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If you're reading this, you were probably searching for the next work of Act-Age artist Usazaki. This one-shot is not as bad as its medium score show, but it's not good either.

The Characters and Art are both a solid (8), but the chapter story choices were astronomically limited because of the One Shot format (3).

There are red flags but I would like to see this story given an entire arch of room to breath.

This is probably unlikely looking at the age of the manga, so I'll keep praying for better opportunities of colaborations to reach Usazaki in the future.

Peace.

Aku no Hana was 60% of the time the worst thing I've had ever read in my life.

The central theme that Aku No Hana proposes to analyze during its first arc is the mindset of a criminal. It is, till the very end, a character study, focused on creating a situation in which our protagonist faces the consequences of a certain action that he makes at the beginning of the manga and eventually reaches the realms of insanity.

This may sound like something really interesting to you if you ever stopped and spent some time trying to understand the mindset of a random criminal you saw ... a particular day on television, and faced an endless and complex web of interactions and social factors which very predictably lead to the crime committed after hours of thought and research were spent.

But Aku No Hana will boil down all the complex social factors to "societal hatred towards perverts" and all the possible interactions to "random crazy girl." I won't say that there is no major factor defining the actions people make or that the show is "inherently wrong" or "being unrealistic" by making this choice.

But I couldn't buy it for 2 reasons:

*maybe* spoilers

First, the lack of characterization of the protagonist, which is a problem because the point that the story is trying to make is that particular circumstances can make anyone go insane, and yet it will not actually tell us how he was in the past, nor will it ever slow down for us to see how he would react to a situation that does not involve the plot. Telling us something about how the character interacts with the world could've been used to give more weight to the supposed changes that he went through when he started to mess up with the world he's inserted. The closest it got to that was making the protagonist stop reading books, but the way they presented it was so poorly executed that I burst out laughing.

Second, the way that everything is so heavy-handed. As I said before, the main social factor it deals with is "hate against perverts," but the story goes way too far in its presentation of this that it ends up looking like this is the only factor of that entire society

The story will go completely into self-deprecating territory and will stay there till it gets into insanity territory. Which is simply obnoxious... He'll just be lamenting non-stop, and then he'll just be crazy non-stop.

"Oh yeah... He is obsessively crazy now..." Not that every single thought he had since the start of his arc was about or tangential in some way to the same thing. There's no sense that he is changing simply because there is no characterization to break in the first place.

And to finish my problems with the first arc, I'm just gonna say that the art was utterly terrible at the start of the arc and is just terrible by the end of the arc.

All of my complaints could probably have been solved if our protagonist had been given a proper background at least... However, I suspect that this arc wasn't very thought out simply because it was never supposed to be the real story.

*definetely* spoilers

At the end, the couple of fuckers are about to commit suicide with fire during an event, and, to my disappointment, they are stopped by the people at the event.

And then... there is a time skip... and the story gets good. And that's when I realize the real story is about someone who went crazy, fucked his family, his life, his dreams, buried it all in a far away city and ran away... What I'm saying is that 60% of the story is that guy's backstory and that the real purpose of the story is about facing your past and finding someone you love, someone you can rely on.

And yes, the way that the story presents his struggles to live on a daily-basis is a great way of showing how a character can change. And that is the very first thing that we see: him searching for meaning in life again since his last crazy-spree through the mountains, and he finds it in this girl that he just happened to pass by in the library, and she's got a plan of writing a story, but she doesn't want to show to anybody, and she acts reserved even to her boyfriend, MC-kun is the only one who understands her, and just the random ideas of the story that she just PLANS to write in the future, is enough for making our MC cry, which is something that anyone...ANYONE that consumes any form of art seriously should be able to completely understand... I was moved...

I'll just conclude it all by saying that my score was the score of a man who was utterly ripped to pieces by his own thoughts since he finished this story... I had the worst experience with it followed by the best (in manga). I can't say for sure that this is a recommendation but, if you ever find yourself without anything else at all to read, go read Aku No Hana. This is a worthwhile ride that you can't find anywhere else. At the very least, it was for me.