Well, this was a thing.

Starving Anonymous, as far as I could see, was a whacky, schlocky super-science series focusing on the idea of the meat industry, with some rather... indistinct themes about global warming thrown in, I guess? Honestly, it feels like this manga was at its best in its inception, where the facility the protagonist wakes up in is largely unknown, and there's horrible stuff happening all around him. It's a decent analogue to what we do to battery farmed animals, what with the hormone treatments we give them and the like, and while it felt overly preoccupied with shock value, it was a niche.

Then it devolves into this messy plot involving the aliens, mad science, and some INCREDIBLY contrived plot twists that left me completely cold. Like, it's not... bad. It's not good either. It felt like a paragon of mediocrity, like 'I am 14 and this is deep' levels of What A Shocking Twist. The protagonist is a blank slate who, 43 chapters into the manga, has not been developed at all beyond the opening chapter. He has a photographic memory, which was actually useful for all of maybe ten chapters, then unceremoniously forgotten about. He's basically a human hunk of cardboard for all the usefulness he displays. There's also an edgy boi who can regenerate, a bisexual guy who also can regenerate, but less so, and an old employee of the factory who's gone native in the ductwork and now looks like an old-school hippy. None of them are amazingly well fleshed out, but they at least have a couple of personality traits apiece, which is more than can be said of Protagonist-kun. Even if one of those traits is 'Is a depraved bisexual'.

Gay male contact is used for shock value at times, which I didn't really appreciate as LGBT myself, but that's Japan's weird ideas about gay people at work, I guess. Some characters get flashbacks, which become more interesting than the main plot past a certain point, particularly glasses guy, even if his whole 'twist' is a severe letdown tbh. Like... he could, and should, have been a cool transhuman at that point, but for the sake of appealing to the edgy teen demographic, he looks completely normal for no adequately explained reason.

Essentially, as someone who's a little over the target age for this manga, it feels pretty dull past a certain point. The whole thing of horrifying people with the power of stuff we do to animals on the daily... good. Everything else felt bland, and schlocky, and way too juvenile for the subject matter. It felt... safe, if that's a word that can be applied to gore. It used up all its good horror ideas (the goop/hormones that permanently damage your mind/body, the breeding pens in general) in the opening chapters, and then completely lost momentum, preferring to spend time on generic mad scientist body horror hijinks and flashbacks. There's something intensely juvenile about the way people are characterized, long term, and it really bugged me.

At least the art is very good. It's realistic for the most part, with intense shading and emotion that feels utterly wasted on the shallow characterization on display. It's a true shame this mangaka isn't an artist, working with someone who can actually write, rather than doing both roles at the same time.

Or maybe I'm just jaded as hell, and this is really deep or something.