きみに恋する殺人鬼

KIMI NI KOISURU SATSUJINKI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
5
RELEASE
September 13, 2022
CHAPTERS
39

DESCRIPTION

“You should stay away from her.

What? But I need to thank her...”

Suzuki Ryuto is an introverted, timid college student. Every day he puts on a fake smile, trying his best to blend into a group of outgoing students even despite cruel teasing over his virginity. One day he comes to a drinking party where he meets a beautiful girl, Kokoa. Per her request, he pretends to be her boyfriend to ward off the stalker who has been harassing the girl.

Their tender love lead to great tragedy.

(Source: Comikey)

CAST

Kokoa Yoshizaki
Ryuuto Suzuki

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

ValRy
45/100
The Most Agonizing Thing I Have Ever Read.
You know what it’s like? It’s like the show Becker, you know, with Ted Danson? I watched the entire run of it, hoping that it would get better, and it never did. It had all the right pieces, but it just— It couldn’t put them together. And when it got canceled, I was really bummed out, not because I liked the show, but because I knew it could be so much better, and now it never would be.
``

Killer in Love is bad. I am not going to mince words here. 90% of it is just soap opera tier sludge. Which is fine! I came back to it, week after week, to have a little giggle.

Oh, look how silly that is. Oh look how melodramatic and edgy it is.

Honestly it's not a great way to consume media. When you read something bad, It's kind of easy to forget that there is an author on the other side of the screen, even as a creative. This manga goes through the motions and seems to back the MC 100%. He kills the Fem MC's past lovers to prove his own love and protect her, and paints him in a sympathetic light. We follow him for most for most of the manga, a sad, broken, unloved man yearning for something to fill the hole in his life. Mentally ill and unstable, trying to find anything to keep him sane, fixating on a girl because he doesn't know how to be by himself. He sees the issues with the Fem MC, but decides to just ignore them and feeds into his own saviour complex, idolising the girl as being the only one who he can be with.

It's a fine premise. It could be done decently enough with a good enough writer, but the writer just doesn't feel strong enough to actually write the story properly. So it was just garbage I laughed at each week for being bad. It really started to drag towards the ending too, as it felt like the author ran out of things to write.

And then.

The final two chapters happen.

Now, it's pretty obvious they're being axed here. It's a pretty sudden and non-conclusive ending, but I honestly don't mind it. It feels like a 'gotcha!' moment. You know, this character who was sort of vilified the whole time actually has a sympathetic backstory! With the quality of the writing so far it should fall totally flat.

But it doesn't. It's actually good. It feels genuine, and expresses the frustrations of being unable to find friendship as a woman because of the alienation of romance. And in turn, becomes a person who is desperate for any connection she can get. But this time it feels like it works. In a short two chapters, I get far more invested than I did in the male love interest that got 30-something chapters. Because it was never about him, it was about what he represented. Someone willing to protect her. As she reflects on her past, she wants to kill herself to "join him". If this did happen it would have been a shitty ending, and I wouldn't be writing this review right now.

But this character is tired. She's sick and tired of relying on men for her safety, to give her purpose. She thinks back to her memories of him, and it finally all clicks into place. She realises she has to learn to be alone. Instead of walking off into the ocean, she walks across the beach, and is implied to start anew.

When this chapter came out I was SCREAMING at my monitor. Because I felt so cheated.

You had that in you the whole time? You just decided to NOT write that well? A gut-wrenching, emotionally investing narrative out of nowhere, and then just ending it. I checked the comments to see if anyone agreed with me on the site I was reading it on, and then I remembered what anime fans were like so just had to bottle it up and mull over it to myself. But I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

What's worse than something that never gets to take off, is something that does, and has its wings clipped immediately. It's like shooting a baby bird learning to fly in its nest.

I've read some of the author's other work, and it's cutesy romance stuff. I liked Killing Me!, that was a fun GL, but it seems like they've given up on making any sort of serious stories. Which, like, good for them! Their fluff is much more consistently decent than most of Killer in Love. But I can't help but feel like there was something there, a potential for an amazing story that the author had in them, just gone. Discarded to the wind. I would have rather have just dropped the manga so I didn't have to know the potential I glimpsed. I feel cursed with this information.

But if you're a writer reading this, if you learn any one thing from this review, please don't be afraid of taking risks. Don't play it safe because you're afraid of what your readers might say, or because it might go poorly.

Because it's better to burn too close to the sun, than to never burn at all.
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BlazingWaters
50/100
A great idea marred by haphazard execution
Something I tend to do from time to time on [redacted] is go through its database entries at random - be it by my searches or whatever pops up on its Latest Updates and Popular New Title banners - and take a look at the author's page if I happened to be intrigued enough by them. This happened with Enma Akiyama, who's newest work Noa-senpai wa Tomodachi has led me to read and finish up their other works: oneshots Kyuuketsuki ni Shite yo and Ningen Maid Robot Meruru, as well as the unfortunately cancelled Killing Me. Now, all of those I enjoyed well enough, albeit the latter being a bit of a lukewarm by-the-numbers GL for my taste, but those were all more focused on comedy than serious development, unlike Killer In Love which was set to be my last venture. And... man, it's a confounding outlier in regards to their other works. No major spoilers, and I won't show off any explicit images and panels but I will highlight a few key points to better state my disappointment.

Now, I will say that, much like Enma's other works, the artwork is fantastic. There's a great mixture of the individuals being either cute, stern, intimidating, and downright daunting throughout the issues, and the way each panel is handled in regards text, character movement/position, and the varying screentones bolsters the draw towards the actions. Though there's a bit of a similarity in character builds, rarely are they ever put together to create a confusing situation. I'd even say that, starting out, the story kept me rather motivated to read on. The theming of abandonment and the forcefulness of presenting oneself as "appropriate" deemed by society's standards, simply to avoid that nagging, horrific feeling, is explored and delved between male MC Ryuto Suzuki and female MC Kokoa Yoshizaki. The former's a loner that forcefully plants himself into outings in order to satiate the sense of belonging, and the latter's backstory is slowly unveiled as being on a similar path, just with a bleaker and more brute route. Driving the plot by intentionally propping Kokoa as the metaphorical object of desire, with Ryuto's low connection to friendship, let alone a romantic connection, clouding and warping his mental state as to what's right and what's wrong, makes for some suspenseful uncoverings in the first two volumes... yet, by the end of it, it ends up falling flat.

Despite being a 5-volume comic, it feels like a truncation of one that's doubled or even tripled the length. A character's fate in the third volume is left purportedly 'ambiguous' at absolute best (one of those "the character believes it but it isn't outright shown" cases), as to be the climactic wedge of Ryuto's demise, yet the falloff from this doesn't leave the same impact as the first two's. There's a plot point about one of Kokoa's past coupling that feels randomly inserted compared to the rest of her narrative roots. Disbeliefs I could suspend before are now bubbling up upon the surface as more events happen when, even with calling the psychotic break the two are now suffering under, feel too sudden. It's not like a bunch of stuff suddenly happens to create new conflicts, but the constant push from one interaction to the next makes any potential circumstance and reflection evaporate. Reveals and new developments of things that should be delivered as emotional and shocking instead hit so tepidly, since it's hard to not ponder and question the confounding increase of the violence's scale as one that feels unearned and distracting. Originally, I thought this could be used as the point of it all, but even then, would that explain the constant use of self-reflection our two leads have? Would that explain how Ryuto's slowly dehumanizing, transmogrification of a stern loner to an inconsolable, broken husk shoots itself down so quickly? Would that even explain the last few chapters now giving context as to why and how Kokoa ended up being the catalyst for all that's happened? Not really, I believe.

Again, it hurts because the premise and a chunk of moments are genuinely super well done! The excessive, warped perception of a being in order to obtain that feeling of connection with someone, only to realize the inner faults of yourself and decide it's perhaps better to back away from it all to quell and outright stop the hurt the other will face, is a powerful message that's barely able to be understood in the middle of the narrative. I don't want to do a grand statement as to how this could've happened - creating manga and trying to keep it serialized is a tough process, and I do not know much as to what Enma was facing during this. That said, I can't help but share the feeling that ValRy had developed in that at some point, the author had to rush towards the finish line due to being at or suffering from the risk of cancellation. That might not have happened at all and the truth's potentially way simpler than that, but it's something I can't quite shake off regardless.

I can recommend Enma's other works due to each containing something I feel people can be able to take away from, as well as the fact that they're all easily downed within an hour, hour and a half. I can somewhat recommend KIL if what I said about its ideas or even its short length doesn't deter you, but I'd just tell you to find other recommendations Anilist has available.
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