[R] Goodnight Punpun

In a departure from the usual tone of these reviews, I'd like to talk about Goodnight Punpun. Not what it made me think about, or some wistful story about my childhood that loosely ties into the themes of it, but my experience reading it in great detail. For the first time ever on Jumpy Reviews™, light spoilers ahead.

Punpun tells a story about a 10 year old child who, by the end of the story, is a fully grown adult. Few manga  I've seen try to tell a story in such a way as this, and Goodnight Punpun succeeds in doing so due only to how much detail and attention each chapter of Punpun's life is given. He reaches adulthood around halfway through the story, and it feels as though the entire childhood section is exposition for the story that Punpun aims to tell in it's latter half. This caused me to almost drop it around the 3rd volume, but if your concern with Punpun is the slow pacing rest assured it picks up substantially. If the dark themes or imagery are more what's keeping you away, it only gets worse in that respect.

Watching the world beat Punpun down can be hard at times, and watching a starry-eyed child turn into an empty husk of an adult is heartbreaking. Seeing Punpun go from being happy to obsessed with a girl to relatably depressed to so empty it's beyond what even I have felt was sad, it felt cautionary even. There was a section of Punpun which I have transcribed here (link so people can avoid spoilers) which I felt hit particularly hard, and motivated me to want to reach out to people more rather than being a recluse and hoping someone 'saves' me. And while Punpun is 'saved' by a character in the story, Inoi makes it clear that you can't and shouldn't expect this outcome, that it happening to Punpun was completely incidental and will never happen again.

I have seen some criticisms online of the cultist sub-story of Goodnight Punpun, and how ultimately it's inconsequential and amounts to nothing, but I think that was the point of it. I believe it ties in well with the themes of it, and the fact that it ends with nothing happening is the purpose of it. To seek superficial love and acceptance from strangers you have no real ties to, to allow your life to be controlled completely by someone else will kill you. This mirrors the main story of Punpun almost perfectly at all times. Punpun and Pegasus's stories intertwine indirectly through the ways they mirror each other, though I won't say how in the event that you want to read it.

Overall though, I don't think I enjoyed reading this story very much. I thought it was good, I thought it taught me a lot, but it also made me miserable. And I'm aware that that was the point, but you can only consume so much media like this in your lifetime. In any event, I feel as though I've seen the entire life of a person. I've watched their family slip away, huge events become small through the passage of time, and I've related more to a cartoon bird than I have to a lot of humans I've seen in manga. I loved this story, and I hate that I subjected myself to it.

If you made it this far, truly thank you for reading. One of the themes of the midsection of Punpun is how the actions of all adults who interact with a child have the potential to dramatically affect the life of the child. Please remember this when interacting with any kid, or anyone really. Be kind, be brave, and everything will be alright. Good vibrations.