Aku no Hana
The Flowers of Evil

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I will mainly write about why I love the scenario and characters and why I preferred the second part, the one which has never been adapted into anime. For this purpose, I am going to spoil the whole story, so don't read this unless you have finished the manga.

I moderately liked the beginning of the manga because I did not really understand what the characters wanted (the MC in particular) and it seemed to me that they were acting irrationally. The escalation of catastrophic risk taking was fine but not enough to make me love the manga and I think I was right because the ... rest of the manga gives a new meaning to this part which is in fact a mere introduction.

To me, it tells the story of boy who is introvert/asocial but not deeply abnormal and who cultivates his uniqueness because he fails to fit in. He believes that if he can't be as good as a normie than the other normies, it means he has a different/superior fate and he convinces himself that his "thing" is poetry, something the others can't understand. He finds a place for the pretty girl he fancies in this thinking pattern, calling her his "muse" (which is quite ridiculous). The MC is therefore at first pretty unhappy and lonely but comfortably confined in his simplistic relation with the rest of the world and vaguely in love with some girl he doesn't really know. This distance between them, which should be a source of pain, actually comforts the idea he has made of himself and make the situation more coherent and convenient than if he tried to seduce her.

When he gets closer to her, it is in fact natural that it doesn't go too well: he is still asocial, he doesn’t know how to fit in by her side and he doesn't have much to say to her. I hadn't understood it, reading the first chapters (I couldn't tell if it is normal, if we are supposed to understand later, of if I am a bit dumb, but however I understood later). On the other side, Sawa gives him an opportunity to increase his uniqueness, to improve his pattern which keeps him away from the others. She is genuinely different, way more than him, and even offers some new categories to add to his pattern (the concept of perversion, the concept of "shit-eaters" (misanthropy in fact) and the concept of "other side") which he tries to match with his understanding of Baudelaire's poetry. When he rejects Saeki to turn to his tormentor WHOM HE DOESN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND, I thought it was dumb, but it's actually very coherent. To this selfish interest is apparently added the desire to help Sawa, to offer her the company of someone who is like her and who can understand her, in opposition to Saeki who is a normie et doesn't need him. However, we clearly feel that he never completely succeeds, that she remains more special than him, that he never understands her and can't really save her, which creates a malaise during this whole part of the story which I find retrospectively delicious.

Then comes the chapter of the summer festival: she betrays him, pushes him away and tries to die alone. He doesn't understand, neither did I at the moment, but it's actually simple: she's thanking him for all these efforts he made for her which have mitigate her misery for a little while but wishes that he keeps living because she understood that he was less abnormal than her and that he could find his place in the world with some efforts, unlike her. The MC only understands this in the end and I only completely understood it at the same time he did. But what makes her so different? Why would Sawa be so desperate while he wouldn't? Is she right to think this way? She's right, and the reason is simple: as seen in the last chapter (which, in my opinion, was not necessary to understand this, but it is an indisputable confirmation which puts an end to any hesitation), she is genuinely, clinically crazy. I don't know anything about psychiatry but it must be some form of schizophrenia. Her perception of the world is biased, everything she says or do in the whole manga is irrational. She's desperately crazy while the MC is merely a bit different from the normies.

For some years, he won't get out of the illusion that he was different like her, that he was able to do something for her, and he will live in the nostalgic remembrance of their relationship and the incomprehension of Sawa's final act. It all changes when he meets the third girl whom he will seduce without giving up his particularity but without persisting in withdrawal. He will understand that he can be normal too, even if he has a passion apparently rare in his environment (literature), and finally give up his dumb pattern which was his shell during adolescence. Then comes my favourite passage: he meets Sawa, who almost didn't evolve, unlike him, again and, after a night of horseplay, reminiscent of the horseplay of their adolescence, she tells him not to ever come again because he is not like her.

I should also write more about Saeki and her friend Kinoshita who suffer a lot because of the MC's mistakes, they are two very good characters, but the essential point is here: a MC who doesn't fins his place and cultivates his difference; he believes (wrongly) that he can help a truly different (crazy) girl and persists in this way despite his failure without ever finding any satisfaction; it takes a lot of time for him to get over it but finally becomes normal while she remains in her desperate situation from which no one can get her out, and anyway from which the MC won't ever try to get her out anymore.

Aku no Hana was 60% of the time the worst thing I've had ever read in my life.

The central theme that Aku No Hana proposes to analyze during its first arc is the mindset of a criminal. It is, till the very end, a character study, focused on creating a situation in which our protagonist faces the consequences of a certain action that he makes at the beginning of the manga and eventually reaches the realms of insanity.

This may sound like something really interesting to you if you ever stopped and spent some time trying to understand the mindset of a random criminal you saw ... a particular day on television, and faced an endless and complex web of interactions and social factors which very predictably lead to the crime committed after hours of thought and research were spent.

But Aku No Hana will boil down all the complex social factors to "societal hatred towards perverts" and all the possible interactions to "random crazy girl." I won't say that there is no major factor defining the actions people make or that the show is "inherently wrong" or "being unrealistic" by making this choice.

But I couldn't buy it for 2 reasons:

*maybe* spoilers

First, the lack of characterization of the protagonist, which is a problem because the point that the story is trying to make is that particular circumstances can make anyone go insane, and yet it will not actually tell us how he was in the past, nor will it ever slow down for us to see how he would react to a situation that does not involve the plot. Telling us something about how the character interacts with the world could've been used to give more weight to the supposed changes that he went through when he started to mess up with the world he's inserted. The closest it got to that was making the protagonist stop reading books, but the way they presented it was so poorly executed that I burst out laughing.

Second, the way that everything is so heavy-handed. As I said before, the main social factor it deals with is "hate against perverts," but the story goes way too far in its presentation of this that it ends up looking like this is the only factor of that entire society

The story will go completely into self-deprecating territory and will stay there till it gets into insanity territory. Which is simply obnoxious... He'll just be lamenting non-stop, and then he'll just be crazy non-stop.

"Oh yeah... He is obsessively crazy now..." Not that every single thought he had since the start of his arc was about or tangential in some way to the same thing. There's no sense that he is changing simply because there is no characterization to break in the first place.

And to finish my problems with the first arc, I'm just gonna say that the art was utterly terrible at the start of the arc and is just terrible by the end of the arc.

All of my complaints could probably have been solved if our protagonist had been given a proper background at least... However, I suspect that this arc wasn't very thought out simply because it was never supposed to be the real story.

*definetely* spoilers

At the end, the couple of fuckers are about to commit suicide with fire during an event, and, to my disappointment, they are stopped by the people at the event.

And then... there is a time skip... and the story gets good. And that's when I realize the real story is about someone who went crazy, fucked his family, his life, his dreams, buried it all in a far away city and ran away... What I'm saying is that 60% of the story is that guy's backstory and that the real purpose of the story is about facing your past and finding someone you love, someone you can rely on.

And yes, the way that the story presents his struggles to live on a daily-basis is a great way of showing how a character can change. And that is the very first thing that we see: him searching for meaning in life again since his last crazy-spree through the mountains, and he finds it in this girl that he just happened to pass by in the library, and she's got a plan of writing a story, but she doesn't want to show to anybody, and she acts reserved even to her boyfriend, MC-kun is the only one who understands her, and just the random ideas of the story that she just PLANS to write in the future, is enough for making our MC cry, which is something that anyone...ANYONE that consumes any form of art seriously should be able to completely understand... I was moved...

I'll just conclude it all by saying that my score was the score of a man who was utterly ripped to pieces by his own thoughts since he finished this story... I had the worst experience with it followed by the best (in manga). I can't say for sure that this is a recommendation but, if you ever find yourself without anything else at all to read, go read Aku No Hana. This is a worthwhile ride that you can't find anywhere else. At the very least, it was for me.

Well this manga takes the cake - the epitome of making a mountain out of a molehill. The supposed coming-of-age story with depth somehow ended up being an obnoxious case of bipolar teens suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Every character in Aku no Hana is unlikable and unrelatable. Aside from the fact that it’s difficult to wrap my head around why stealing gym clothes can turn into such a fiasco, but how does a middle school kid get bullied into succumbing to his fellow classmate and eventually developing an attachment to the said abuser is the main problem. There’s no clear/convincing explanation to Nakamura’s behavior either, ... i.e. why she acted the way she did, except the reader is constantly hammered by the hysteria brooding within the MC. And then there’s the crush, who actually has a backstory as to why she’s bipolar, but again her extremity requires such a mental leap that you can’t help but wish she seeks psychiatric help throughout the manga.

I have no idea why this piece is praised to high heaven; perhaps I'll never understand unless I adopt the mindset of Happosai (the infamous underwear thief from Ranma 1/2) who, believe it or not, may actually be more sane than any of the characters in Aku no Hana.