Red Hood

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Yadokari no Kuni, The Land of Hermit Crabs, Myakunashi, No Hope, No Pulse

Japanese: レッドフード

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 3

Chapters: 23

Status: Finished

Published: Jun 28, 2021 to Nov 8, 2021

Genres: Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Demographic: Shounen

Serialization: Shounen Jump (Weekly)

Authors: Kawaguchi, Yuuki (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 6.39¹ (scored by 9,836 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #18762²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #1034

Members: 20,860

Favorites: 127

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Nov 7, 2021

SonTOSHI

Mixed Feelings

You're capping if you're saying it's anywhere near 7.
It was not bad, but not good either. Fight scenes were beyond my understanding. They were just pieces of abstract art. Many times the art looked wonky. And overall, the ending left a sour taste in my mouth. Only redeeming quality this manga had was Grimm and her EXTRA THICC thighs. Nothing else. Not even the muscle hothead girl was good enough for me. I don't have anything else to say. It was just boring for me to read through week to week.

Well, at least it was better than Phantom Seer.

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Jun 27, 2021

ASeaWeeb

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (1/23 chp)

As of the first chapter, it's nothing outstanding. Fairly generic plot with some good art thrown in. Wouldn't be too surprised if the series falls a bit flat and gets cut short, but it has room to grow and I'm curious to see where the author takes the series.

First things first the art is really good. While I can't say for certain how this author will handle fights going forward in terms of them being readable, what we have was really nice to look at and relatively easy to follow. The setting has this kind of victorian-esque influence with the biggest comparison obviously being ...

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Jan 25, 2025

Final_Verdict

Mixed Feelings

Potential. A very loaded word, if you think about it. Who determines what does and doesn’t have the -potential- to be something great? While few things achieve everything they set out to, I don’t think it’s an unfair perspective to say that the seed of greatness can be found within most pieces of art. Whether it’s a beautiful, life-changing painting, the Great American Novel™, a corporate-garbage TV program, or pulp comics printed in newspaper-quality magazines. Everything has the potential to be something to someone, right?

It SHOULD be this way, but life is not always so fair. So what about when that potential is cut ... short? When the people in charge of a story’s publication pull the plug prematurely, and say, “No. It never had a chance.” Such a thing leaves behind a miasma, a sort of scent of regret that seeps up toward the reader from the author’s very words. The Hunters Guild: Red Hood, is a good example of this.

Made up of a scant three volumes, The Hunters Guild: Red Hood ends up having three very clear phases to its story. The first stage, here, is setup: as to be expected. Red Riding Hood, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, dark, dark woods, werewolves, witches, giants, dragons, and the Van Helsing-esque organization that hunts them: that is what this manga’s world is made of. Though seeing western fantasy in manga is nothing new, I did find it a bit of a breath of fresh air in a magazine that is positively (and expectedly) full of Japanese-ness. Katana swordfighting, Shinto demons, martial arts, and all accompanying Asian mythos—it seems there’s no end to it in Shonen Jump. But of course, it’s a Japanese magazine, so it’s gonna be there, you know? So having a Grimm’s Fairy Tales/Little Red Riding Hood manga should be a standout in this roster, a reprieve of sorts… in theory.

And for what it’s worth, that first volume is indeed good setup. The art is deeply reminiscent of a one Kohei Horikoshi’s of My Hero Academia fame (which is fitting, considering that the creator of this manga, Yuuki Kawaguchi, was his assistant) and leaves a bit to be desired, but it’s by no means bad. You have a basic conflict, interesting monsters, and a generic protagonist, but stirred together they amount to that one promising word: potential.

Sadly, the entire second volume is terribly boring, flaunting one of the most by the numbers, cookie-cutter attempts at a training arc I’ve ever read. As I trudged through the chapters I couldn’t help but think, “yeesh, no wonder this got canned.” It takes place in an uninteresting area with uninteresting characters, bereft of the off-color fairytale qualities the first volume had in spades. It overall was not a good place to take the story hot off the heels of fun action scenes between freaky-looking werewolves and the hunters that kill them.

But then in the third volume, things get weird. The manga seemingly had been taking its time to set up the world. It had even introduced three named antagonists. But then it makes such a wild headspin turn into metatextuality that I can literally feel Kawaguchi’s desperation and regret leaking out onto the pages, bleeding into the fabric of the story. Anyone with an interest in this title has more than likely heard about the meta nature of the ending, but I wasn’t prepared for how much pity it would arouse from me. And if you somehow didn’t know, the reason this manga is so short is because Shonen Jump, the publisher, axed it not long after it was greenlit. So the entire climax of the story is a desperate scramble to wrap up loose ends in the most unique way possible. The work culture of the manga industry is brutal indeed, and all I was thinking as I finished reading this title was that the author is but one of many victims of a very competitive industry.

I do think there was value in this story, certainly, and if you generally like shonen manga or western fairy tales, then it’s worth the read. I think the ending saves it from mediocrity, but instead makes it somewhat bizarre. The one emotion I’m left with, however, is sadness for the mangaka at his inability to draw a long, fun story he could fully flesh out. Sadness that his bosses said “no.” Not everything can be as long as One Piece, I get it, but I keep going back to that one word—potential—and wondering just what this little story could’ve been, if given more time.

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Nov 4, 2021

Giblow_20

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (18/23 chp)

Hunter's Guild: Red Hood was a serialization by Yuki Kawaguchi, a former assistant of Horikoshi. You can see this from the character's faces and bombastic action panels imo. RH is about MC Velou and thicc muscle lady Grimm going around and killing monsters (with the first arc focusing on Werewolves).

RH failed to establish the 3 G's of Jump early enough

G - uy: Who is our MC, what's their backstory, what's their personality like, can the audience root for/attach themselves to the mc

G - oal: What's the point of the story? What actually drives our MC and does it have potential to keep the story ... going?

G - immick: Luffy is rubber, Naruto has the demon fox and Ichigo has a big sword etc etc. You want to introduce what the MC's weapon or power is and maybe even how other characters will fight. Especially important for shonen battle manga.

Red Hood achieved one of these well, and it took 5 whole chapters to do so, while the previously mentioned series got it done in the 1st chapter. So of course that lowered its initial reception in Japan. Velou is a pretty bland character, who's motivations seem all over the place at first, going back and forth between protecting the village or going off to kill monsters. This ties into the Goal, which was to defend the village by killing monsters that aren't even near the village. Maybe Velou should have just been the overly empathetic type who wanted to defend villages like his own. Lastly, the Gimmick, Grimm's assortment of fairy tale and literature themed weapons, was pretty good. You could easily see Velou being trained over time to master all these different and interesting weapons by going up against a variety of monsters.

By the time the author began the exam arc, the manga had lost all good will. The story instantly moves away from the potential of its worldbuilding and instead locks us into weeks and weeks of one of the most poorly timed exam arcs in manga history. It's like if Hxh had Gon sail away from home and instantly be put into the Running portion of the Hunter exam, which then goes on for 10 chapters. The strength of the series was its monster designs and use of Fairy Tale lore (which Japanese audiences would be less knowledgeable about) and it wastes that in less than 10 chapters.

At this point the axe is clearly visible, especially because the series had been at the bottom of the TOC since chapter 7 or so. Obviously Kawaguchi was given notice of the axe, because at the end of exam he decided to dump all the late game twists the story would have led to. Velou is a puppet, made by the Mayor (Gepettou) to destroy the book that writes the fate of the world. The author excuses Velou's poor characterisation, Grimm's wasted potential, the unneeded focus on side characters and the odd twists in the story with a meta narrative analogy about publishing a manga. It feels incredibly whiney to read, and if it is intended to critique the industry, it feels quite pathetic coming from a first time author who couldn't last 19 chapters. I would like to hope Kawaguchi is just trying to express his frustrations about trying to please the audience and failing rather than lashing out at them, but meta narrative's always end up confusing to interpret when you don't know the author well.

Overall, the one-shot was nice, but the manga failed to sort itself out fast enough to gain an audience, and lost the remaining audience by rejecting its initial premise for a meta one.

Edit: I know this review is really harsh, but I was fairly excited after reading the oneshot. This plus the constant Phantom Seer level copium and whining from readers soured my opinion of Red Hood quire a bit

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May 5, 2022

DakimakuraThor

Mixed Feelings

Character design A1. The mangaka definitely has a thing for strong, thicc women. Can't complain. Some of the monster designs are unique, have a real old-timey eldritch horror vibe.

Story was promising at first, but felt like it lost it's direction and went really off-kilter by the end. I suppose that is par for the course for a to-be-axed manga. Just a shame to get our feet wet and then have your excitement cut short.

Would love to see this author take a crack at another series, perhaps after some serious pre-planning, world-building, and structured story pacing.

Overall, if you want to enjoy some art and feel a ...

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Sep 24, 2021

yona2005

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (10/23 chp)

It can happen sometimes that a one gets way excited while reading a certain story to the point where the action of not noticing a lot of the flaws within the story occurs unknowingly, yet all it takes is some minutes to calm down and analyze what they've been reading.

Red Hood is a manga that caught my attention solely for it's using of an old tale as it's name which according to my experience may indicate that the story itself have some of these fantastical elements that do not exist in other stories, and sure it does.

For this review we are going to split things ...

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Mar 13, 2025

Chesed

Mixed Feelings

Red Hood is a manga that is essentially one giant mixed bag. Conceptually, it's not the most insanely unique idea out there, but that's okay if the presentation is good. And the presentation, aesthetically, is pretty good! Some of the character designs are quite standout and it's not hard to see why people would attach on to them immediately with a visually distinct style. The monsters are repulsive with a slightly cartoony/goofy flare to them, which suits them being based on fairy tales, and the overall setting feels drawn in a way to invoke typical fairy tale settings and bring things further together.

However, beyond aesthetics, ...

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