Would they have gotten off fairly easily if they just went to the police?

Would they have gotten off fairly easily if they just went to the police?

I have no idea how strict or lenient Japanese criminal justice system, so I dunno. But even if they did get away with it, they'd probably find another way to fuck up and be miserable anyway.

A good Aiko is a dead Aiko

Aiko was a crazy bitch
Punpun should've killed her in the woods

AIKO DID NOTHING WRONG

Aiko was a poison.

If anyone can attribute their faults and misery to bad luck is Aiko. She had the most fucked up family out of the lot and had her self-confidence quite literally beaten out of her, never mustering the courage to run away on her own. She begins to trust Punpun and they promise to elope together but he leaves her hanging, which was also traumatizing. By this point she's already more fucked than most other characters throughout the whole manga and that's still elementary school. He rejects her again in middle school due to being a dense motherfucker and a coward, and she spends the rest of her youth with no friends and taking care of her crazy whore stepmother. By the time she meets Punpun again she's already a husk of a person and he was not the person she could trust anymore.
Seriously, if anyone had it bad in this manga it was Aiko, and part of Punpun's tragedy is that he could have saved her if he acted sooner but by the time he actually tried it was already too late.

the way punpun ends the manga, free and innocent, just makes it look like the police was the best choice

really, after they went to the ghost town it couldnt have ended well

And they could've, you know, had just called the cops or ran away at the first indication she was going to harm them. (I remember it being slightly obvious she didn't want to just chat about her daughter, and Aiko should've known that they should've left instead. Though I can understand her traumatization kind of blurring that notion.)

He's not free and innocent. All he ever wanted was to be left alone and now he's pretty much forced to keep up a facade around these friends and take care of a child. And god knows he thinks he isn't fit for that.

It's was probably the most depressing ending for him.

Exactly. He was better off by letting her go do her own shitty life. Some people are simply poisonous for you, even if it's not their "fault".

Her dying was the best for her and for him

I'm pretty sure one of the reasons child abuse is a problem is because the kids don't usually think about telling the authorities. Their parents are the authorities.
Running away is also not something kids consider until their rebellious teenage phase unless shit's gotten really bad.
In that sense I guess it's fair enough. He was also traumatized by his early experiences with Aiko and it did haunt him for the rest of the manga.

Punpun, you were a cool dude deep down.

Punpun was a huge faggot at any given time and shape.

Devilman Punpun was just a dick and it was his own fault too. Aiko did nothing wrong.

I only read this recently and haven't seen much discussion i it so I don't know if there's a generally agreed upon opinion on this, but does anyone else think that the post murder, Punpun and Aiko running from the cops sequence went on too long?

what doujin is this, does it give her head?

>that SEELE symbol thrown in
for what purpose

Everything went to shit with Pegasus and after Aiko's return.

Punpun went into maxi faggot overdrive and try to crash the scenario with him

Definitely. It could have done with getting trimmed down.

I also think the subplot about the snot-nosed retard who thought he could talk to god and the other guy should have been cut tho so I tend to want the series trimmed diwn more than most.

The stuff with Pegasus and Aiko's return didn't bother me because I felt like the manga still maintained what made it good, which is that Punpun's misery was relatable and that kept me engaged. I would have been fine with the killing if it was just a set up for the ending, but it went on so long that I felt like the manga lost what made it interesting, Punpun was no longer relatable and neither was his situation. At that point I was glad the Pegasus stuff was there because it let there be more chapters with Seki, and he felt like he embodied the soul of the story more by the edn of it than Punpun did.

>Punpun was no longer relatable and neither was his situation

Yeah that's my point of view too. It went too far

I actually think that's the best part of the whole manga

Seki was always best boy.
I think Punpun is supposed to be relatable enough so you can empathize with some of his flaws, but at the same time to cause a certain degree of disdain towards his continuing failures. Throughout the whole manga he just digs his hole deeper and keeps fucking up, with the murder being the apex, or rather, the bottom. The eloping sequence felt excruciating for me, but it was precisely because I could related specially to early Punpun that it was painful seeing them in that situation. Did it went on for too long? Maybe. But it's supposed to be hell, and I think it got that point across very well.

What was it that you liked about it? I don't think it was bad necessarily, I just didn't feel like it was fitting for it to be so long. I initially thought it was great, and there were some really brilliant moments in there, but somewhere along the line, I just felt like it was drawn out, the shock was gone, and it just felt like something that lacked what made everything before it so engaging.

Not him, but I thought it was well portrayed how progressively bleak their relationship became until the breaking point.

Like the part where they were in the forest and you could realize he pretty much had just given up on her.

That was well done, you could feel that atmosphere.