Foxy whats dr grayman i feel like all the art is giving me a false perception
LOL You'd be genuinely surprised. *Cracks Knuckles* I hope you don't mind spoilers?
D. Gray Man (with the D actually meant to represent Dear) is a story set in fantasy 19th century. It's about a group who call themselves exorcists who have been chosen by a power called innocence which was created by God to destroy monsters called Akuma created by an evil being called the Millennium Earl.
The main character is Allen Walker, the white-haired boy with the star mark on his face. He was a young man who was trained to be an exorcist when he was born with an arm that contained the power of innocence. It's pretty rare to have innocence fuse directly onto the body instead of being held in an object. Allen Walker is also a human who is cursed.
His curse? He's able to see the souls inside of Akuma.
Akuma are dead human beings who have been made into a weapon by the Millennium Earl. In order for them to be made, the earl will approach a grieving person of the dead person who loved them, tell them he can revive them, and bind their souls to the exoskeleton of the Akuma. The dead person then loses all free will and has to obey the earl, with his first order always being to kill to grieving person and take over their body. It's... pretty brutal.
The earl will choose any grieving person. A man grieving his dead wife or a child his dead mother.
Allen has made it his goal in life to save all these trapped souls after he awakened his innocence when he was also approached by the earl and made the man who adopted him an Akuma.
In order to become an exorcist officially, Allen is told by his master to go to the Black Order, who his master is a general of. And the story starts off with what we saw in the introduction:
Allen meets new friends such as Lenalee, another exorcist, and Kanda, who he has a tense relationship with and is sent to kill Akuma and retrieve any raw innocence in the world that has not found a person to wield it. The earl sends Akuma to hunt the innocence too so he can destroy it.
Along the way we also meet Lavi and Bookman, whose clan record the hidden history of the world. They are currently working with the order just to observe their history, though they do also fight alongside them. Bookman have one rule: don't get attached, you are just an observer and a recorder, not a player on the stage. Lavi... is struggling with this.
However the story takes a turn when we're introduced to a character called Road, who calls herself a Noah and one of the "super humans". Noah all serve the Earl and they all have a deep hatred for humanity and God and their goal is to destroy this world.
We learn that the reason the Earl is hunting down innocence is to find the "heart" of innocence, which if destroyed would destroy all of the innocence in existence. However their is no way to tell the heart from other innocence.
What seems like a typical story of war between black and white factions changes more the story goes on and we learn the story behind the Earl and his existence, why the Noah hate this world so much, and how the good guys aren't as "good" as we were originally led to believe (...well considering it uses christian imagery I don't think any of us were really all that surprised to learn the church is a pile of corruption and horrid people).
The story is also about unraveling Allen's story. We learn that none of what Allen believes to be his past is completely accurate and what has drawn me back into the story again is the fact that Lavi is heavily linked to this.
Allen and Lavi were a pairing I loved when I first read this manga so it was so nice to see how deeper their connection actually is.
But beyond that, the story is about love and grief and war. It's about how hatred creates a cycle and drives people to commit acts against one another that should never be done. It's about sacrifice and how teenagers are made into soldiers and have had their childhood stolen from them.
It's about a struggle against fate and how hard it can be to keep walking forward.
I also appreciate the queer themes in the story, especially later on in the story. It must have been hard for Hoshino to get acceptance for some of the themes she added (and the VIZ version of the story even censors a love confession between two men) but I'm glad she did and I can't wait to see what more she does with Lavi and Allen.
