This comes along with "Rashomon"-Style, Perspective Flip, and some bit of Mind Screw. Is Ragyou a mentally ill and unintentionally abusive woman who was prone to lashing out her children or is Satsuki the mentally ill one who perceived her mother as such? Or, as a recent review on the story asks, are both Ragyo and Satsuki mentally ill and unaware that they are?
We get Rei's suicide and her motives. Did she commit suicide out of fear or did she have other reasons?
In Raindrops we have this with a Secretly Dying Ryuuko and her illness. Did she really grasp the severity of her illness and just didn't want to upset her sister but went to live with her anyhow or did she know she was dying and, due to denial and her stubborn nature, refused believe it until the end?
Doki having cerebral palsy makes a tad more sense if one remembers that cerebral palsy tends to be more common in multiple births. Likewise, it's not uncommon for those who have cerebral palsy to have eye problems, nearsightedness being one of them.
The chapter titling of Through Thick and Thin is a reference to cancer stages.
Nezumi having bad eyes is because she's a rat youkai and, if one can remember, a lot of tunneling and nocturnal rodents, rats (and mice) especially, tend to have poor vision.
She did allude to this trope with a painting she titled "Cruel Irony", said painting being a still-life of a vase with lycoris flowers and with Rei in Feel, who suffered from repository problems and is implied to has later on passed away. The basis for those things was that her maternal grandmother was in hospice and had passed away.
The Reality Subtext behind the story Broken Gate makes the Downer Ending a lot worse, especially since she wrote it based off of an abusive situation she endured.
Jerkass Woobie: Toki. She started out as this in Time Heals No Wounds II, before her redemption and change of heart. To further drive the point home, she wasn't always like that and was rather sweet, however, deep within the pain from being abused and then neglected (on top of that almost dying of cancer, after it was allowed to reach later stages) eventually poisoned her, allowing her personality to be tainted and turning her into the mentally ill intimidating wreck that she is, making sure no one could ever hurt her again and that she would be one to hurt, in control, and to be betray, just like it had happened to her. The quote below is just a summary:
Brownie: Toki was once a sweet shy innocent girl who only wanted to be loved, according to Jinx and Spin, but the birth of Frailine turned her shallow, cold, cruel, dominating, calculating, and worst of all, sadistic.
Nightmare Fuel: A few of her writings but the poem "Broken Leg" is scary on a Reality Subtext level, as she wrote it based on an obsessive intrusive thought (or vision) she had where she had broken one of her legs, was alone, and couldn't get help.
Stoic Woobie: An emotionless Nezumi in Broken Gate. It's clear her life has never really been happy and she only wanted to be free but that all changed when she and her older brother Ryuuji had a fight, over the latter's mistreatment. Besides roughly 100 years pragmatics and guarding the gate, it's no surprise she's emotionless, as, odds are, her having emotions would probably make her situation worse.
The Reality Subtext behind Broken Gate and its Downer Ending. Thinking about how someone's family could treat them that way makes the aforementioned ending worse.
The poem What He Couldn't Save, which concerns a father trying to cure his daughter's illness and him wanting to make amends but, alas, as the title would suggest, he's too late.
The poem Beishang, where, like the previous example, the father is too late to make amends and, to make it worse, the titular couldn't express how she felt.
The poem $900 ends on a very sad note, as the subject, too poor to afford an ambulance trip (and the resulting debt from her inability to pay), dies despite the efforts.
The Woobie: The titular Beishang. Worse is when she felt displaced when her father remarried but could never bring herself to state how she felt, even as she's dying.
