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TW: SA, bullying, harassment

Othello's one of those shoujos from the early 2000s where SA and harassment are used as punch lines despite how serious it is. It's an interesting plot with our MC girl with a split personality which causes some unhinged situations but many of these are SA and borderline r*pe.

TLDR; It's a short read (only 28 chapters) with pretty art, but again there's sexual harassment happening every 2 chapters. It's a decent story littered with assault and bullying that shouldn't be normalized as a "funny trope". If you don't mind things like that or ignore it, you still enjoy the overarching story.

Going in, the story seems solid, characters seem to be typical shoujo but with a slight twist as our MC (Maria) has extreme awareness to people's true feelings, so it causes scenarios where characters actually need to face their flaws. personally for me, it's halfway through which starts going downhill from there. Below I'm going to write one without spoilers and one with that actually detail what's very wrong with the direction the manga goes in (again this is my opinion but I feel as if it's misleading and is looked past).

NO SPOILERS EXPLANATION:
Maria's past is slowly introduced to the audience and it makes ... absolutely no sense. Her past has very serious connotations but is essentially solved because the author uses friendship and forgiveness. The characters also become very obsessive over Maria where it's creepy and wouldn't be acceptable past a manga/fictional standpoint.


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WITH SPOILERS EXPLANATION:
With Maria's past, it's eventually revealed that her mom was a r*pe victim. Her mom was 14 when it happened, with the perpetuator at 20 years old. The father was found not guilty, and was supporting Maria financially behind the scenes. Knowing this, Maria forgives her mother's r*pist and even brings the r*pist together with her mom's parents to become a family. Not only that, the father is actually a priest and is taking care of orphaned children. It's insane to me that a child r*pist was forgiven, and actually had the audacity to say he fell in love with Maria's mother as well (they exchanged letters bc Maria's mom didn't want him to forget what he had done to her, but through the communication he "fell in love"). This is the biggest issue with the manga for me and I feel as though I should rate this lower because of it. There's also 3 boys essentially in Maria's life that all like her, but 2 of them are super obsessive, push themselves onto her constantly, or gets insanely jealous that other males are there to support her.

SUMMARY:
Overall, it is my two cents, but I feel as though the truth about Maria's past and what unfolds later down the story is too messed up for a shoujo manga or just a story in general. Shoujo targets females 18 and under, and it sets a bad precedent that everything that happens in the story is acceptable, similar to how in Maid Sama where almost every episode our MC girl almost gets sexually assaulted but is played off with comedic animation or because our MC male is attractive.