Real Account Volume 6
And here’s where the series descends fully into exploitation and fan service. Real Account volume 6 begins with a new game, but instead of being interesting commentary on how we communicate on social media, it’s an excuse to make all the characters look as horrible as possible. Spoilers follow.
The Flamer Festival requires revealing embarrassing personal information in order to get plenty of comments from observers. The players aren’t giving juicy items out fast enough, so to shake things up, the game runner swaps their phones, encouraging everyone to peep into other people’s private lives, and teasing the reader as well by encouraging voyeurism with a side of sadism.
The girl whose naked selfie was exposed in volume 3 has returned, so we get a few more revealing images of her. This is wallowing under the guise of teaching a lesson, to avoid creating the kind of material that could later embarrass you.
That’s all before previous lead character and hero Yuma faces off with Kurashina, who has a death wish and delights in tormenting others. Kurashina’s taunting forces Yuma into a breakdown. His forehead scar starts bleeding, as shown on the cover, and he plays a disturbing trick on Kurashina to utterly destroy him. No more nice guy here! Instead, we get mental torture… and instead of a smart solution, we get a last-minute random save.
Watching Yuma become a self-centered villain certainly is a shocking twist, but one that makes little sense and doesn’t keep me interested. I wanted to read about someone doing the right thing and outsmarting the manipulator in desperate circumstances. Now, everyone is just terrible.
Amazingly, it promises to get worse in the next volume, as the players are sent into the real world as sacrifices — anyone who finds one and strips them to find their “marble mark” gets richly rewarded. Of course, the first victim is a buxom woman, for another couple of nearly-nude images.
I suppose watching a manga that had some ideas behind it descend into sadism, gratuitous nudity, and other morbid curiosities still counts as commentary, along the lines of giving the viewers what they want and how tacky what they want really is, but I miss the early volumes.