All these people saying "The mom is unrealistic!"
Like, yeah, clearly, the mom who literally just fucked off after her divorce and left her teenage daughter to live by herself and fend for herself, to the point that she was just skipping school entirely at the start of the series....That parent is a bad parent? What shock! What stunning and contrived drama! Why I can't believe it at all! /s
Guys. Sora's mom was always going to be awful. She was visibly neglectful with her mere absence. She abandoned her kid and left her to live alone, without supervision. If Ayaka hadn't come to get her, she'd have flunked the year and been about to be held back a year by now. At best.
She was -already- an abusive parent, this just cemented that that abuse is also physical.
If you think it's contrived, I have news for you. You know someone with an abusive parent. Some of you may not know you do, because they don't talk about it, but they're there, participating in your daily life. And given that Honda's mom was visibly abusive, she was always going to be a natural impediment to their relationship in one way or another. The seeds for this "sudden twist" were in chapter one.
That doesn't mean you gotta like it! You can dislike the twist, you can not want to see that kind of content. If you just don't like it, I don't have a problem with that. But it's not unrealistic, it's not unlikely, it's not even contrived, and it is definitely not sudden. Some tropes are common because the events they depict are also common.
Sora was -introduced- as a character with visibly awful parents, that's why when mom showed back up, a lot of us knew she was going to be an obstacle, because we already knew she was awful.
Writing this wall after a whole page of people saying it's realistic is very bad timing.