A heavily underrated piece. At the risk of sounding like I'm just throwing around a common buzzword ("cosmic horror"), it does a small-scale one very well. There's absolutely no explanation for the tower. It has always been here, and if you step in, you die. Simple as that, and it's what the story revolves around. It's a short and quick read, but in the time it takes you to read to it, or listen to a narration of it, it creates believably-acting characters asking the obvious questions and doing what anyone else would do in their situation. Hell, maybe even doing better, since there are definitely a lot of people who would hesitate before punching someone out of their trance.
Which, btw, is what was a part of the dream I had, either me actually walking toward the tower or just watching the characters do so from the third perspective, and feeling the dread knowing what would happen.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTQXFqcDuFA
mangadex.org
There's a further level of realism to people just living around the tower and not knowing anything about it, and only vaguely understanding how weird it is. I've watched a video by some Youtuber who does video essays about Ancient Rome, and he talked about some historian in those times already talking about ruined cities whose names nobody could remember, and some people in the comments then started talking about their own experiences of living around buildings nobody could explain, or seeing such on TV. Also, the demons being just bland, standard ones can also be a neat detail, if it isn't too underwhelming to you. Since it's a manga, you'd probably expect some weird-ass youkai that just with you with Japanese weirdness, but, you can see their rather basic and almost out-of-place appearance as more showing of the tower's otherworldly nature in how it doesn't conform to what you'd expect from where it exists.
Which, btw, is what was a part of the dream I had, either me actually walking toward the tower or just watching the characters do so from the third perspective, and feeling the dread knowing what would happen.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTQXFqcDuFA
Chihone no Shanikusai - Vol. 1 Ch. 5 - The Familiar Tower - MangaDex
Read Chihone no Shanikusai Vol. 1 Ch. 5 "The Familiar Tower" on MangaDex!
There's a further level of realism to people just living around the tower and not knowing anything about it, and only vaguely understanding how weird it is. I've watched a video by some Youtuber who does video essays about Ancient Rome, and he talked about some historian in those times already talking about ruined cities whose names nobody could remember, and some people in the comments then started talking about their own experiences of living around buildings nobody could explain, or seeing such on TV. Also, the demons being just bland, standard ones can also be a neat detail, if it isn't too underwhelming to you. Since it's a manga, you'd probably expect some weird-ass youkai that just with you with Japanese weirdness, but, you can see their rather basic and almost out-of-place appearance as more showing of the tower's otherworldly nature in how it doesn't conform to what you'd expect from where it exists.
