User blog:AustinDR/PE Proposal: Genjurou Imari

What is the work?
Pupa is a horror manga about two siblings — Utsutsu and Yume respectively — who live by themselves after their abusive father left them and their mother was taken to a mental ward. While walking home, Yume encounters red butterflies and a sickly dog. This causes a change within Yume to develop, and she transforms into a bloodthirsty insectoid monster. in order to satiate her hunger, Utsutsu must be her main source of food. Was adapted a few years back into a 12 episode anime by the notorious Studio DEEN.

CHARACTERISTICS
Genjurou Imari was the grandfather of Imari Ai (or Maria Imari) who founded the Imari Ishin Facility along with the young prodigy Chiharu Bizen when his granddaughter discovered two of the Pupa monsters. Much like his granddaughter, Genjurou was sociopathic, but possibly more so.

MORAL EVENT HORIZON
Genjurou had died years prior to the events of the manga, only appearing in flashbacks. However, I feel the flashbacks give enough to define Genjurou's character. Besides being a researcher, Genjurou's passion was painting. But he believed that true art was in suffering. In short? Genjurou adopted orphan boys and tortured them by whipping them senselessly so they could serve as muses to inspire him. He would abuse these orphan boys for years until they eventually died, after which, he would discard of them. Genjurou had done this to three orphan boys before setting his eyes on Shiro Onijima, the father of Utsutsu and Yume Hasegawa. He would then spend years torturing Shiro as well as psychologically warping his mind by claiming that those were acts of love.

Eventually, Maria and her older brother, Hotoki, were sent to live on the island due to their mother being terrified of Maria. Shortly afterward, Bizen dashes in, claiming that Genjurou had hung himself. However, when Hotoki analyzes his expression, he has a slight smirk on his face, suggesting that he was the one who killed Genjurou as a way of putting an end to his twisted art work.

NO SYMPATHY
No. He was just a pedophile who derived satisfaction from torturing boys and doesn't bat an eye when he unwittingly kills them, choosing instead to discard them like used toilet paper. As for Shiro, while there were moments that he would show care towards Shiro, it's made abundantly clear that he is only doing so to keep him under wrap. Genjurou's sociopathic tendencies extends to even his own family where he doesn't express any love — or any emotion for that matter — for anyone. Not his grandchildren, not his biological child, no one.

HEINOUS STANDARD
So, yes, the heinous standard of Pupa is high with Yume being a mass murdering bug monster and Maria herself not even being heinous enough when I first read through the volumes of the manga. With Genjurou...while he has a small body count of three victims, he of course can't compete with the likes of Yume. However, what I think makes him stand out is adopting orphan children and then systematically torturing them until they literally drop dead all for getting inspiration to paint is a unique crime not replicated by anyone else in the manga. While torture is common in the manga, it is never committed on children.