This backstory is not sign of justification, it's showing us how sociopath being created.

Yes, it's the VP.

last edited at Aug 26, 2022 10:08AM

So this'll be a controversial arc.

It's certainly a choice to swap to the antagonists' PoV right after emotionally devastating the protagonist. But I'd be more surprised if Ryouko had any intention of making the audience suddenly open our hearts to them. The decision to place a page of them laughing immediately after Satsuki's breakdown was extremely deliberate. These aren't people you're meant to like or justify. Nobody wants to sympathize with them, and Ryouko's smart enough to get that.

But their perspectives are important. Kai is the anti-Satsuki: willing to use underhanded methods to save lives by setting up death. He's driven, if not straight-up blinded, by a sense of righteousness potentially born from guilt like Satsuki's. He and Satsuki both struggle to understand each other; Kai still thinks he can convince Satsuki to see things his way as shown by him getting disheartened when Michiru's death hurt her more than expected. I think he is good deep down but completely warped into lawful evil.

And it's less obvious, but Sayoko is the anti-Akira. Child of a (probably) broken home, distrustful and abused to the point of hopelessness. It's implied now she's the one with darker tendencies. Even before meeting Kai she seems to have fixated on death as a solution. Rather than any noble purpose, she's in it for attachment to Kai. But they might have their own disagreements on who deserves justice. Her whole standoff with Satsuki in chapter 39 seems like it'll be significant.

There's several points I'm looking to see this flashback cover:

• How Sayoko got the burn over her right eye.
• Why Kai's afraid to save anyone fated to die.
• What the mistake Kai made was. This page was fairly ambiguous.

If I'm speculating, Kai chose a nonviolent method and it backfired, scarring Sayoko. She pushed him to kill and the rest has been him proving he's capable of it. Looking forward, the truth behind Michiru could be what breaks them. Kai's righteousness can't handle killing innocents. But Sayoko's maybe different. I doubt she'd abandon him but that's where things start to crumble. And from there I wouldn't be shocked if they got undercut by a new villain. Like maybe Seo, since she's the only one who can expose the truth with Michiru.

I don't know if the student council will ever get redeemed and I don't think this is the kind of cliched flashback designed to do that. Rather than trying to get the audience to feel merciful, I think Ryouko's taking steps easing us on allowing someone to die. Most would agree with Satsuki that murder isn't a solution. But we're all going to have edge cases we might not admit until it's life or death. And the moment this manga gets you to cross that line, you are sympathizing with their perspective, just not them.

Their narrative purpose could easily be a cautionary tale against taking life into your own hands satisfying your own sense of justice. I feel like I obsess on this, but all signs point to how Satsuki will ultimately handle Akira and her father. It's a direct reflection of Kai saving Sayoko from her abuse, and they'll try to tempt Akira and Satsuki down the same path.

Frankly I really want that to be Satsuki's moment to tell them to fuck off and prove she can do it her way. When she's ready to come back, it's not like she'll be in any mood to pity them either.

I really can't sympathize with these bad guys. Like oh they were bullied so now they kill bad people except they never tried anything except kill people so far like that's so lazy they're the president and vice president I'm sure there's a lot of things they could try before murder lol. I know it's just the kind of story it is but I really feel like they skipped a lot of steps. I even felt Light was more justified (at least at first) because those were criminals and not like high-school girls

I wonder why the teacher was also involved with that bully. Kids bully each other because they're stupid, but why the teacher too?

I wonder why the teacher was also involved with that bully. Kids bully each other because they're stupid, but why the teacher too?

Because they get a rush of power from it, some of the most vicious bullying I experienced in school was at the hands of teachers. They feel powerless so they take it out on those they have power over.

I wonder why the teacher was also involved with that bully. Kids bully each other because they're stupid, but why the teacher too?

Because this is set in the twilight zone in which almost everyone is crazy and multiple people can see death.

Honestly, while I hate the two student councils morally, it is funny seeing people go 'A bit of bullying isn't going to make me empathize with them' cause it's pretty clear the teacher is in on the shit too. With that, honestly I don't even hate Sayoko that much, it's awful what happened to Michuru, it's pretty clear the teacher's probably going to do some awful shit to her and this trauma's going to catapult them to where they're at now. It's fitting and gets me to sympathize with them a bit. I don't even know if Sayoko's death is 100% certain, just because I don't think Satsuki is going to have a moral heel-turn anyways. If she kills them or lets them die, they still get the moral victory.

I wonder why the teacher was also involved with that bully. Kids bully each other because they're stupid, but why the teacher too?

My elementary school was so full of these kind of people, it was insane. One in my high school too, it's the damndest thing.
Not sure what has to happen in the headspace of a teacher for them to pull stuff like that but it feels more commonplace in the real world than it should be.

this series is downright silly lol

I'm enjoying this series less and less with every new chapter released. I wish we could see more of the fun and quirky interactions between satsuki and her friends again. Now it feels like there's only problem after problem with no room to breathe. The worst part is having to wait so long between chapters. Usually I could just breeze through the stressful bits to get to the resolution, but having to wait weeks for a new chapter, which I know full well will bring me little to no joy or even take it away from me is... I don't really know the word lol but it sucks.
Maybe I should just wait for the chapters to accumulate.
So that's what I'm gonna do from now on, even though I want to know quite badly how those two will be dealt with.
Personally, I'm hoping for Satsuki to come up with some loophole in her moral code to allow herself to do a medium amount of physical trolling, resulting in two permanent comas. I mean satsuki didn't have any problem punching him, so it should be fine.

This is getting boring... I don't care for their backstories and it's dragging for too long. I just want the focus back on Satsuki and the present.

The hardest part of this series is waiting for new chapters, I've been spoiled by the rate of release of Walk to Death

I'm enjoying this series less and less with every new chapter released. I wish we could see more of the fun and quirky interactions between satsuki and her friends again. Now it feels like there's only problem after problem with no room to breathe.
Personally, I'm hoping for Satsuki to come up with some loophole in her moral code to allow herself to do a medium amount of physical trolling, resulting in two permanent comas. I mean satsuki didn't have any problem punching him, so it should be fine.

Ditto on these two points. I don't mind a little backstory for our villains, but I really cannot sympathise for them in the now just because of their pasts when we've already seen that our protagonists didn't have the easiest lives growing up either. I want to see Satsuki go off, be proven right, and more importantly, figure out which one of her friends is the one she's going to ask out on a date.

last edited at Sep 8, 2022 5:05PM

kinda disheartening to see people crying about the plot being boring, hopefully the scanlators don't drop it at any point ... i've been hungry for a multi-faceted story for a while now, this manga has been a joy in its careful setup and continuous fleshing out of the characters (i would be very interested in learning more about komachi later on, too)

It's not like multifaceted is bad, it's just that there are a lot more interesting things to explore over these two's story and I think a lot of people would like to see that plus a bit more of the "fun" that was in earlier chapters where Satsuki worked with her friends to solve stuff.

last edited at Sep 8, 2022 8:24PM

I'm loving this, and thank you to the people who' is translating this.

We need context and the whys these antagonists are doing what they're doing, that's what makes interesting antagonists not just bad people doing bad things cause the manga needs it for the plot. But I really want to know what Komachi it's doing and her back story please.

Ah yes, how to pass a rag to your antagonists to try to justify their actions: create someone shallow who is crueler to them for no apparent reason, that will maybe make them look less bad

last edited at Sep 8, 2022 10:16PM

Kind of a bummer that we didn't get to see Kai brutally murder the teacher. That'd be an interesting scene — to see the boy snap.
We just got this last panel, and something tells me this can pretty much be the end of the flashback. Hope I am wrong.

I am curious about Satsuki's parents, what happened to the mother, that led the father to behave like that, or the short blond girl, is she evil or is does she only blackout as a safety mechanism? To me, those two characters are just not captivating, the boy is a psycho and the girl had like 10 lines before those 2 chapters, but ok, background story it is. Is it close to the end?

Oh, I forgot, why leave a kid near an acid in any hypothesis, a strong one for making that burn, and how did it not leave a scar?

last edited at Sep 9, 2022 12:08AM

I wish this manga would have stuck more to Satsuki playing sudden death detective over having some ridiculous Anti-Satsuki villain duo.

Oh, I forgot, why leave a kid near an acid in any hypothesis, a strong one for making that burn, and how did it not leave a scar?

It did leave a scar, it's been shown before. But yeah, the responsibility would still fall on the teacher, regardless of whether she claimed it was an accident or not. I doubt she would have simply gotten away with that (or at least the mother shouldn't have let her get away with that). This backstory is so over-the-top that it doesn't make me feel anything towards the kids. Not that I had expected their actions to ever become justified through a backstory, but still, it could've been better than this. I just hope it ends and we can go back to the present soon.

I'm not too sure what the point of the backstory is, since it sure doesn't make them sympathetic. I wouldn't reject a plot where traumatized kids with superpowers have decided to take revenge through violence and we're expected to empathize with them, but after showing that they actually find killing people fun in chapter 51, I don't think that was the purpose.

Maybe it's just to show that even though they like killing, this didn't come out of nowhere and they had reasons to turn out like this? That addition would make sense, I guess.

I just hope I'm not wrong. If this all turn out into a "they were victims first, let's support them and just forget about how happy they were about killing before", I'd find this pretty annoying.

So the teacher is not just a participant in the bullying, but has organised it herself. Even "better".

There remains the question of how Kai awakened the power.

jumping the shark ho!

I'm not too sure what the point of the backstory is, since it sure doesn't make them sympathetic. I wouldn't reject a plot where traumatized kids with superpowers have decided to take revenge through violence and we're expected to empathize with them, but after showing that they actually find killing people fun in chapter 51, I don't think that was the purpose.

Maybe it's just to show that even though they like killing, this didn't come out of nowhere and they had reasons to turn out like this? That addition would make sense, I guess.

I just hope I'm not wrong. If this all turn out into a "they were victims first, let's support them and just forget about how happy they were about killing before", I'd find this pretty annoying.

The purpose of a backstory is never to justify, but to understand how someone/something came to be, this is just explaining that they werent evil from the beginning or that even if they had a predisposition, what happened to them was just a push to become

last edited at Sep 9, 2022 8:10PM