The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.
Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated.
–Rules text of “Wrath of God“, and namesake of the manga.
What we have here today is, without beating around the bush, a simple boy-meets-girl romance. There are hundreds of manga like this, probably thousands, so it’s difficult for one to stand out without some kind of twist. Something that grabs the audience’s attention. That twist here is simple, but surprisingly important to the general flow of the story. As its lengthy title hints at, Destroy All of Humanity, It Can’t Be Regenerated is deeply entwined with, and is basically about, seminal trading card game Magic: The Gathering. It is, in fact, licensed, which is why the manga can get away with showing you all of its period-accurate power combos faithfully reproduced from the actual card art without having to censor them. It is frankly sensationally geeky, and it’s less a flaw and more just a fact that if you don’t have some level of MtG knowledge, the manga will be a touch hard to follow.
And yes, period-accurate. Because Destroy‘s other big deviation from the norm is that it is something of a period piece, though it’s closer to present day than the term normally implies.
The year is 1998. The global mood shifts from optimism to wariness about the impending year 2000. In Japan, Obuchi Keizō becomes Prime Minister and the Nozomi Mars probe launches. In the world of anime; Cardcaptor Sakura, Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain and, perhaps most pertinently, Yu-Gi-Oh! all premiere. In other words; it’s not the worst time to be a nerd living in suburban Japan. Perhaps less specifically associated with Japan is the growing global popularity of Magic: The Gathering. At this point in time, Magic–and the entire medium of TCGs–was just five years old, younger than contemporary competitor Hearthstone is now in 2021. The game is about to enter one of the most infamous phases of its first decade. And it is in this environment that we meet our protagonists, and, indeed, they meet each other.
Hajime and Emi are ordinary middle schoolers*. They compete for the top spot in their grade but don’t otherwise really know each other, until one day Hajime discovers that Emi–shock of shocks–plays Magic: The Gathering, just like he does. What initially seems like it might be the setup for a very stupid “what? Girls have hobbies?!” kind of comedy eventually proves itself to be a surprisingly thorough look at both young love and the transience of youth in general. That’s a lot to put on a manga about a card game, but it’s not exactly unique in this regard, as we’ll get to.
Destroy All of Humanity‘s real ace in the hole here is an ability to transmute pop-culture ephemera into actual, meaningful pathos. Obviously, the connection to Magic: The Gathering is what runs deepest. There is an ongoing thread wherein the release of various sets–especially those in the Urza block–is directly and deliberately correlated with the basic inevitability of time moving forward. “Growing up” is a big theme here. Another occasional reference point, Revolutionary Girl Utena, is tied explicitly to the arc of a specific character, Yakumo.
Elsewhere, everything from the Boogiepop series that spawned the Light Novel format to Final Fantasy VII, to Eurodance hit “What Is Love?” come up. Sometimes, as with the many anime referenced, these appear to just be namechecks, but they tie into the wider narrative often enough that the interpolations feel meaningful rather than simply clever.
So why this, why all of these allusions? Well, they’re merely the methodology. Destroy All of Humanity runs on the same internal logic as a sports movie. Personal growth is tied, directly or not, to persistence, determination, and skill at a game of choice. In that way it’s very classic, maybe even old-fashioned. What prevents it from feeling maudlin or corny is a shock of wistful melancholia that shoots through much of the series. There is a palpable sense that with the end of the 20th century comes a kind of end of innocence. Everyone, Hajime most of all, is keenly aware that teenage years don’t last forever.
Running alongside the many references to pop culture media is a lone nod to one of the phenomena of the day. A fixation on the idea that the year 2000 would bring about the end of the world–in recent memory this has largely been supplanted by the later 2012 debacle, but it was definitely a presence at the time. Here, it serves as the simplest of the manga’s many metaphors for the waning of youth. But in that would-be apocalypse, it sees a kind of romance, and it is for that reason that it’s so easy to root for Hajime and Emi. Even if the world were to burn, they’d have each other.
Visually, Destroy All of Humanity‘s default mode is a sort of nostalgic charm. The character designs aren’t throwbacks exactly but they don’t quite feel contemporary either, aiming for a sort of timeless middleground that works more often than it doesn’t. The backgrounds similarly hit an ageless “suburban Japan nostalgia” feel that is so ingrained in the medium it’s practically invisible if you don’t take the time to notice it.
The main thing that departs from all this is the actual Magic duels themselves. There’s a certain type of person who will want to pick this manga up just for the wonderfully nerdy sight of things like a mill combo (specifically, the “Turbo Genius” deck, and yes, they do use that very name in-fiction here) getting the full Yu-Gi-Oh! treatment.
And about that whole “rival in love” thing. The main pairing remains pretty uncontested throughout, but Destroy does manage to shake things up a few times, and the duels also being the emotional centerpieces of the story is a big part of how. The aforementioned Turbo Genius duel is actually surprisingly intense. (Making a Blue artifact deck the one the “bad guy” of the match uses may be a little obvious, admittedly.) It’s not the only one of its ilk in Destroy All of Humanity, either, mangaka YOKO really seems to have a knack for this kind of thing.
In general, Destroy All of Humanity has few notable flaws. It is noticeable how often the skeevier side of 90s otakudom is simply brushed off. One minor character’s bouts of misogyny are even played as an obvious joke–no one takes him seriously–which frankly just kind of seems like wishful thinking. But this is a minor complaint and I find it hard to hold against the series.
It is also worth noting that Destroy All of Humanity isn’t finished. The series releases fairly slowly, though scanlators The Fallen Angels are diligent about translating it when new chapters do release. So there is of course, time for all of this to go south, but it seems unlikely that it will. Things aren’t this well-written by mistake.
The most recent chapter ends with the delightfully sitcom-y revelation that–oh my!–our lovebirds are in the same class after years of being assigned different classrooms within their grade.
It’s the kind of slightly-cheesy twist that suits this sort of thing well. Where is it going to take it? Who knows. But when Destroy All of Humanity finally ends, I think I do know where Hajime and Emi will be; right beside each other.
*I think. They’re called “middle-schoolers” in the scanlation but act more like high schoolers and I can’t tell if that’s artistic license or due to that thing where Japanese and American high school years don’t line up exactly right. I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter.
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