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and I'm so grateful that I'm a loveless asexual bastard with barely any friends.
(spoilers ahead. you have been warned.)
It all started from this one playlist and someone said Goodnight Punpun is good so naturally I have to check it out, right? So I spoiled the plot to me myself by reading the summary as I almost always do with ended manga series, right? (yes I know it's weird please don't judge) Look at what Wikipedia had said:
A coming-of-age drama story, it follows the life of a child named Onodera Punpun, from his elementary school years to his early 20s, as he copes with his dysfunctional family, love life, friends, life goals and hyperactive mind, while occasionally focusing on the lives and struggles of his schoolmates and family. Punpun and the members of his family are normal humans, but are depicted to the reader in the form of crudely drawn birds. The manga explores themes such as depression, love, social isolation, sex, death, and family.
Also, the playlist mentioned above
A boy struggling about life? Seems like my kind of story, how about I give it a go- and I'm hooked and spent all of my recent free time on reading the thing. Wonderful.
But (of course) I shall defend myself (or confess, really): it was an exceptionally decent mix of captivating and cringe unbeknownst to me. I don't read cringy stuff because it upsets my stomach, but everytime the story's about to go downhill the development gives the exact right amount of cringe that keeps you disgusted but not so disgusted that you stop the reading altogether. That's not something that every single edgy story could achive. According to the Wikipedia the author "disliked the labeling of the manga as an utsumanga (depressing manga) or surreal, which he felt pigeonholed the manga"; this is very correct and very real. Instead of calling Goodnight Punpun a depressing or surrealist manga, it should, in my humble opinion, be simply called a "things happened" manga.
It is... not a very pleasing story. I understand how the "cruel youth" genre works and the fact that I'm a bit too old for this kind of stuff, so let me put it this way: while other teenagers in other stories are only youthful-minded stupid, the protagonist of Goodnight Punpun is just straight-up awful. The last time I've read something with a protagonist this off-putting was *years* ago with Re:zero, but even that would still lies within the boundaries of the normal "teenager stupid & cringe" range; the way the protagonist (named Onodera Punpun) handle things is just (at times) straight up creepy and disgusting. You can tell that he inherited his traits mainly from his bitch of a mom and his weakling of a dad. (His uncle was a bit better but he cheated his girlfriend so the assholery probably do run in the family.) It's bad, and the fact that they are all bad on but a human level so you can't really full-on hating them makes it ten times worse.
You see, this is why asexual is a real thing and this is how an asexual person like me could never really understood what's going on with "normal" people's mind when it's about sex: I was never this obsessed with the topic (other than rambling about SJW issues online but that's on a different axis so it doesn't count), especially with real people. Not when I was young, not now, not in the future. I wonder if Punpun - or whoever the character was supposed to be based upon - ever asked himself: does he really have to treat all the girls he met in his life like that? Surely there's other way to deal with these kind of things that one can learn and lead to a better outcome?
Then again the story seems to be set in the late 1990s ~ early 2000s, maybe things are so different back then that it's impossible. Oh well...
(See, the thing about sex is sex is just sex. It doesn't start anything, it doesn't lead to anything, and it doesn't end anything. It's not a sign, an implication, a tool or a metaphor. It's both related and totally not related to love at the same time and at any time always. It's its own thing, in and of its own. It's neither the solution nor the problem. Only one thing about sex is real: just like someone had once concluded, it's about (exercising and exerting) power. Talk about being pathetic... That's the kind of thing about supposedly "normal" people that I could never understand.)
The real conclusion of Punpun's story, in my opinion, started when he stabbed Aiko's mother to death (Aiko said it was her; I don't really think so. As for her stabbing, it's probably just her finally pouring out all the anger and hatred she had kept inside). The old Punpun is gone - or should one say, the real Punpun finally comes out under the sun? To be honest I liked him a lot more after this, I was like "finally he became a man who can push thing forward instead of doing whatever the fuck he was doing before". Aiko probably could have lived a new life, but it seems like the author won't let her anyway:
...At end of the manga, Asano was originally going to make Punpun die while saving a child of a friend, but he felt that it was too "clean" of an ending. He continued the theme of nothing going right for Punpun by making him live and by denying Punpun solitude after Aiko's death by pairing him up with Sachi.
-- from Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Punpun#Themes
Welp, ain't that seals the deal... If a "dirty" story (and this a "dirty" ending) is what the author wanted, then the current ending would be the only way things could've reasonably played out, nothing could be "dirtier" than this. (Committing suicide *after* Aiko has no meaning, because the point of a double suicide is to die in the same event.)
I personally don't think there's a deeper meaning beyond adding another layer of surrealism and being a setup for the Seki & Shimizu line of the story; their story also needs to be a "dirty" storyline as well.
Is it a good read? I would say yes. Is it unique? I mean, not really if we were only talking about the story (you can't expect a "cruel youth" type story to be truly unique anyway), but the manga had other very careful constructs to make up for it (especially in the way the characters depicted, like the side characters getting more and more normal-looking as the kids grow, the representation of Punpun get twisted according to the state he's in, etc.) and that's good. Is it a good tearjerker? Seems like a lot of people cried while reading it, but not me; the story do be saddening though, everything is right on the line between "ah I can see that happening" and being painfully absurd (or absurdly painful), which somehow makes it both of those things; some people might not like that. If you wanna spent 2~3 days binging a manga series and feel slightly awful after, this is an excellent choice.