Responses
I totally agree with this. Everyone in the family is selfish and cowardly for not facing the problem. Even the little brother who has all these feelings for the older brother thinks only of what he wants--attention, and resorts to hurting his older brother constantly for years. Everyone just turns a blind eye to how the older brother is living in self hate and self shame. Even at the end, the older brother still thinks everything is his fault. I also don't like how there has to be this blame going around, as if someone is at fault instead of just trying to move forward and improve the situation.
On the one hand they actually sat down and COMMUNICATED! Amazing. BUT what was said was such nonsense if you read the preceding chapters. Ok, I get that older bro thought himself a total failure (who wouldn't with a mom saying that to you?) and mistakenly assumed his lil' bro felt the same. But why shouldn't he feel justified in that assumption when little bro kept calling him trash all the time since then? Is that what any of you do when you see someone you love going through a hard time, thinking they're failures, add to it by constantly trash talking them?
And don't get me started on the parents. I don't like how this is turning out to be all older bro's fault, despite that the fact that the the adults did nothing to correct the situation during all these years. If they really were so misunderstood surely they would have reached out to their son years ago, and let him know that they were sorry for what happened that day of the exam. Instead they never addressed the issue, just pretended it never happened and there wasn't a problem. Oh but mom could talk about it to lil' bro, except he wasn't the one with a problem. IDK- feels like a family conspiracy to convince itself that older bro was the one at fault, and now they're convincing him.
I really hate the moral of this story. That kids who may be the victims of bad parenting are just "misunderstanding" the situation. I would have liked it a whole lot better if for once the mangaka hadn't tried to make everyone nice and allowed the parents to be overachieving bad parents. I think that the moral that if you don't give up on yourself, even when those closest to you does, then you can still succeed is a powerful and important one. Besides I also think the fact that BOTH boys would become a success to be an important point. Meaning the reason parents like them are to be found is because a great many do have successful children.