tl;dr: A manga that with great intensity dives deep into the concepts of growth and change. 

This manga was very different from what I expected after reading the first chapter. It’s certainly really strange, but it’s also really intense and at times incredibly dark. It rarely went in the direction that I expected it to, but still went in ways that made sense. Characters weren’t like what I expected they would be like, but rather had a lot more depth than what I expected. This is a coming of age story, one centered around a particularly nihilistic middle school student, and hence has a lot of themes that you would expect from such a manga, such as love, loss, friendship, and bullying. but the biggest and most important one by far was change. Everyone can change, especially when they’re just kids. The importance of being able to grow and adapt to change is a pretty common theme that’s pretty common to such works and this has a pretty good take on that as well. But what I think was especially great about this manga and what makes it stand out, is that it stresses the importance of being able to acknowledge others growth and not boxing people into what you expect them to be based on how they’ve been before. To some degree, you have to let things go. Even if someone greatly wrongs you, with time they may no longer be that person. While if they’re truly trying to change some sort of major redemption would be for the best, even without that, even if they just change slowly and naturally without really acknowledging it, sometimes it’s best to just let things go and move on. People have many sides to them, a person that seems terrible at times to you but that often acts good isn’t simply a person hiding their true selves, but rather is a multifaceted person, and may well grow to lose the part you find terrible. Basically, people are complicated, and I think this does a really job of conveying that. The writing I think was particularly excellent, and everything flowed really well and kept me hooked from beginning to end. The art in terms of general style isn’t terrible, and there are certain shots where I think it looks pretty nice, like the color pages, but for the most part it has a very sketch like aspect to it that I wasn’t really fond of at all.