Love Murder Basketball is a story of abuse and how it can shape a person's affection. The pacing is breakneck, with a bland presentation at first glance. There isn't much shading to the designs or environments, but there is attention to detail when artist Tsunderuuu wants you to notice something like the location of a specific bruise mark or a particular point of view. Despite being over three hundred pages long, I finished the volume in about twenty minutes. Part of that could've been me trying to speed through some of the more intense imagery in the book, but the overall structure of this volume is frantic and disjointed, and I think the pacing is intentional.

Volume one warns you as soon as possible what exactly you are getting into. This is a story of child abuse, sexual assault, rape and violence. It's about two young men feeling damaged due to the environment they grew up in, and they are trying desperately to find some semblance of peace in a world that has taken every ounce of control away from them. Our protagonists, Shoto and Goro, could not be further opposites regarding their visual representation. One is tall and built with sharp eyes, while the other is small, skinny, pale, and meek. Love Murder Basketball is not subtle about what it tries to communicate, and that direct heavy-handedness can be off-putting.

They are both united through their abuse and have established a BDSM Master/Servant relationship. It is far from healthy, with a lot of personal traumas spilling over into the relationship, but it is easily the healthiest one in the book. There is a sense of caring between these two. Despite the unimpressive visuals, the dialogue has a surprising amount of subtlety that implies more respect between these two than visually shown. As someone with some experience in BDSM, I'm admittedly happy about some conversations and appalled at others. This is not a story that wants to highlight a textbook example of a fleshed-out BDSM relationship. This feels like a story that is trying to highlight how the practices of BDSM ride a fine line into territories of abuse when the people who are practicing them don't have the most put-together lives. However, I cannot tell if the story glorifies its subject matter or treats these themes respectfully, a crucial distinction.

In that sense, Love Murder Basketball is rather captivating, but that doesn't change the fact that this is one of the most challenging books I have read this year. Despite being called Love Murder Basketball, I think I only counted one passing mention of the word "basketball," and any murder that happens is more for the sake of establishing other character traits in the background rather than being used as a pivotal plot point, at least in this volume. I only know certain things about the story because I read the synopsis. The story properly skims over a lot of specific details, like Shoto's dad being a yakuza boss or Goro's famous serial killer name.

These may be things that will occur later on, but these come off as throwaway elements to the story at this point. I need to be in a particular mood to read this type of story, but I'm not against reading more when the time is right. There is a solid foundation about people trying to discover that they deserve more than they were ever given and learning to accept that maybe they can nurture a little bit of happiness they've carved out for themselves without turning into another broken piece in their mostly shattered lives. I do not recommend this for the faint of heart in any way, shape, or form, but if you are looking for something darker and have the stomach for it, you may also see some of the potential in this manga.