Mars gives you its thesis statement by volume 2.

My sister dropped out of highschool when she was sixteen. My mother was desperate to stop her from throwing away her life, but she didn’t know how to handle this. My father (my sister’s step-father) was in jail for distribution. Mama used a second mortgage to supplement her income from the nursing home. She was going to night classes to get her nursing degree. I was in first grade and obviously got some brain stuff about it and the foreclosure that happened four years later, but that doesnt have much to do with Mars. Let me rewind back to my Sister and Mama.

Mama felt that my Sister was throwing away her life by dropping out of school. Their arguments escalated to the point of my Sister leaving to live with a drug peddler that gave me his xbox (he was pretty nice ig). It was very dramatic and something I felt was just my sister’s recklessness for a long time. To finally draw the line, Mars is about teenagers ‘throwing their lives away’. By ‘throwing their lives away’ I mean Mars is about wounded children clinging to whatever they could trust. Why would you come to a school where the teachers disrespect you? Why would you live with a father that hurts you when you could live in squalor with someone who loves you? When you can’t imagine your future, it is exceedingly hard to convince yourself to invest in it. Adults that didn’t suffer like you will dismiss the trauma even if they don’t mean to. The adults that did could resent you as frequently as they try to extend help. What if you fall in love with someone that’s aching for the same stability as you? Will you maintain healthy boundaries? Maybe, but you can’t even imagine being alive in three years. Mars is written for, or at least with profound sympathy for girls like my sister, and the fuck-up lovers they lean on.

Anything past this point could be a spoiler

Mars is weird and loud and violent. Kira, in part, is the quiet girl that firmly anchors the manga in its shoujo demographic. She gets the boisterous popular boy’s attention, because he notices her hidden qualities. Rei (the boy) unbalances her emotionally and she falls in love. He reciprocates and then the first 2 of 15 volumes are over. Mars may be easy to reduce to some fairly common romance structures, but it distinguishes itself through its emotional volatility and its complex visual composition. Mars’s understanding of violence is that of arrhythmia and the disruption of patterns. This shows not only in Mar’s spontaneity, but in the paneling itself.

Souryou Fuyumi’s style is somewhat extreme. She’s perfectly fine sacrificing legibility for emotional effect and trusts the reader to sort out their own confusion about the sequence of events. Her experimentation focuses on techniques unique to comics. Her line art is mostly spare, but her use of screen tones is aggressively detailed. Her composition relies on the lines of characters and objects to interact noticeably with the lines of the panels themselves, and her sfx will stretch and distort, reaching across panels to signify motion or exaggerate the form and position of objects/people. I think this page might be a good way to explain what I mean:

This is not to say that she’s the only one that does all of these techniques, but she foregrounds them so aggressively and uses them so unconventionally that it feels like entirely different grammars than most manga and comics use. Its easy to see something this baroque losing sight of its core narrative for the sake of stylistic experimentation, but Mars’s broken, sometimes disorienting pages exist for the same reason so many war painters turn away from realism. Mars understands that honest depictions of violence should be necessarily unpleasant. It also understands that indulgent anatomical detail isn’t the only way to be honest about its violence.

Mars may feel like a teen drama directed by Martin Scorcese at times, but its core is still that warm, uneven shoujo romance. No matter how violent the story gets, everything circles back to Kira and Rei’s love. It's one that is full of codependency and insecurity, but neither Mars nor its characters are under the illusion that their attachments are strictly healthy. This bright, obsessive love is the only armor these children have and you don’t have to approve of their decisions to root for their happiness.

Ultimately, Mars is everything scary about shoujo and those things are important.