Warning! Contains spoilers for Chapter 16 Crypto Academy!
While breaking the 4th wall is often used to please readers, a creative Shonen dance manga is using this technique to fight directly with fans. That series is Crypto Academy, written by Nisioisin with drawings by Yuji Iwasaki, about a boy named Iroha as he explores the harsh world of a school for code breakers. The series hasn’t hesitated to speak directly to audiences before, but its most recent chapter uses the manga’s self-perception towards readers for the first time.
Chapter 16 adds a new twist to the Crypto Academy’s incredibly complex Murder Mystery game the characters are playing. After winning the Murder Mystery section, Iroha is promoted to the next round where he will compete against other winners like himself. When he got there, he found a student, Anonymity-San, already there. While this character used to be just a fun background character, their reintroduction here makes it clear that they really are the bad guys when it comes to revealing the utter lack of morality they use to win. advantage in the game. This spirit even extends to the reader himself as Anonymity-San approaches and destroys the framing mechanism that normally appears to notify the reader of a new puzzle.
Crypto Academy Use the new 4th Wall Break to attack the reader
This is a shocking departure from the typical manga approach to these puzzles. Most of the 4th wall breaking in the series actually comes from a helpful character named Kogoe that informs readers about an aspect of a certain puzzle they might have missed. The series even tries to give Shonen Jump fans a real-world puzzle to solve, using its typical intro frame to set its difficulty. This helpful precedent is part of what made Anonymous-San’s fourth wall broken in a recent chapter so shocking.
The villain reveal in this chapter also recreates the super joke at the core of the Anonymity-San character. Previously, Anonymity-San’s masked censorship bars and dialogue were said to be Shonen Jump’s satirical commentary on Japanese censorship. But in terms of her true personality, these bars are an expression of her desire to gain whatever advantage she can, even if it’s as trivial as hiding their identity from the audience. fake.
Breaking the new 4th wall of the Crypto Academy recreates the setting for the series
This is a truly revolutionary breakthrough in breaking the 4th wall that hopefully more series, both in Japan and abroad, will be adopted in the future. It’s unclear how Anonymity-San will use her meta powers from here, but given her evil nature, they certainly won’t be used to the benefit of Secret Academy readers. code or its heroes. Only the upcoming chapters of the manga will tell if Iroha and his friends will be able to decipher the information this villain is hiding. Shonen dance fans or if they will be kept permanently in the dark.
Chapter 16 Crypto Academy available to read from Viz Media.