I think a person's enjoyment of Shizumu Watanabe's Dead Account will mostly boil down to their ability to tolerate characters talking like Redditors nonstop. On its surface, Dead Account promises a deeper examination of the growing intersection between society, spirituality, and technology that's increasingly relevant in the world today. However, this analysis is frustratingly superficial, and instead, Dead Account is a straightforward shonen battle series, but with many of the techniques and ability names utilized by characters being based on internet words, like “Flamer.” In short, if you liked Jujutsu Kaisen but wish it were more social media-pilled, you'll probably have an okay time with Dead Account, but this will likely read as a derivative to folks who routinely touch grass.

Dead Account opens with the revelation that bad boy streamer Soji Enishiro's little sister has been killed by an evil spirit, which sparks the awakening of his psychic fire powers and motivates him to attend a school for exorcists so he can defeat the evil spirit responsible for his sister's death. What differentiates Dead Account from similar shonen battle fare is that evil spirits in this series are the materialized social media accounts of people who have passed away. This hook is what drew me to this work initially, as I was familiar with Shizumu Watanabe's previous work, Real Account, a death game manga that's also steeped in social media and the lexicon of the digital age. While a lot of the social commentary in Real Account was fairly surface-level, I had hoped that this element of Watanabe's writing would improve in Dead Account.

I was mistaken.

While Dead Account does have a social commentary streak, with several characters in the work like Kukuru Kasubata and Kukuru Kasubata's primary character motivations stemming from their homes being incredibly traditional and restrictive, Dead Account doesn't offer much of a commentary on the social media institutions that overtly inform this work. While characters fighting with abilities based on internet lexicon like a “Ban Hammer” or having an account “Frozen” does add some novelty to the fights in Dead Account, this work is overtly trying to cash in on the current popular battle shounen mold.

In just the opening story arcs, Dead Account features: A quirky and spirited young man who awakens supernatural powers after another young man tries and fails to defeat a monstrous creature.

That young man is being invited to a school to train his new powers and also go out on missions to defeat evil spirits causing issues across a Japanese cityscape.

The protagonist's teacher is the strongest person in this universe, who chooses to bring about societal change through fostering the next generation of monster fighters.

The protagonist forms a two-boys-one-girl team where the young woman is brash and has an at-first antagonist relationship with the main character.

A student whose supernatural power allows them to fight remotely by controlling different kinds of robots. An intramural battle where rival groups of students fight each other, only for the event to become compromised when a student is revealed to be a traitor working with the malevolent spirits.

I know it's reductive to say that Dead Account is just a riff on Jujutsu Kaisen, but it really does just keep overtly borrowing ideas and plot points from the current king of shonen. This is especially frustrating for a number of reasons. Beyond the fact that Dead Account's premise lends itself well to making any kind of statement on how technology and society shape each other, a la the better entries in the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona franchises; Jujutsu Kaisen is already a fairly derivative work. JJK was a pretty clear mashup of past shonen hits like YuYu Hakusho, Naruto, and Hunter X Hunter, and Dead Account's attempt to further repackage those ideas feels like the death of creativity. Though I suppose a point of distinction in Dead Account is that it's a far skeezier work than Jujutsu Kaisen, as, while JJK is by no means a treasure trove of well-written female characters, at least the women of JJK don't inexplicably strip when they share a scene like the women in Dead Account.

After reading Dead Account, I think this work is going to be my new go-to example of “shonen slop,” but that being said, this is pretty good slop. It reminds me a lot of the kinds of manga I read when I was first getting into the medium, where I would prioritize whatever people on forums were posting about over prestige or originality. Even as a teenager, I knew that series like Fairy Tail, Seven Deadly Sins, and Akame ga KILL! weren't amazing stories, but they did help me get a sense of this medium and the conventions within this genre. Similarly, I think Dead Account can be a good palette builder for other young folks getting into manga, or a popcorn read for genre aficionados.

As far as comfort reads go, there is definitely less appealing shonen fare out there than Dead Account. It's full of familiar ideas dressed up in a fresh coat of paint, but it's still novel enough for an easy read. I bet the production committee behind the upcoming season of anime is furious that the anime is going to air alongside the latest season of Jujutsu Kaisen, as this work is sure to lose out in a comparison to most other shonen series. However, the familiarity did manage to at least partially endear me to this work.