YMMV / Goodnight Punpun

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• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Mama Punpun spends her dying moments regretting not being a warmer mother to Punpun. This moved a lot of readers who had previously hated her.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Punpun's mom. At times, she may seem to border Evil Matriarch levels. At times, she seems to just be grumpy. Besides Punpun, she is without a doubt the most conflicted character within the series.
  • The ending leaves itself open for interpretation. Is it a happy ending because Punpun seems to be going down a path of normal and sanity now, or is he just a hollow shell who keeps marching on because he isn't even strong enough to kill himself? Word of God says the latter is closer to what he intended, but does state that he doesn't mind people interpreting the ending differently.
  • Aiko gets a lot of this, particularly in later chapters. For example, whether or not many of her actions are an understandable effect of being a constant victim of abuse, or just plain and genuinely twisted and unforgivable, is a subject of debate. Punpun's own actions, which come from similar causes, are also debated frequently.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A cursory glance at the series might make it seem like a cute slice-of-life story about some cartoon bird doodle and a cute little girl. However it is actually an extremely dark Coming of Age Story and character drama, which isn’t afraid to show the characters’ depravity and pettiness. It’s won itself critical acclaim and a devoted following for those reasons, but even fans admit the story is so bleak that it can be hard to stomach for many people. An interview with Inio Asano, the author, stated that volume sales had a noticeable decline every time something really upsetting and dark happened.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Aiko. A lot of people dislike her due to Punpun's obsession with her severely screwing him up, making her the catalyst for a lot of his poor decisions and darker moments, even if she didn't want that to happen. However, some find her an incredibly tragic Woobie due to her past. Thus, Aiko gets a considerable amount of focus in fanworks despite her mixed reception.
  • Punpun himself. While many fans of the story consider him a complex and well-realized character and empathize with him due to his horrible upbringing and obvious depression, the fact that he spends a lot of the story in a constant state of misery and self-loathing makes it difficult for a lot of people to get behind him. In addition to this, as the story goes on his character development turns him into a gradually more unpleasant and horrible person, which only makes him more contentious.
• Catharsis Factor: Although the scene is conveyed in a way where this trope is not intended to be in effect at all, Punpun killing Aiko's stepmom in a rage caused many readers to cheer on given what a monster she was.
• Hard-to-Adapt Work: The art-style and writing style of the manga leads most fans to think it can't be adapted into either an anime or live-action work.
• Ho Yay:
  • The end page of chapter 104 depicts Aiko and Sachi cuddling together.
  • Seki and Shimizu have a very strong relationship as a result of the former saving the latter's life from a fire (which results with both holding hands and Seki looking embarrassedly to the side). They are the only friends from the group to remain close throughout their teenage years, keeping each other grounded. Seki's girlfriend once asked if he was gay from how much he talked about Shimizu.
• Hype Backlash: In general, opinions about the story seem divided between those who regarded as one of the greatest mangas ever made and those who find it so pessimistically bleak it borders on being pointless or boring.
• Quirky Work: Characters include a god of poop in an alien spaceship, a perpetually smiling, photorealistic god with an afro◊, and the main character and his family are usually depicted as cartoony birds, despite everyone else in the series being relatively very realistically drawn, and at one point Punpun turns into a triangle for a while, when he starts living alone. The surrealism gets toned down as the story goes on, however.
• The Scrappy: A fair amount of readers hate Midori. While she's initially seen as a sympathetic character, that goes out the window when she rapes Punpun. While other characters have dark aspects to them, she notably faces no consequences for the act and arguably has a happy ending, which doesn't endear her to fans.
• Squick: In chapter 137, Punpun and Aiko have sex in a forest. And right after a very disturbing emotional confrontation between the two of them, at that.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Has been known to happen. The story eventually becomes so depressing and uncomfortable that it can turn people off. In particular some people feel that Punpun, initially a sympathetic if very flawed Classical Anti-Hero, gradually becomes such a horrendous individual that they find it hard to excuse his behavior or care what becomes of him. In a post-series interview, Asano admitted that he had a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the readers, and that sales took a sharp decline every time something really dark or upsetting happened. He's said this is why he took a lighter and less nihilistic approach (at least by Punpun standards) in his later work.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Many people criticize the Pegasus Cult subplot as being confusing and question what point it serves in the story, when they're primarily interested in Punpun's life and Character Development. In an interview Asano later clarified that Pegasus and his followers actually WERE battling evil and saving the world, but many readers didn't find this to be sufficiently clear in the manga and still find it to be the weakest part of the manga. The cult's quest for spiritual upliftment is functionally unrelated to Punpun's personal struggles, so it could just as well be excised from the manga without detracting from the story.
• The Woobie: Aiko. She had the most horrible life of anyone in the story by a wide margin. She desperately yearns for the comfort and warmth her cold, abusive stepmother never showed her. This desire goes unfulfilled.

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