Adashino-san wa Sude ni Shinderu.

nathandouglasdavis Jan 18, 2021

2

I feel like I'm always initially on board with these types of 4-koma fluff manga, but then I eventually get worn down by the aimless monotony and simplistic drawings. It's not that I don't enjoy my fair share of low-drama slice-of-life stories, but this one ended up feeling more mindless than relaxing. I think part of it is the repetition in the artwork. Almost all the panels focus on the same small handful of characters and have very simplistic patterns and gradients for backgrounds, meaning that all of the appeal falls on the cuteness of the faces. They have small mouths and big, largely blank eyes. Thankfully, they do attempt to switch up the angles and stuff during these conversations (because it's built around small talk), but even the angle changes start feeling repetitive after a while. Like, they frequently will have one character in the foreground looking toward the other person who's in the background. I got the impression that the way the eyes and certain characters were drawn changed over the course of the series, but maybe I'm mistaken. Each chapter is fairly short and begins with the phrase "there are beings in this world known as undead," which is then immediately followed up with some display of Adashino's zombiehood (such as feir head falling off). In this world, the undead aren't menacing and co-exist with humans. It's indicated that there's some discrimination toward zombies and stuff, but the story doesn't really delve into that. A small handful of characters, with some personality quirks, end up forming a social circle. About half of them are also undead, of differing varieties. I think the appeal is supposed to come from their personalities playing off of each other, but it just felt pretty basic to me. We see days at work interspersed with hanging out outside of work. Zombie jokes and just general references to zombies are constantly brought up, to the point that I genuinely felt like it went too far in with its premise of "zombies" and didn't allow itself to explore non-thematic interactions. Adashino not only is a zombie, but fe also is a fan of zombie movies and trivia and stuff. It reuses some of the same jokes, which tells me the author's well might've dried up pretty quickly. There are jokes about gore and detachable body parts and already being dead and stuff. Considering quite a few of the jokes seem to be pun-based, it's possible some of the humor was lost in translation.