By Dustin Cabeal

I had decided not to review the fifth volume. Hell, I wasn’t even going to read it until I started this volume and saw that there was a character death in the previous volume. It made me think for just a moment that something of importance actually happened.

Instead, I found a situation that could have proved to be emotional, moving and full of substance to be hollow. One of the maids gets taken over by Loki, and he uses her to fight the demon and the gardener. That’s what I’m calling them now. There’s all this build up to make this character’s death sad, but it’s all completely shot to hell when the gardener just say’s fuck it, I’ll kill her. There’s no emotion to the death, and it doesn’t build the gardeners character.

Flash forward to this volume, and he’s mopey. Everyone’s had their memories erased of the dead character which makes her death void of any emotional reward. The gardener has decided he’ll become a demon as well and push everyone away… Wweeeeee!

Also, there’s a trans angel that apparently appeared in one of the previous volumes. You’ll forgive me for not remembering these forgettable villains that commit one evil act to prove they’re bad and after that get their asses handed to them by the demon. They make a lot of dick jokes and act repulsed by the character making me wonder who the real monsters are? It’s 2017, and this book is being written in the past. Not just with its opinion on transgender characters, but its structure and pacing as well.

The kicker is that the two-people helping the demon are related to the person that was killed that sent the demon on her path of vengeance. It’s a shallow, selfish cause that makes the demon’s character all the more pathetic. Worse, her relationship with the gardener is decreasing in importance. She’s just let him fight, however, and there’s still a huge focus on regeneration during battles. It makes their entire relationship pointless if neither one cares about the well-being of the other.

The art is whatever. It’s not bad because it’s professionally published manga. It’s not good because the story is so terrible. The action never has a flow because it stops to inform the reader of the gardener’s injuries. Just shut up and fight. Let the art tell some of this terrible story because the facial expressions do a better job than the dialogue does.

I gave this series one last go, but I’m done done with it. If it’s sent to me again, it’ll just end up in the rubbish bin because I simply won’t waste any more time with this series. The character motivations are terrible, and the author only continues to poke holes in them. What little cheesecake there is in this story can easily be found in other series and better, so it’s not worth the money or time. I wish I could get mine back.

Score: 1/5

7th Garden vol. 6
Story & Art: Mitsu Izumi
Publisher: Viz Media