MAJOR TW: Rape, sexual assault, abuse, pedophelia, stalking, blood, misgendering, death of a parent

Note: This review comes from a non-binary trans person.

I honestly am having a hard time with this manga getting so many rave reviews. I understand WHY, but what I don't understand is the huge elephant in the room that everyone glazes over. The major "Hey, one of the main characters literally sexually assaults the other protagonist...twice" elephant in the room.

Now, I'm okay with a trans character being imperfect and even cruel and hurting others, like any minority we have our fair share of traumatised, emotionally unhealthy and manipulative folks. But not only do the fans of this manga completely excuse the protagonists assaults and frame the entire story as sweet and healing, the story itself never addresses the assaults this character inflicts as wrong. It clearly traumatises the other protagonist but it's just waved off the next moment as nothing.

Again, I'm not saying the story had to change or that this should not have happened per say, because hurt people hurt people, and it made sense in the story that a person as traumatised and hurt as this one lashed out trying to inflict pain, not excusable, but makes sense. But the fact that no one is addressing this as problematic, in a manga where the entire premise is very much built around another instance of sexual assault, is just wrong.

And of course the message is just plain messy. We explore one characters gender, but it's so often implied their gender comes from one: their mother dressing them like a girl, since that's the gender of child she wanted (are the cis okay?) and two: from being sexually assaulted. While this can very well be real reasons for people to grapple with sexuality and gender it is a harmful stereotype and isn't even properly or fully explored in the manga.

This is all a shame because the art, the humour, the other characters where so well done and I had many good laugh-out-loud moments. But the ending, the lashing out, and also just how graphic the sexual assault scenes were, as well as my complaints above I just can't let the good points undo the damage.