It's my favorite manga of all time, hell, probably my favorite *story* of all time. An intense, tumultuous, and bittersweet tale about the loss of innocence, the ever-lasting search for kinship and the eternal problem of understanding each other's intentions.
It features a cast that starts off as cartoonish sketches of tropes that gradually gets fleshed out more and more, almost at the same pace as the mysterious increase of the quality of art that seems jarring when compared to how it looked in the beginning, but barely noticeable when reading the series as a whole (Almost like Punpun in this sense, but I think that is their strongest and possibly only salient common factor). From the start, every event is examined and scrutinized very closely, every emotion that may arise is explored and let grow, letting events crash into each other at break-neck speed, making each chapter so perfectly paced (a feat I don't think Oshimi-sensei has replicated so far) that in only 57 chapters, so much has happened, and so much has been conveyed.
Why do I like it? For starters, it's an ode, I feel, to the chuunibyou-stricken clueless youth. It calls back to times when we experience (or perhaps merely thought about) things that make us feel such intense yet utterly indescribable emotions. In its heart, I think that's what Aku no Hana is built upon.
Next, and venturing into slightly spoiler-y territory, I feel that the so-shocking-it's-addictive quality of this manga is secondary to what really is the most important feature of this story : the desperation for companionship, for "someone who understands", that is so apparent in all of the main characters; and their tragic yet inevitable unraveling as their pursuits slowly unfold.
Although I don't think I am willing to say that the actions that the characters took and the choices that they made are necessarily the same I would make in their place, I really feel that the story made me at least understand where they were coming from, and that is, I feel, one of the best things a story can do: making the reader understand and empathize. And for a story that comes from a terribly specific and awkward aspect in our lives, I feel that it is quite the achievement. For that, it remains on the main seat of my heart and mind. A story I hope I would never forget.
