Otherside Picnic continues not to miss with volume 10. File 32 feels like a nightmare after the last volume ended with Runa letting the lap pillow slip in a terrifying yet familiar way.
I love how both of them are different flavors of insanely jealousy. I love how the immediate jump back onto the train unprepared primes you for the later chapters. I love how long it’s taken for them to get this one project done since it’s 2 college students making in 11 floors of concrete and rebar. I love how it feels like such an accomplishment to have made their base safer.
File 33 is much more interested in the mechanics of the Otherside and does some great character work for both adopted mother-daughter pairs. I’m betting there will be some very interesting parallels going forward, but it’s definitely more of a chapter to slow down and think, which is great since it’s sandwiched between a fever dream and File 34.
Oh File 34. This one is such a wild ride. Satsuki is still haunting the narrative even after her funeral, but I’m also glad that the worries about ammunition are being addressed. The guns are powerful, but limited power makes them more impactful. Toriko and Benimori getting to meet was a wonderful piece of levity that also helped push the nue into a stronger relationship.
And then the bear. Hooo the bear. It’s been a chekovs gun ironically for half the series at this point. It’s been spoken of in whispers, and has been the unsaid fear. Yet I still doubted that it’d be more terrifying ghost story inspired creatures of the Otherside. I was wrong. So very very wrong. The bear might be the single most terrifying encounter in the entire series. It’s just a bear, but that on its own is actually terrifying. And then you see that it not only hunts the hunters but tries to become them really made me feel like the graveyard might actually be the place of their death. And then they escape by going deeper into something even more terrifying, and the tension between the underground people and the threat of getting caught on the real world blends before they are able to become the nue and the terror keeps going.
The full terror comes at the end when the bear shows up real close to their recently renovated base which feels like the safety has immediately been compromised, until the bear is shown to have been killed, presumably by the horned man who is now hunting the nue.
And they’ve got 5 rifle bullets left.
I cannot wait for volume 11
