#inside mari

[siix-eyes]

Inside Mari | Boku wa Mari no Naka - chapter 51

#inside mari #boku wa mari no naka #manga black and white #black and white #monochrome #siixmanga #manga edit #mangacap #manga panel #manga #screencap #manga aesthetic #manga art #mangacore

[jumpfalls]

Boku Wa Mari No Naka — Chapter ✦ 73

#ぼくは麻理のなか #boku wa mari no naka #inside mari #manga recommendation #manga screencap #horror manga #manga aesthetic #psychological horror #manga panel #mangacap #manga #psychological #drama #mystery #thriller

[shera-dnd]

Stayed up until 2am last night reading all of Inside Mari in one sitting and I have been fully obliterated then put back together piece by piece

It's this fucking master piece about identity, and gender, and your relationship to your own body, and your sexuality, and the expectations other have of you, and the expectations you have of yourself, and all the little ways these things can clash and break, and what is left of you when you strip away all those things

It's bizarre and absurd, but also so genuinely, painfully, UPSETTINGLY real and human

It's horribly messy and uncomfortable, but in a way that resonates with something at the core of my being

Or to put this another way

#inside mari #i am so not normal about this

[ystrike1]

Inside Mari - By Oshimi Shuzo (8/10)

A love story for one. A love that doesn't matter. A selfish love. A mental breakdown. A high school life with no friendships. A college life with no friendships. Both parts of this "couple" never really get to know each other. They're just obsessed with the other.

Komori is a gaming NEET who lies to his parents every day. He went to Tokyo with big dreams, but he has anxiety. He never addressed it and it ruined his chances. He got too nervous to attend class, and now he is in a rut. A very dark one.

The signs are all there. Komori seems to think he is a loser monster that will never touch a woman. He never even spoke to a girl in high school. His intense paranoia and self hatred are all signs of untreated anxiety and depression. He enjoys his games, but he is unaware of how smelly his room is. He has no social responsibilities at the moment, so he is happier. Living in filth is fine. Crowds and pressure is not.

He is obsessed with a pretty high school girl. She's in the same place, every single day. She buys the same drink. She takes the same route home. She's easy to follow. Komori really wanted to get a girlfriend in Tokyo. He thinks it's impossible because he has so little experience with the opposite sex, so he gets attached to Mari.

Mari, his stalker.

The lonely girl that finds comfort in his quiet, secluded life.

"Komori" wakes up inside of Mari, but that's not true. Mari has been pushed to the brink by bullying and family misunderstandings. The clues are all there. This is not a body switch manga. Mari convinces herself. She believes she is Komori, her stalker. The man she stalks out of comfortable affection.

Her denial is very deep. It takes a long time for her to accept that Mari is within her, but again the clues are stark. She doesn't want to be Mari. She wants to fool around and be alone with no deadlines, like him.

Poor, depressed Komori becomes the victim. Mari is convinced that she IS him, so she thinks a stranger is inside the old body. Mari's creepy antics eventually push Komori to get a job and move back home.

He gets better before she does.

It's heartbreaking.

Mari is still in terrible condition, convinced that she's some kind of Komori doppelganger, while he's getting his hair cut and moving on.

Their "friendship" is disturbing, but Komori thanks Mari in the end.

Mari was jealous of his stability. Komori has parents who are willing to support him no matter what. Mari's mother is a weirdo who isn't very empathetic. When Mari gets bullied by her supposed best friend at school she has no one to turn to.

When she started stalking Komori she wished she didn’t have to go to school. She wished she could play games all day. She bought the games he played, and she followed him to the convenience store until their routine developed.

She also looked through his bedroom window, from a vantage point above his apartment.

This "letter" is found by Mari, who believes she is Komori. She's convinced it is a message from Mari, who disappeared.

But no, Mari just wrote notes obsessively about Komori before her psychotic break. Sometimes a creepy note on the ground...is just that.

Mari also takes advantage of a closeted lesbian who is in love with her. Yori believes the whole story. She believes that Komori is inside Mari, even though the real Komori lives down the street. Denial is a hell of a drug, and mental illness is hard to understand.

Mari and Yori kind of try to date near the end, but Yori goes to college...and Mari doesn't because she skips so much class because of her stalker breakdown.

They part as friends.

Yori doesn't hate Mari either, despite all of the weird things she did when she was convinced she was the man she liked.

Mari doesn't completely get better.

There's just an implication that she will eventually be ok.

Komori tells Yori the brutal truth as soon as he gets a job. It's obvious that Mari is following him around acting crazy. There's no such thing as magic. He isn't Mari. Her perception of reality is clearly off for most of the story, but nobody wants to accept it. Everyone waits for Mari to get better, but it's hard. Komori, understandably, kinda washes his hands of her. He realizes that crushing on a teen girl is gross. He realizes that he was just obsessed. He realizes that he was only into Mari because he never left his house. She was the only pretty girl out at night.

That was it.

Komori admits nothing special is going on. Mari just knows how to act like him, because she's been peeping for a long time.

There are even signs in Mari's room, when she is in deep denial. Receipts. Weird manga. There are mementos in her room that indicate she has been stalking him for years. Mari's cracked mind goes over these clues believing that she and Komori are somehow connected. They are, but not in some kind of supernatural way.

It's just stalking.

It's sad how hard the girls try.

Yori is convinced that she's involved in something special for most of the story.

Reality is much bleaker.

Mari says goodbye to parts of herself, and she finds the will to live on as Mari. It's implied that she really does like nerdy games, and karaoke, and being silly. She just had to act cool because she's pretty and psychological warfare style high school girl bullies latched on to her.

Her mental illness never gets a name.

Her mother's mental illness never gets a name.

Mari's original name was Fumiko, from her Grandmother.

Her mother changed it.

Her mother wanted her to be cute, and her mother never really cared about Mari's issues. She just wanted her daughter to act normal and get better. It's rough. Familial love sometimes isn't enough.

Mari and Yori cut ties with the bullies.

They manage to graduate ok.

By then Komori is long gone.

Mari accepts that she concocted this fake version of Komori, inside her, so she could escape her life. She forgot about her happy childhood as Fumiko, because her mother hated it. Her mother was more volatile back then. She suppressed herself. The hobbies she wanted. She made no friends. She has an undiagnosed mental illness. Her pretty looks made her a target. She snapped and the worst part of all of it is the two people she loved grew up. Yori and Komori go on to do better, but Mari has to go slower.

It's incredibly tragic.

#Inside Mari #yandere #male yandere #yandere male #yandere boy #recommendations #recs #rec #recommended

[w0rm-3nthus14st]

mari inside of mari inside of mari inside of mari

#inside mari #boku wa mari no naka #fanart #digital art #artists on tumblr #digital artist #drawing #art #sketch #rkgk illust #illustration #CLsart

[celestialmega]

Boku wa Mari no Naka, inside Mari, ぼくは麻理のなか, 我在麻理体内 by Shūzō Oshimi.

#manga cap #manga screencap #mangacap #manga #manga art #manga crop #shūzō oshimi #Boku wa Mari no Naka #inside Mari #ぼくは麻理のなか #我在麻理体内

[brightpinkink]

Shūzō Oshimi is such a talented manga artist and I love his work and how weird it is, but dude needs to like question his gender a lil. just a lil. There are so many afterwords where he’s like “I’ve always really wanted to be a girl like really really bad and I hate being a boy but it’s normal and I am so so cis trust me dude.” Like half his manga explore gender expression or identity.

#btw this isn’t me trying to assign a stranger as trans #and I know gender is different in japan than in the west #shuzo oshimi #shūzō oshimi #welcome back alice #inside mari #blood on the tracks #manga #manga artist #pink ink posting

[soup-mother]

Inside Mari asks the bold question: "can a cis girl dissociate so hard she becomes AGP?"

and then boldly answers "yes"

#my post #inside mari

[haveyoureadthismanga-poll]

#inside mari #boku wa mari no naka #shuuzou oshimi #2010s #complete #2012 #seinen #manga action #nudity

[transgendertransformations]

Relatable panel from Shūzō Oshimi's note at the end of volume one of his gender bending manga Inside Mari.

[read from right to left]

#transgender #trans dysphoria #shūzō oshimi #inside mari

[hellsite-yano]

So glad she's uploading again and this one's a banger

#inside mari #Youtube

[siix-eyes]

Inside Mari | Boku wa Mari no Naka - chapter 42

#inside mari #boku wa mari no naka #manga black and white #black and white #mangacap #monochrome #manga edit #manga panel #manga #siixmanga

[menxisan]

#inside mari #boku wa mari no naka

[nofatclips]

Ephemera on "Mother Horror"

#cinema #comics #horror #mother horror #domestic horror #shuzo oshimi #the babadook #jennifer kent #mother! #darren aronofsky #jennifer lawrence #javier bardem #essie davis #ephemera #inside mari #trial of blood #Youtube

[shingerion]

#manga #manga panel #manga panels #mangacap #dailymanga #mangadaily #animanga #manga blog #manga caps #manga cap #monochrome #manga girls #manga girl #inside mari #mangaworld #mangalove #manga love #otaku

[lairn]

Book 18/24: Inside Mari by Shuzo Oshimi Rating: 3.25/5

I'll warn off the bat that this is an 18+ book with some graphic sexual imagery and dark themes.

I've read another very good manga by Oshimi, Happiness, so when I saw the plot summary for this was "creepy college drop out body swaps with high school girl named Mari" I knew there had to be more to it than that. And there is. It starts off as a deconstruction of body swapping, but grows to explore issues of adolescence, sexuality, and identity in more depth. I don't want to dig into the themes too much, as they unfold as part of the mystery behind the body swapping, but the tonal shift goes from "haha pervy guy has girl body" to things like this:

Oshimi is a talented artist. I love when he illustrates everything without midtones, which comes into play effectively in this story.

The ending fizzles a little, especially in parts of Mari's backstory, but it is still a solid, unsettling, and cutting look at what it means to be a teen girl trying to grow up in a hostile world.

#it's also queer #but if you squint you can dismiss the queerness so i'm not going to push that in the main body of the text here #but the word lesbian is used explicitly #inside mari #oshimi shuzo #shuzo oshimi #reading challenge 2023