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"Slice of Life" may seem like an inaccurate tag to anyone who is reading the reviews or just finished reading the manga, but Oyasumi Punpun is what it is, and at its heart, it is a story about people: nothing more, and nothing less.

The story is meandering, telling Punpun's coming of age in bits and pieces, in the spirit of all other slice of life's. Because of this, there is no coherent plot to Punpun. It is entirely character driven, and Punpun is the character central to the story.

The story starts with tragedy. Punpun's mother is in the hospital, his father has been arrested on ... suspicion of spousal abuse, and his uncle has just moved in to take care of him. Punpun is still almost unbearably young, however, and he doesn't care about any of this. He cares about the new transfer student, Tanaka Aiko.

And so it begins.

We follow Punpun through rape, suicide ideation, domestic violence, body image, and a whole slew of other morally debatable problems, and this manga, at its center, tackles what it means to be human.

Almost every character has their own backstory, their own tragedies.

Oyasumi Punpun highlights a truth in our lives: normality is nothing but a social construct. It highlights the uniqueness of each character and how they live their lives. There is no normal path to take; every person's path is different.

While Inio Asano's art is not personally my favorite style, I will not deny the skill that is obvious in his drawings. Emotions, poses, quotes, are all skillfully placed in the manga. The abstract representation of Punpun is a stroke of genius, leading us through his various mental states. The small bird seen on the cover of the first volume shows Punpun as a child at his most innocent. At varying points in the manga, he becomes a floating tetrahedron, a bird head with a human body, and a dark black head with a hole straight down the middle, among others. The one time his face is shown, his eyes and nose are blacked out. This, along with the fact that Punpun's real name is never revealed, allows us to both better follow his mindset and also better put ourselves in his place.

Goodnight, Punpun.

(a quick outpouring of my myriad feelings after thinking about the most recent chapters of RE. aka don't expect quality)

Ishida Sui is a genius. His story is sprawling, with twists and turns and foreshadowing in every corner.
Small, maybe insignificant details you may have written off on a first read through carries new meaning afterwards. For example, a reveal in a relatively recent chapter (~mid 50s) will ensure that I will never be able to read any part of the original, beginning to end, the same way ever again. This reveal was foreshadowed everywhere, from Kaneki Ken's psychological mindset, to indications in the art, in his ... actions, in his words. This reveal is (hopefully, for the sake of my poor shredded heart) one of a kind, but such like it happen on a smaller scale everywhere in the story, echoing the "Black Goat's Egg" - Rize foreshadowing.

In terms of actual story, the central message seems to be that there is no bad, and there is no good. There are only people. And people can be anything at all.

The original story had what essentially amounts to cannibals, the ghouls, portrayed as the sympathetic figures, while those who were saving humans, the CCG, were not the heroes. In almost any other story, the protagonist would be saving lives, and the cannibals would be the villain. But, what seems to be the impassable dividing line between humans and ghouls is not the dividing line between good and evil. Everything is in shades of grey. If anything, Aogiri Tree would be the villain, and yet characters from Aogiri are also fleshed out and portrayed as sympathetic, such as Ayato. There is no apologizing for their "evil", their grey, either. They are acknowledged as morally reprehensible, and that is amazing.
[slight spoilers?] Even Eto, the "big bad", is portrayed in shades of grey. Abandoned by her father, belonging to neither of the two worlds, author of multiple novels that Kaneki is enamored with, slightly insane a la half-kakuja Kaneki. If anything, she needs to be sent to a therapist. (They all need to be sent to therapists, lbr) [end spoilers]
RE is showing all the good sides of CCG that we could not necessarily see just through Amon and Suzuya in the original, after ghouls were already established as sympathetic figures in Tokyo Ghoul.

The beginning seems a bit slow, especially if you're coming in straight off the Anteiku Raid, but in all honesty, looking back at the beginning of Tokyo Ghoul, RE escalates much faster. Once the tragedies start, they just never stop.

All of Ishida Sui's characters are amazing, nuanced, and flawed, all in one. The sheer diversity of characters is amazing - ghouls and humans both good and bad, both with morals and without. Male, female, nonbinary. The only romances I can think of that play a role in the story are Akira & Amon, which is peripheral, and that of Kanae, which debateably goes either way, so I won't count diversity of sexuality as something Ishida explicitly includes, though there are certainly hints. But the best part is that none of these characters are pure good or pure evil, they simply are. Not even the protagonist is some sort of fount of goodness in the world, as happens with many protags. He makes mistakes, he makes bad decisions, he has issues with morality and he hates. The best compliment you can give characters is that they're people. And Ishida Sui's characters are people.

[spoilers - you probably already know this one, tbh]
When Haise is revealed to be Kaneki without his memories, Haise is revealed to be yet another step in the tragedy of Kaneki Ken. He provides meaning to the quote from the original: "my only salvation is to sleep and have a happy dream."
Haise is the happy dream Kaneki dreamt up when he was cut down in Arima's garden of corpses. Haise is the Kaneki who has never known tragedy, who woke up one day in his twenties with a place to belong to and people to belong with.
RE is, at its heart, still a continuation of the tragedy of Kaneki Ken, and he can't dream forever.
[end spoilers]

tl;dr: RE is amazing and ingenious. It is mainly character driven, just like the original, and yet its plot is phenomenal on its own merit. Read it; you won't be disappointed.