Personal Rate: 2
Overall Rate based on the different criteria: 3.25 rounded down to 3

Seriously... Have we read the same manga? Have people rated the manga or the anime? I haven't seen the latter but given the length it sure doesn't cover the whole series and thanks GOD for that...
Deadman Wonderland started strong... and then went downhill... like... near the center of earth. Seriously how can anybody ruin such a good idea is beyond me... Sigh... I did wonder if I had to bother finishing this series... but heck I've read more than half the series and unfortunately it doesn't get any better.... So....

GIVE ME BACK MY HOURS!!!!

Story: 3
Art: 7
Character: 1
Enjoyment: 2
Overall: 3

Story: 3

Interesting premise completely ruined by the typical shounen tropes... Seriously... The first 4 or so volumes are enjoyable. But then the series veers into a remake of street fighter with philosophical mumbo jumbo, "cool" punch lines, and fake camaraderie. It's overly violent but it doesn't serve the purpose of the story... I'm not even counting the fanservice... Gosh. I mean, I could probably type something more coherent about how the series is a very very BAD shounen by trying too hard to look cool, but my brain has turned to jelly and I just want to rant.

I so wanted to like this.


Art: 7

Very good art... though it goes downhill with the action scenes as the series goes on. Totally confusing.


Character: 1

Likable hero, although typical shounen boy....
HOWEVER...

You've got all the rest. Excluding Shiro who at the point I dropped it, was overly naive... ( I spoiled myself the end and she joins the rest of the group after a while), the rest of the cast is made up of twisted characters who are so intense in everything they do, it just falls flat after a while. In fact... you can practically guess when this or that character is a liar since everything is just so t-y-p-i-c-a-l... and the betrayals therefore are just anticlimactic since you can see them coming from miles away. They all have some typical backstories which are told in a very repetitive shounen-like way - X vs Y, Y aka bad guy wins in the beginning, X on the brink of death remembers his past - enters typical sob story or fucked up story number 83 - then X has a revival thinking about our 14 year-old hero who inspires him for stupid reasons badly introduced and X wins.

Then we also have a contest of punch lines, contest of cool positions/gestures, contest of cool moves and so on...

The bad guys have no believable motivation for their actions. They are completely rotten, and twisted and cruel for sport. Mind you, I've read Tokyo Ghoul and some characters are pretty sick, but even if you don't approve, you come to a certain understanding of where they're coming from... Here though, the few characters who explain their reasons for being trash sound empty because the author was too lazy to give them a proper backstory. Yeah, we're bad guys because.... We hate flowers, and good air, and people living in peace. We want chaos, and violence, and blood and it's your fault you're a goody goody. YEAH. We're bad, because We love EVIL!!! SEE!

The good guy's past are no better.They're all tragic and surrealistic.


SPOILER





A dad who's lost his daughter is crazy because his daughter was a nutcase, another is a professional liar because her mother betrayed her, hence she killed her mom AND her dad, homosexual guy turned transsexual and was imprisoned because he killed the girl his boyfriend was two-timing him with.... Are we seriously supposed to empathize with murderers? If we are, then make sure we can empathize with them with proper buildup,





END OF SPOILER




WHERE IS redemption when all your characters are sick in the head?

You don't need to write whatever appears the most intense to make people relate. The whathefuckery is SO over the top that it just makes you roll your eyeballs after a while.

Worst of all, Likable characters are a scarcity. No truly, I'm trying to remember a manga in which characterization was worse but I can't come up with any. It's just that bad.


Enjoyment: 2

Intriguing beginning... the rest? I just don't want to talk about it. I want to purify my poor brain.


Overall: 3

Thank the art for the 3. Why are shounens cool? Well, obviously the answer is not to be found in Deadman Wonderland. In fact, I'd say for any aspiring mangaka, this is definitely a good series to read - the things you SHOULD NEVER DO EVER... It pains me to be that harsh because yeah...It takes time to make a manga. I'm just flabbergasted that such a series managed to be published for such a long time. Mind you, again, the beginning is promising, but after volume 5 or so... I found myself struggling. Should I continue or should I stop... Should I? It could have been WAY better, the plot itself offered possibilities to something more complex and enriching but nope... We get the shounen tropes and that's it. Forget everything that made this series interesting in the beginning just let's play streetfighter in a more gory way.

A manga to avoid. Worst shounen I've read so far. I've read boring, bland, flavorless, not-funny-trying-to-be-funny... This one enters the category of the "trying-too-much-to-be-cool-and-so-is-totally-lame" category along with Bleach... except that Bleach for all its fault was way better... Even worse, that one had a better potential than Bleach from the beginning and it managed to be crushed to the ground by its own authors. I'm wondering if they didn't get tired of their own series themselves... They should have done like Yukiru Sugisaki with D.N. Angel... Go on hiatus indefinitely.