There were 6 stories in this manga. 9 people died. Most of them were cute little girls. All of the murderers were cute little girls. Welcome to Bloody Lily (ブラッディ・リリイ), a horror comic from Ciao, one of the three leading shoujo manga magazines.
In the first story Dahlia joins a class and all of the girls are charmed by her beauty – and the fact that her family makes a popular perfume, Crimson Dahlia. Lily, who has always been popular with the boys, learns of a rumor that the secret ingredient of the perfume is the blood of a beautiful girl. When Lily ends up fighting off one of the boys, she runs to Dahlia’s house, where the mysterious girl kisses her and promises to protect her. Dahlia invites the attacker over and confides to Lily, as the poison in the tea kicks in and he falls to the floor, that the real secret ingredient is the blood of a beautiful boy. Bloody Lily and Crimson Dahlia go off together, forever.
Mako is being picked on by the girls in her class. When she finds a strange little gaming system that causes whomever’s name is used as the character name to suffer the character’s fate, she plugs in the names of her tormentors and watches them die with a sense of power. She climbs the levels of the game, controlling those around her; she becomes a Witch and rules the game…until the hero of the game defeats the Witch and she dies herself. Whoever plays the game, the game tells us, is herself cursed.
Touko loves to make clocks. She doesn’t have friends, the other girls think she’s weird, but she’d be happy enough if people left her to make clocks. Misa befriends her and they are inseparable…Misa tells her that a large supermarket is killing the stores in the local shopping arcade and her own family’s shop is in danger. Touko decides to help by building a bomb and destroying the supermarket.. It works, Misa’s family is saved. Touko is so happy that even when it’s becomes apparent that Misa was merely using her and that’s she’s quite psychotic…it’s okay.
The school rumor is that if you go to sleep in the Infirmary, you’ll die, so Fumie is really, really worried about her friend Ryo who sleeps there almost every day, but is still getting more and more listless. Something is up – the school doctor is hiding something, so Fumie tries to peek in, but finds herself being touched by a creepy, gasoline-smelling tentacle arm. Determined to save Ryo from whatever it is, Fumie breaks into the Infirmary to find Ryo covered in a gloopy creature, that the school doctor calls “my baby.” Fumie rescues Ryo and sets, creature, doctor and school on fire.
The other girls don’t like dark gloomy Mayoru (midnight), but bright, sunny Mahiru (noon) is totally willing to be friends. It turns out they share a birthday, so they decide to pretend to be twins. But as Mahiru gets closer to a boy, Mayoru panics. She demands Mahiru never see him again, and when Mahiru apologizes, but says she’s seeing him, Mayoru comes up with a plan. She get surgery to look just like Mahiru so they can be real twins. Mahiru is, predictably, creeped out. Mayoru deceives Mahiru’s boyfriend, kills him, then asks Mahiru to join her. When Mahiru arrives, Mayoru explains she meant “join her” in death. She kills Mahiru , puts her in a coffin, then kills herself and now can be with her forever.
In the final story Houka is a beautiful, kind girl who raises rabbits in the school hutch. Kirika is her best friend whose feelings are slightly deeper, who is on the basketball team. Kirika sees Houka with a boy after the basketball game and is disappointed, but the next day when she finds all of Houka’s rabbits slaughtered and Houka missing, she’s distraught. No one will even talk to her about Houka and she gets hysterical and ends up in the hospital. Her tablet computer develops a devil face and tells her he can show her want happened. A bunch of the boys brought airsoft guns to the hutch and shot the rabbits as target practice. Houka discovered them, so they shot her and buried her in the forest. The evil tablet tells Kirika that she can bring Houka back with a lock of Houka’s hair and the blood of the boy who killed her. Kirika goes out and uncover’s Houka’s body, vowing to bring her back. She finds the boy who killed her, kills him and pours his blood over Houka’s hair. Houka is revived, but she is a demon, ugly and malformed. Kirika realizes she’s done a terrible thing. Demon Houka does not accept the rejection, and decides to solve it by killing Kirika and bringing her back as a demon, as well. The two demons fly away together happily.
The overall lesson in this book is – don’t trust anyone who wants to be your best friend. ^_^
Nakayoshi’s horror series Jigoku Shoujo (licensed by Funimation as Hell Girl) has a frisson of morality (at least in the first series, I haven’t followed it past that.) The people who are condemned deserve it and the people who condemn them themselves bear responsibility. Not so in Bloody Lily, where random people manipulate other people and people die. There is no shortage of blood, violence or death, even though the art is purely shoujo. ^_^
Ratings:
Art – 8
Story – Variable – 7
Characters – Variable – 7
Yuri – 6 Whether it is actually desirable or not, in two stories, the girl gets the girl.
Service – 1 – there’s little physical service but you just gotta know someone is fetishizing murderous girl children
Overall – 8
Remember, parents, this is the kind of stuff your children read. ^_^ I especially loved the adorable little ghost logo for the imprint Ciao Horror Comics. Cute ghost=murder and mayhem.
I posited that there was more than one Lain at the end of disk one, and here, on disk two of Serial Experiments Lain, we learn that that there are an almost infinite number of Lains, as every memory of Lain in every individual’s mind, exists as an artifact in the Wired.
