Review

My Broken Mariko didn't connect with me emotionally for a lot of reasons, I'll highlight two that I simply could not get past:

1. A loss of my suspension of disbelief due to the interactions present.

1. The constant flashbacks that, in their repetition, lost their initial purpose and became pure emotional gish-galloping to remind us of deadfriend. Said flashbacks also robbed subtext from the story and removed any real ambiguity to Shiino's thoughts in such a way that made the entire experience feel manufactured.

1. Quirky! (But sad!)

I'm not opposed to humor in this sort of story, but I often found the specific instances to be in poor taste. They weren't outwardly so, but enough to drench the entire manga with this... zaniness that undermined most of its emotional moments. As an example, this page was fine and displayed the feeling it was trying to portray:

But it's followed up with this, and both Shiino's first panel and the old creeps' reactions take me out of where that page before had put me by making it more ridiculous than emotional:

It doesn't let us sit with the effect of that moment on the room, and we receive this comedic-reaction-to-someone-yelling trope that hugely clashes with the dialogue on the page itself. You may say that she's drunk and the moment isn't too weighty but the panel below and the pages after certainly are.


Moments like these, which constantly happen, give the manga an irreverent feeling, where interactions feel scripted and melodramatic despite the subject, characters acting not as people but emotional bumper walls for Shiino to bounce off of emphatically for comedic effect and "cathartic" RAGE. Their projected, outlandish quirks are the root of this, and though it's difficult to properly characterize in four chapters, this series over-corrects and makes them seem like they're from Black Clover, further catalyzed by the lack of measured emotional discourse after chapter one; Fisherman and Shiino have that little conversation after she jumps, but it's just a cliché "you have to keep on living!" and certainly doesn't serve to isolate him from his abstract weird-sage unearthliness. At least a realistic manner of communication between characters is a must if the backbone of a series is constant and repetitive traumatic exposition, otherwise it ends up like this, where the reader is lurched back and forth between emotionally overloading outbursts and traumatic flashbacks they've seen before, causing a dissociation from anything but angst. And it's a flimsy angst too, not built by an atmosphere or handled with any sort of grace, but manufactured through crazy moments.

It's really just a horrific combination of an inconsistent tone and amplitude between emotional beats, there's no time to sit with the story's messaging as a consequence of the mangaka's insistence that an impassioned catharsis is Shiino screaming as loud as possible.

2. Groundhog Day

There were 12 (twelve) 1+ page flashbacks in this four chapter manga. TWELVE. In each one were the same few messages: that Mariko was traumatized, that Mariko was extremely dependent on Shiino for acknowledgement (due to trauma), that Mariko was in abusive relationships (due to trauma) etc. Besides those in the first chapter, almost all of them were unnecessary in establishing the required emotional backdrop for Shiino's attachment to Mariko, and harm the story by beating the reader over the head.

What exactly does the page above (picked from like a five page flashback) serve to do? Give us more context to her trauma? This was all achieved by the page below from earlier in this chapter, along with the multiple flashbacks in chapters 1, 2, and 3.

I see it as manipulation, the mangaka so forcibly grasping at the reader's heartstrings that the traumatic contexts of the flashbacks are lost and become a slog, accessing the reader's emotions not through merit but overload, fearful that a more subtle message wouldn't convey. I'd go as far as to say it was insulting to read, and I was left unable to establish any connection, trying not to roll my eyes at every piece of dialogue.

...

It's worth mentioning that I generally enjoyed the art! And I understand that there are people out there who can relate to a series like this DUE to the overt nature it laid everything out, but it's the last series I'd ever recommend when asked for a nuanced and mature take on the procession of grief.