2 out of 5

In short: I didn’t like where volume 3‘s chapters were heading, and that direction continues here.

I think if you entered into BNP expecting a comedy manga, perhaps you were pleasantly surprised by how much lore it seemed to be built on, while creator Hikaru Nakamura somewhat took their time – after an initial upfront overload – to step through that lore. There were signs that some aspects were maybe just weird for weird’s sake; and some storytelling tics that I chalked up to a bit of a learning curve for the creator – figuring out the pacing / visualization for more complex concepts – but on the whole, it was a good balance of character, comedy, and world-building.

The previous volume, though, started falling back on everything-is-connected style tropes, and volume 4 starts kind of proving out how much of this is just a random sequence of events by really forcing certain plot points into position, teasing reveals that thus aren’t earned and losing any sense of consequence in the story: when you loosen up logic and bend it to meet your needs, there’s no longer any consistency in rules to rely on.

While I’ve been waiting for some deeper lore to reveal itself, I’m having to accept that it’s just not there – or is sketched in at a much shallower level than I’d hoped – and, unfortunately, even the character setups that were appreciated are now fully suffering under this plotting style as well, as everyone exists solely for a joke or an aforementioned plot point. Like, I’m realizing I don’t even understand the relationship between the red and black santa at this point, and while some of my misunderstanding in manga generally comes from my American eyes not picking up on some nuance / not “accepting” some aspects of the story that may be more familiar to those steeped in the medium / maybe missing some bits through translation, I have also been reading this stuff for a good chunk of years at this point to at least have improved on some of my ignorances, and so I go back to feeling like the story is more knee-jerk in BNP than I’d prefer, complicated by Nakamura still not being great at more complex layouts or when jokes require some tighter timing.

…Behind this, though, I’d still praise the overall creativity of this series. If I accept that I’ve been reading it wrong this whole time, the lighly horrific spin on XMas concepts is continually interesting (if frustratingly executed), and Nakamura continues that stream of ideas here. In a similar plus/minus, I don’t think new character Ben was a necessary addition yet – there’s already a broad and strong cast – but he is used to bring in a pretty killer emotional angle that makes me want to back pedal on everything I’ve said, since it’s a pretty deceptively deep concept that I don’t think gets a lot of due in comics. Whether or not it’ll get its due here is still up in the air, but the fact that it was spoken to at all is promising.

In volume 4, we find out a little more about Ben, and Nakamura writes what amounts to a filler episode where everyone gets to go home for the holidays.