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There's an episode of an old 90s cartoon called Rugrats where the grandpa character is putting his infant grandson to bed. However, the grandpa is in such a hurry that he's doing everything as quickly as possible. When it's time for the bed time story he flips through a picture book and rambles:

"Once upon a time there was a rabbit who had no friends then he found some friends and they all lived happily ever after the end."

That's kind of what this manga is like. The first chapter or two hints at some intrigue. The protagonist meets a strange girl who acts blissfully ignorant of ... her own torment at the hands of bullies. Teachers warn him to stay away from her. He meets up with her late at night where she starts defacing her old middle school, a place she was miserable. She is literally painting over her own trauma. The protagonist's own insecurities are what pulled him into her orbit, and now he's starting to fall for her. The title is "For Imperfect People"

Doesn't that sound like a great set up for an adolescent psychological thriller? Maybe a bittesrweet tragedy steeped in melancholia? Or an amazing story of perseverance?

Well it's not. Instead nothing really happens. The girl is bullied, then she's not bullied, and they all live happily ever after. The end.

This manga is about two topics mainly: pregnancy and loss associated with it, and rape.

In the behind-the-scenes bonus comics the author explains that she's gone through giving birth to a stillborn child and based that side of her work on her own experiences. It goes a long way towards explaining why those themes are explored very thoughtfully and completely. I have no complaints there. In fact it deserves some praise for being fairly unflinching with regards to the situations AND the emotions involved. I brought up the author's experience because it comes through. It's intimate, personal stuff.

The themes of rape... are not quite as well ... handled. It's not a total rock bottom all the time and will occasionally connect in the way it was intended to, but it slips into questionable territory enough that I felt like writing this as a bit of a warning to those who might need it. A lot of this manga feels like your typical shoujo romance drama, but the "hook" is that the loner girl the main character is in love with had been routinely raped by her stepfather throughout middle school and eventually impregnated. It's a dark way to look at the material, but it is what it is and some of the cliches used here become outrageously bleak in this context.

Specifically the obligatory rival girl, who in this context is required to reach such high levels of pure evil that it starts feeling like a pure trash soap opera. There's an EXTREME level of tonal whiplash whenever this character appears.

At one point the girl is put into a "Guy Saves Her From A Random Sexual Assault" scene. You know the type of scene I'm talking about. It shows up a lot, but in this case it's not only graphic in its depiction but it's especially dark given the character's history. This girl's been victimized over and over again since middle school, bu this sudden reoccurrence of sexual violence years later is recovered from almost immediately. The foremost thought on her mind is only how grateful she is to her guy friend for pummeling her attacker within an inch of his life. See what I mean by cliche shoujo with an unfortunate twist? Something like that should probably introduce some HEAVY pathos into the situation, maybe even to the extent of a complete emotional breakdown, but it's treated like a love flag of all things.

Oddly enough, by the last half of the story the 'rape stuff' kind of slides into the background in favor of the pregnancy themes. It's perhaps a better move since that stuff is so much better considered, but it's weird to see the characters fretting over the fact that the main girl's secret is that "she used to be pregnant" while failing to recognize that she was made pregnant by her step-father and rapist. It's also unfortunate that a lot of the conclusions come down to the guy saying, "I'll protect you!" in that typical manga way that's just not good enough here.