Metamorphosis (manga)

It is a Hentai and the most depressing coming of age story out there. Read at your own risk.

Metamorphosis (Henshin), also known as Emergence, is a 2013 hentai manga.

Saki Yoshida is a shy, friendless student. After graduating from middle school, she decides to make more friends, transforming her own image from a quiet glasses-wearing girl to a sex-addicted gyaro. Soon, after her first day in high school, an older guy called Hayato flirts with her and Saki falls head over heels for him. Before she realizes it, she has lost her virginity and is getting addicted to drugs. And things only get worse from here...

Inspired by Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (hence the name and dark plot, and similar theme about transformation). Infamous for its ending, which is known for being a total turn off to hentai readers. Completely. Maybe, because, it's a little too realistic. It's also notable for being one of the few hentai to enter the mainstream eye and spawn several conversations about its literary merit.

Written and drawn by L Shindo, serialized by Comic X-Eros on Japan. Published digitally by FAKKU Books on November 10, 2016.

Tropes used in Metamorphosis (manga) include:

• Compensated Dating: Saki engages in this to gain more money to buy fashion accessories. Let's just say the limits between "dating" and "prostitution" are crossed quickly.
• Crapsack World: The only thing this setting can be described as considering how many awful people Saki meets in quick succession. It says a lot when an ugly bastard that hires Saki for a date is one of the "nicer" characters.
• Downer Ending: Saki is viciously assaulted by her former classmates, who don't even recognize her and steal all her money after they take turns kicking and stomping on her stomach, which causes her to have a miscarriage. Finally realizing how far she's fallen and concluding that she has nothing left to live for, Saki deliberately overdoses on the rest of her heroin and dies alone and forgotten in a filthy bathroom.
• Drugs Are Bad: Saki's growing addiction to more and more drugs don't helps her at all, allowing her to be abused or giving "service" without being paid. It reaches such a point she chooses drugs over cash as payment for her "services", leading her to getting kicked out of Hayato's apartment because she couldn't cover his loan to Obata-san. Even when she is pregnant and decides to keep the baby, swearing to never do drugs again, she regularly shoots up because she can't bear the withdrawal symptoms. She ultimately dies of a heroin overdose.
• Driven to Suicide: Saki decides to take a lethal dose of heroin at the end of the story.
• Dying Dream: Saki has one of living with her infant daughter on a better future.
• Exploitation Film: The manga version of this. The story is mostly about the sexual and psychological degradation of Saki.
• Friendless Background: Saki has one as result of shyness. Trying to get friends only sets her on an worse path though.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted, and Saki feels very, very guilty about it.
• Hate Sink: Pretty much nearly all of the characters surrounding Saki, from her abusive parents, to her boyfriend Hayato, to her female so-called "friends", to all the men who rape poor Saki. This girl is pretty much cursed.
• Horrible Judgement of Character: Saki herself, which leads her to many of the horrors that plague her. Also Saki's mother, who judges that her husband was "seduced" by Saki and scolds her over the incestuous acts between the two instead of, you know, calling the police.
• Humans Are Bastards: One can interpenetrate the message of this story as such. The fact that all of the characters surrounding Saki are shown to be horrible, vile people, and that the story is about Saki's life being destroyed because of them, definitely backs this up.
• Karma Houdini: None of the people who exploit, abuse, or otherwise harm Saki are ever held to account. In fact, the people who beat up and trample her happily enjoy spending the money they stole from her.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: In the epilogue manga, Emergence, Hayato gets arrested for overdosing an underaged teen girl on drugs, and goes "States Witness" to turn in his source, so his days of partying and drugging are at an end. Saki's story of prolonged torture, rape, and the horrific way she was found in a gutter, with extreme damage to her rectum and vagina caused by her bullies shoving bottles of glass in and then breaking them and how the police just turned their head the other way as it was going down, all went public. Especially the part where Saki was in intensive surgery for at least 24 hours, died, and was revived, several times. It doesn't show it in the manga, but Japan doesn't take public shame well and everyone who exploited Saki is facing some serious consequences "for troubling others."
• Love At First Sight: And portrayed very negatively. Saki kisses, has sex, and consumes drugs with a guy she met for the first time on the same day.
• Meganekko: Saki at the beginning of the story, being a shy nerdy girl with large glasses.
• My Greatest Second Chance: In the epilogue manga Emergence, Saki is rescued by an American man who was visiting Japan with his daughter only for said daughter to fall victim to Hayato and die of an overdose. The man in question rescues Saki from the literal gutter after seeing Saki has a tattoo identical to the one found on his daughter's body. Saki's child is delivered by C-section and after Saki has endured at least 24-hours of surgery, with having to be resuscitated several times, she goes into rehab and comes out clean, having custody of her daughter under the guardianship of the man who rescued her.
• Rage Against the Reflection: Near of the end, Saki looks at herself on the mirror of a bathroom and crushes it in impotent rage from what she's become.
• Parental Incest: Saki's father is reavealed to be a lecherous bastard who lusts after his daughter and rapes her to have his way. This event leads to Saki's mom pinning all of the blame on her and permanently ruins their relationship. .
• Porn with Plot: Metamorphosis is one of the most infamous examples of this trope in recent years. It's a tragedy, that happens to contain a lot of sexual assault scenes on Saki. Despite the heavy focus on sex, the Manga is more of a study of Saki's psychological decline rather than being simple erotica.
• School Bullying Is Harmless: All of Saki's so-called friends think the horrific vandalizing of her school desk and pushing her around with slut shaming will "toughen her up." In reality, all it does is lead the poor girl to becoming a very pregnant and homeless drug addict who is beaten, trampled, and robbed by those same self-proclaimed "friends" who repeatedly tell her the money they're stealing is not "hers" and leave her to die in a public bathroom while they happily spend the money.
• Slut Shaming: Because they're forcing her to have sex with them due to blackmail, Saki is popular with the boys and is often surrounded by them. Upon noticing this, Saki's friends think that she is becoming too much of a diva and hear rumors that she's screwing all the boys in the class, so they vandalize her desk with insults and death threats. They also make the boys help vandalize her desk, too.
• Teens Are Monsters: A group of teenagers (Saki's former classmates) viciousally assault and rape a homeless, pregnant Saki at the end of the story. The sadistic glee they take in brutalizing a former friend( whom they don't even recognize due to Saki's drastic change in appearance) makes the scene even more unnerving. .
• Your Cheating Heart:
  • Saki prostitutes herself with an older man, cheating on her boyfriend Hayato, but by this point it's obvious that Hayato sees Saki as a bootycall rather than a girlfriend. In fact, he barely cares about her having sex with other boys in her school later, laughing about the videos the boys posted online with Obata-san and Tetsu-san at the bar.
  • Saki's dad, technically, by raping his own daughter.

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