I’m still working my way down all the various titles tagged ‘cyberpunk’ over on Baka-Updates for my podcast . Last night, I stumbled acr...
I’m still working my way down all the various titles tagged ‘cyberpunk’ over on Baka-Updates for my podcast. Last night, I stumbled across a fascinating manhwa called Dogma. The basic description sums up a lot of it: “A world where machines yearn to understand and become humans and where one human seeks to become as strong and indestructible as these machines.”
CONTENT WARNING: discussion of suicide.
SPOILERS
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The hero of this story is a human named Yura. Yura is, we discover very quickly, one of the last of his kind. Humans are a rarity in The City. Yura has attached himself to an a$$-kicking junk dealer named Aaron, whom we presume is a good guy because he has a Very Cool Hat.
Not to mention the nifty coat that sways in the breeze.
Like most of the denizens of The City, Aaron is a cyborg at the very least. Most of the people in The City refer to themselves as machines or robots, but it becomes clear as the story goes on that some folks have more or less flesh than others (and even others have “modded” themselves–or been “modded”–into lizard or wolf-people,) but that probably most of them started out as humans.
With one exception.
Machia.
Even his name evokes machi…ne.
Machia is the overlord of The City. His castle is The Citadel. He commands an army of robotic police and has spies–with literal recording eyes–all over The City. Nothing goes down in town that Machia isn’t aware of.
Yura and his twin siser Sira used to belong to Machia.
Sira and Yura–being young, possibly the last birthed humans in the area–were ‘lab rats’ in the Citadel and not the only ones. Under Machia’s care, they were tortured daily via experiments that seemed to have no purpose other than to hurt. Yura even once tried to escape via suicide, by biting his tongue in order to bleed to death. When he recovers, he finally decides to make his break. He tries to take his sister with him, but Sira isn’t interested. She’s bought into Machia’s world, his lies. She thinks that–even with the constant pain–life inside The Citadel is preferable to life in The City and being constantly hunted and on the run from the machines.
And from what we’ve seen of Yura’s life on the outside? She’s not exactly wrong.
Yura is fascinating to the local robotic community–at least the ones who suspect that he is not one of them. There are fairly fleshy robots, so with some goggles Yura can pass. However, there’s a sexbot (naturally, how else would we know this was cyberpunk?) who regularly comes to Aaron’s workshop to flirt with Yura and talk about how much she covets his smooth, pliable skin. Everyone tells Aaron he needs to keep Yura better hidden because humans fetch a high price on the open market.
Naturally, as a reader, I am expecting a raid to try to capture Yura in the next couple scenes, which does, in fact, come but not before… Yura tries to saw his own arm off.
At this point, I’m like, “Whoa, what? WAIT. WTF??” and I am truly hooked.
It turns out, in the way of all good manga and manhwa heroes, what Yura wants most of all is to get stronger–strong enough to take on Machia and save his sister!
In this world, that means becoming a machine.
Now why Yura thought through how something as relatively simple as biting his own tongue might be a good route to suicide but doesn’t seem to consider the possibilities of bleeding out from cutting off his ENTIRE arm… maybe says a lot about the world he lives in? Where parts are easily swapped out? But, everyone pretty much tells Yura that he’s kind of naïve and an idiot, and I was initially very inclined to believe them.
In fact, one of the things I ended up really loving about this manhwa is how fully duped I was into believing that Yura is as weak and useless as everyone tells us he is…. until the final scene. Then, I’m like, “Oh… you clever, clever boy! You knew what you were doing after all!!”
Interestingly, I think this surprise reveal works in part because Yura is so much less cool in any given fight than Aaron.
Coat go SWOOSH! Very Distract! Much Hero!
If you can withstand a lot of body horror and blood and guts, I think this manhwa is enough worth reading that I’m not actually going come out and explicitly discuss the big reveals in detail, but let’s just say there might be more than one villain in this piece. There’s a lot of tragedy, too, but in some ways Machia’s ultimate goals are–despite their horrific methods to getting there–oddly wholesome. Machia just wants to be a “Real Boy,” it turns out. But, some of the things that the people helping Yura have as skeletons in their past? HOLY SH*T. Dr. Mengele, anyone?
But, I encourage you to read this one to see how it plays out exactly.
I’d be curious, too, how much having foreknowledge that Yura is smarter than he plays changes how quickly you guess the final moment–or if you’re still as surprised as I was. I mean, I think I caught on several panels before the end, but not a whole lot quicker than that.
I really loved the art in this. If I had to describe it to someone without the visuals I’d say something like, the best parts of Akira (including the gory bits) + American graphic novels.
Mileage may vary, especially, as I say, depending on your tolerance for splattering gore and guts falling out everywhere and faces getting smashed–so many faces get smashed.
But I liked it.
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