One volume in and I begin to wonder which Gonzo made Red Garden. Is it the one that made Last Exile and Gankutsuou or the one that made SpeedGrapher and Real Bout High School? Cheap-shot mentioning RBHS, I know. I guess either way, Red Garden promises to be horrific, though obviously I pray for the good kind.

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I wanted SpeedGrapher to be one of those well executed anime that had something to say about the broken side of modern life. It showed promise as an anti-cute, grim look at greed, but instead presents a far too idealized dystopia complete with a monolithic corrupt upper class, that I had a hard time taking the message of the show seriously, because it really failed in its understanding of power and how people acquire it. But, my goal isn’t to bang the SpeedGrapher sucks drum as loud as I can. It wasn’t all bad.

A Brief Rundown of the Premise
Speed Grapher is the story of Tatsumi Saiga, a former war photographer who finds himself going through the motions of modern life as a tabloid photographer. While sniffing out trash to snap and sell to a rag, Saiga stumbles upon something big, an underground pleasure club whose membership consists of all the power brokers in Japan. Still, this was just trash Saiga needed to capture to make a buck, that is, until he was kissed by The Goddess, the sixteen year old Kagura Tennouzou.
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