Some aspects I found rather disturbing. The way the transgender teacher is treated, the way one person is almost generally praised for the murder of a mentally ill individial, and later mounts an argument that because one is 20 rather than 21, he might be excused from rape because "he doesn't understand that it is wrong". It doesn't give the feeling that they understand how horrific rape is: their attitude towards rape is disturbing. The appropriate punishment for gang rape (which occurs in three different occasions -incredibly often-) is a beating (the same someone gets if it pisses the protagonist or his friend off). One female that almost became a victim was immediately ready to forgive and trust a sidekick that was implicated once he "apologized" (you would think they were talking about car theft). The other didn't talk about her experience at all, and the protagonist didn't bring it up (apparently it has no psychological effect). One victim, a child, a middle schooler, kills herself, and the ones responsible, caught red handed, 20, almost 21 years old, since barely below the age of majority and, most importantly, first time offenders with rich parents, are left go. The problem is that this doesn't seem fucked up to anyone besides the victim's relative, who, already suicidal, goes off the deep end when he hears one of the perpetrators brag abut it. The guy that almost killed a mentally ill man in the former days says that they should be let go because they are too young to know better, something hard to swallow since essentially everwhere in the world you are an adult at 18 (aside from that, any boy younger than than that knows perfectly well something that doesn't need to be taught to morally normal human beings, namely that gang raping a child is wrong, and that above that, not being sadist, besides "understanding" something that is innate in us, and doesn't even need to be "taught" to children, because they already know it perfectly well, don't even feel any "desire" to do that, in fact find the idea repulsive), and the manga depicts a child, a classmate of the protagonist's younger sister, having sex with her adult coworker, a married father. Young enough to give consent, but not to "understand" that gang raping a child is wrong? (once again, not something that a normal human even wants to do, and that in any case no one could honestly claim that he doesn't intellectually know that is condemned -yet it's what it is claimed by anyone in the manga-). We are therefore treated to a bunch of relativization, and justification of rape by a bunch of rape apologists -one even female, which wonders why the relative might take objection to the sentence -a short few months that left them perfectly identical to how they were before, and ready to rape again-, is even surprised that someone would think that that's fucked up, when apparently the victim that killed herself didn't even receive psychological treatment and the caretaker was not informed-. That part of the manga seriously spoiled things for me, because essentially showed people willing to applaud the attempted murder of a mentally ill patient, but relativized the psychological trauma of the victims of gang rapes, minimized the actions of and attempted to justify the rapists, and showed them essentially taking advantage of an obviously flawed system, but didn't make any of the characters besides the victim's relative, driven to insanity, that the whole system was completely fucked up and had it backwards -thus in the end the plainly criticizeable social structure went uncriticized essentially by anyone-. The "white knight in shining armour" part I also didn't like (the killed victim was saved by... a gang rape... by the protagonist' friend before... apparently, no one thinks about contacting the police, they simply beat them up, as if that would accomplish anything -as if they wouldn't simply do it when they weren't looking and be more careful-, and as if that wasn't the "penance" they also reserved to people that simply annoyed them for trivial matters, thus drawing a completely skewed moral equivalence). Those view of rapes made me seriously wonder if the characters didn't have a sister or mother (one is in fact a woman herself) to put the seriousness of the crime into perspective ("how would you feel if it happened to someone you cared about"), but apparently women are simply objects placed there to allow them to show how "masculine" they are by... resorting to simple minded violence, rather than doing the logical thing and calling the police, and setting the victims of the aggression up for an appointment with a psychologist. The protagonist' friend also seems to have some sort of brainless cult following -and no, I don't think that having people that would uncritically do anything you say is a good thing: having friends is different from having subordinates, it's an unequal relationship that displays the will to be a slave and surrender your faculties to charismatic personalities-. His father is also a politician, and his mother his mistress, and this is apparently somehow impressive (as if it implied guile, or some sort of faculty that the general public didn't share). Coupled with the release of the serial child rapists because of the position of their families -that left them meet unsupervised and freely discuss future rapes in the streets -targeting prostitutes to decrease the risk, etc-... and discussing their crime in an entertained fashion, all the while showing that they knew exactly how cruel their actions were, and were delighted by the fact that society wouldn't stop them, with people displaying a disheartening willingness to take them at face value and make up excuses for their actions, be they men or women)
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