I'm at the end of my wits here. I spent the last 6 or 7 hours trying to find the title of a horror anthology manga that includes a story done in a really cutesy art/story style that's similar to Winnie the Pooh or the 100 Acre Wood or something and at the end an eldritch horror shows up. The closest I've found is this post on desuarchive where someone else is asking for the same thing in 2017, so I at least know I'm not imagining it. But I don't know that they ever found it, because the thread just told the guy to ask /wsr/. The guy does remember another story from it, though.Does any now what this manga might be? Normally I'd never ask for help because I prefer getting to the bottom of things myself, but like I said: 6 or 7 hours. I even stooped so low as to ask google's ai and it just kept hallucinating titles and sending me on wild goose chases, then apologizing when I called it out? That thing really sucks.
I guess I'll try to add to this. It was a short story anthology where I believe the stories were unrelated? I feel like I remember the 100 acre wood style story coming way out of left field even because it felt like a children's storybook or a cartoon or something. I want to say there was a whole little village of these cutesy animals that were probably supposed to look like plush dolls or something. There was a family of bears and I want to say the dad gets beheaded and the mom is pregnant and gets stabbed? It's so hard to fully remember it. The kid bear walks off and finds an eldritch horror in a lake on the mountain or something. It opens cute and gets progressively more dark as time goes on. But I remember it being really good.
Was the anthology by a single author or different authors?
>>1572122I think it was different authors. Like, I'm almost positive it was a collection of different authors doing unrelated short stories.I spent another few hours looking for it yesterday and again today. No luck, still.
Very few horror anthologies were translated. So in theory, you can just use mangadex’s advanced search and filter for “horror” and “anthologies”. And check them 1 by 1.
>>1572186I figured this would be an option too, yeah. I assumed I'd do it as a last resort, but I'm now doing it a second time in the last three days. My main worry at this point is that it's gonna turn out to be something that isn't on Mangadex or any of the other sites I've checked. I was really hoping someone else might've recognized the comic and might've been able to help me pin this shit down, but I'm quickly losing hope. This would be so much easier if I remembered any of the other stories, but the only other one I have to go off is the one the guy who described it in the OP image tossed out. The "A devil trying to convince a group of people to sell their souls" bit, but that's not descriptive enough to make it work.
Christ, this is exhausting to look for. It doesn't help that I read so much horror back in the day that some of the anthologies are blending together in my brain now, so I'm not sure which one is which. I found notes I made to myself about this book back in 2015, and the post I found from someone else (the OP image) is from 2017. So I'm guessing this book is more than a decade old at this point. Assuming it was translated and released in the same year and I read it in that year, all of which is unlikely, that would make it at least 11 years old. So I assume it's older. I might check an older HDD in a bit to see if I made anymore notes at some point, but I'm worried if I did they'd be gone by now. I swapped PCs at some point between 2015 and now because I fried a motherboard and it corrupted an HDD, so there's a high probability chance that HDD that hypothetically had notes might've been the one that also got fried. Which would suck.
I remembered like 3 other horror short stories, but I don't know if they were in the same anthology. That being said I haven't been able to find any of those 3 either, so that just shows me that most of the sites I'm checking don't have a complete database. And like I said, some of them are blending together in my head now. So that's been great for this whole situation. The stories I remembered that might not have been related were: A guy who takes a job looking into holes, there's a 50 50 chance you find treasure every time you look in or else you die and the guy who pays him hires hundreds of people (this might be a youkai hunter story, though). A girl who gets abducted by aliens who look like owls who cut her up extremely thin, then put her back together and implant a security system in her that kills her bullies (I'm pretty sure this one is much more recent than the one I'm looking for).And lastly a story about a group of scientists who go into a dig site and find a bunch of tiny statues, the finale is a guy explaining that his family had been keeping one safe his whole life and he breaks it to prove a point. He turns into a monster and kills a ton of people.
You know, the confusing thing is I read all of horror and scifi oneshots collections I could find on mangadex and elsewhere. And I don’t remember anything that you mentioned. Cutesy art style made me think Asano Inio’s Heroes, Uguisu Sachiko, or Dowman Sayman. But I don’t think they did anything you’re describing. Perhaps it’s antology-like but not oneshots, something like Franken Fran.
>>1572239I remember it being a series of one shots, because there wasn't any underlying story or anything between the stories in it. Only one story in the whole collection was cutesy too, and that one had zero humans in it at all. The one I'm looking for, obviously. It was like a Winnie the Pooh story out of left field because the rest of the collection was normal horror, then this story was just a bunch of animals or animal dolls or whatever living in a cheerful little village in the mountains and then fucked up shit started happening.
>>1572240time to ask mangadex forum and /r/manga and /r/tipofmytongue and other places, anon
>>1572236Okay, I found the owl one. It's not that as far as I can tell, that one is called "Owl fingers" (Fukurou no Yubi) and it most frequently shows up on hentai sites because despite being horror I guess the main artist does a lot of porn?? It was printed in 2020 though, and is unrelated.I can also confirm that the one about the guy who gets paid to look in holes IS Youkai Hunter, like I thought. Which is kind of disappointing.>>1572241I really hate socializing, though. Reddit is awful and I'd feel awkward asking a random forum. My biggest fear is that I'll ask a bunch of randos and it'll turn out to be some kind of porn thing or something. Like the Owl Fingers one I just found. It's not porn, but it's pretty commonly found bundled with it or whatever. I was really hoping someone here would be able to help me.
Maybe check out TV Tropes website.
>>1572256I've gone through a handful now, but I'm not seeing any reference where I think it would be. To be fair, I think the portion of the anthology is like a handful of pages at best, which would make it unlikely to show up there. Worse comes to worse I guess I'll just ask reddit as much as I hate the idea. I've also gone through another few hundred horror mangas today and come up with nothing. Also, 6 of my own HDDs trying to find anything more than the notes I made to myself in 2015 and I'm still seeing nothing. If I had to guess, I'd say I had the manga saved on the HDD that's gone now.
