from some stranger. We come to find out that Obata (Hayato's dealer)  wont sell to her anymore. She basically has to beg this new guy, pregnant as fuck while reeking of poverty to sell to her, and he only does it because she's so desperate, but he laments that she's a goner as she walks away.

So far, Saki has been stashing her money away in a public coin locker. She goes to make a deposit after she takes another hit to keep the pain away, and we see that she has thousands saved up in a duffel bag that she's earned to finally make a much needed change in her life. At this point, it's getting cold outside, Saki's missing teeth, wearing a thigh length pea coat and a hat. She smells as homeless as she looks and she is in rough shape.

She is discovered by her former classmates as she's stashing her money in her locker and they accuse her of stealing it. She explains that she earned it, but they don't care and they begin beating her and abusing her while she begs for the life of her baby, assuring them that the money she saved is for the child. 

They don't give a fuck. They say she's a garbage person and the life she's carrying is also trash, and they're actually doing society a favor. 

Then, they all begin kicking the shit out of her after they realize she's having a masochistic reaction that makes it apparent that she enjoys being hurt. 

The beating is pretty brutal. She's saying stop while they kick her but she's also moaning and shit, it's fucked up. There isn't a lot of blood or bruises shown, but the impact shots looked pretty painful. 

They eventually get bored once she starts bleeding, take the entire duffel bag of cash she'd saved in those 9 months and leave her for dead. A businessman walks by, sees her stumbling, naked, pregnant, beat up and and bloody and pretends he doesn't.

At that moment, she crawls into a bathroom, stands up to blood pouring from between her legs and sees herself in a mirror, giving us this wonderfully insightful moment:

She puts on her glasses and braids her pigtails, yearning to be her simple plain old self again- for once since this entire thing began, she actually misses her old life. But once she realizes how childish it is, since she NEVER liked that person nor could she ever go back to being that again, she breaks down on the cold dirty floor of the public bathroom and  pulls out the last thing she has left of value in the world, and takes what's left of of the heroin. 

On the next page, Saki is older and self-actualized. She is dressed modestly with a short conservative bob as she sits on a park bench watching her daughter, the spitting image of her younger self, play. The little girl named Hana asks Saki about what's on her mind. She laments that she had to go through such a dark and horrible time in her life and she cried a lot. When she says this, Hana pats her on the top of her head and says "It's okay now" and I forgot to mention it before, but it's important that every time Saki was pat on the head by Hayato or a client or whoever, no matter how fucked up the situation was at the time, she always commented that it made her feel good, like a "good girl"- which kinda puts a lump in my throat NGL. In the end of her conversation with her young daughter, she is now glad that she was able to make it all okay because she had Hana to pull her through it.

The last thing we see is a fade to black and then, this:

And that's the end. :|

Because Saki never made it out of that bathroom.

SOOOOOO!!! It is definitely depressing and fucked up and I don't recommend it, but I don't feel that bad for Saki. 

She was naive, I can't deny that, but she wanted all the bad influences. I'm sure her parents didn't raise her that way, and yet that was just how she turned out.

Obviously taking into account that her dad really did contribute to her psychological corruption by raping her, I don't fault Saki for that. But Saki didn't make ONE good choice. It takes some serious skill to make every wrong decision, but I know very well that's truly some people's reality. Saki was even trying to be responsible, in her own weird way, but at the end of the day Saki wasn't fit to be a mother. She didn't think practically or logically enough to get the demon off her back that eventually claimed her life.

I blame her addiction to drugs AND sex. Mainly drugs, but sex compounded every complication by continually exposing Saki to unnecessary danger.  Anyone can argue that if Saki had just been more careful or if she was just a little more cautious, things could have turned out very differently. 

Our Saki is hapless, because she was never truly was a mature adult. She behaves like a child from beginning to end, albeit a mild-mannered one. She's not a bad girl. She doesn't talk back, she's not spoiled or moody, she doesn't throw tantrums, she doesn't get bad grades, she doesn't pout, and by all accounts Saki looks like a model student up until she's discovered with the boys that were blackmailing her. It can look like a mild-mannered child is mature if they don't talk much, but what becomes obvious every time you watch someone take advantage of this girl, is that she has no backbone.

It happens in rapid enough succession that her downfall was devastating to watch, but again. if you just change the title to "Metamorphosis of a Masochist", then at LEAST you'd come away from that dumpster fire feeling like you got the fair warning of a cautionary tale. At this point it's a Hentai that takes itself too seriously, if you ask me. I am not averse to a tear-jerking-feels-trip of an anime, and I certainly do like a sense of plot to my hentai, but this was a mixed bag for me. 

In the end I don't believe that Saki's child would have grown up to be a bright and precocious little girl like she imagined, right before she died. I think the child would have come out fucked up either by the drugs, STDs she contracted or perhaps even brain-damaged or mentally disabled somehow by how roughly Saki was being handled even on a regular basis, sexually, by strangers who would fuck a pregnant whore. Not to mention on a civilized ethical and spiritual level it is so so icky  and damnable to make a person in an unclean womb.

I also don't feel for the fact that she lost the child, because I didn't ever think she should have kept it it the first place. The way it happened was traumatic as FUCK, but Saki was mentally unfit to raise a kid- and her attitude and approach to sex from the beginning never evolved to its full serious maturation even after she got pregnant for the final time. I even venture to say that Saki's sexual identity matured before her own personality did, and it ended up consuming her perception of self/identity completely.

Saki never took herself seriously, until she had to provide for her child- not even when she ONLY had to provide for her self. That seems selfless, but it's childish. If you have a million problems and look at a child as the solution to all of them because you no longer have a reason to act selfishly, that's great, but at the same time you saddle quite a burden to a potential person who has no say over whether they want to be used as that kind of tool or live up to that kind of responsibility.

Not only that, but all of that filthy money that Saki saved, doing God knows what with God knows who and at the end of the day to look into your child's eyes and say "I did it all for you"  or "I put you at constant risk for your sake" is clearly not done for the pure reasons she states, even though, in her eyes, this is what she sees as stepping up to the plate.

We can only speculate as to what levels of depravity she was willing to stoop to AFTER men were still willing to pay her for sex when she was OBVIOUSLY pregnant. How much cum did she swallow? How many people wanted to pee on her or some other fucked up shit? Over the course of 9 months that baby had a 40 hour work week before it was even born.

Saki could have done all of this, without being pregnant and still saved her own life in the end. But instead, we got dick.

It was actually sad, but if you think about it as her actually knowing what's happening while she's overdosing and accepting ACTUAL responsibility for every mistake including the one that was bleeding out all over the bathroom floor, in the end, it really is okay. She and her daughter are together, so even though no one lived, in the end, Saki wasn't alone anymore.

Hentai shouldn't make you tear up, but damn son... I dunno. Is it good or bad?

8/10 for me.