YMMV / Shi ni Aruki

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Does Tokiko's apparent Lack of Empathy come from her having sociopathic tendencies, or does she have a different disorder such as autism? The manner in which she processes emotions has overlap with both, and while Tokiko herself claims the former, the way she emotes and expresses herself when with people she actually trusts and feels comfortable with (such as Natsuki) implies the latter.
    • Relatedly, did she actually planned the death of her own father, or does she blame herself for his accidental death?
  • Does Miyuki really care for Tokiko, or does she only care about the idea of a family? Tokiko herself seems to believe the latter, but considering that she has a rather... warped view of family, and wasn't there when Miyuki stood up to her brother and sisters-in-law for Tokiko's sake, that assessment may not be entirely accurate.
  • Why was Tokiko's Last Request to not have her remains buried alongside the Kurosus? Was it because of her obvious dislike for most of the family? Was it because she didn't consider herself part of the family? Or was it banking on the remote chance that her birth mother would come to claim her remains for burial?
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Tokiko is clearly not at all normal, given her lack of an emotional reaction to other people's deaths, but it's unclear whether she's a sociopath, on the autistic spectrum, severely traumatized, some other disorder or any combination of the above.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite having a limited role in the story and dying less than halfway through the plot, Miyuki is relatively popular as the Only Sane Man of the cast, and one of the few who actually care for Tokiko.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: Outside of them possibly being pure coincidence, the only other explanation given for all the deaths besides Rina, whom Sou Aoya killed are attributed to a supernatural curse surrounding a Dead All Along Tokiko. Some readers dislike this conclusion, finding both of these conclusions unsatisfying; particularly the latter, as the reasoning behind why some of the victims died can come across as arbitrary at best, with even characters in-universe pointing that out.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A minor subplot through the manga is Natsuki's poor grades. Natsuki's mother thinks her martial arts practice is to blame, which leads to her threatening to burn her daughter's dougi if her grades don't improve. From that point on, Natsuki carries it with her for safekeeping, and in Chapter 27, the bag gets caught in an elevator door and dragged upward, causing the strap to nearly strangle Natsuki to death. Maybe Natsuki's mother should have taken it away (granted, it wouldn't stop what happens afterward).
  • In one of the extra chapters, a middle school-aged Tokiko creates a faux hostage situation involving Natsuki's indoor shoes to coerce her. As a high schooler, Tokiko creates an actual high-stakes hostage situation involving Sou's younger sister Ai to coerce him.
  • Tokiko's establishing character moment, wherein she finds her father dead and casually picks up and reads a book near his body is bad enough, but it gets much worse after Tokiko reveals that she deliberately asked her father to get out all the books in order to create a situation in which he would fall and die.
• He's Just Hiding: Some people were convinced that Tokiko's niece Rina isn't actually dead, since the person in question didn't die on-screen, and thus that the bloated corpse that was found may not belong to them. It helps that the second set of character portraits had a blank space in the bottom-right corner, which could have been used for a new or returning character.
• Heartwarming Moments: Pretty much all of Tokiko and Natsuki's interactions are this. Tokiko is usually disaffected at best or cruelly dismissive at worse when interacting with others, but Natsuki is easily able to get a full gamut of emotion of her, with these instances being among the only moments where Tokiko earnestly smiles out of joy. The two of them trust each other in a way they do nobody else, leading to the impassioned Platonic Declaration of Love speech that Natsuki gives in Chapter 28 that is the most heartful moment of them all, as it ends with the two of them hugging while crying tears of joy, more certain than ever that they'll be together until the day they die.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Rina was never very nice to her adopted aunt Tokiko, even threatening to finish the job her uncle Takahito started. But considering she lost both her parents within days of each other, with her father dying in front of her no less, and she later gets kidnapped and murdered, it's hard not to feel bad for her.
  • Despite being rather insane and having multiple murders under their belt, Sou Aoya comes off as rather pitiful. Not only were their parents horribly abusive, but when the killer was a child, said parents killed their younger sister and themselves, leaving them with a bad case of Survivor Guilt. Killing Ai's parents results in them being consumed with horror at their own actions, and the murders committed afterward are the result of a stress-induced delusion that they can somehow "purify" themselves of the deed. None of this justifies their actions, but they might not have turned out this way if they'd grown up in a healthier environment.
  • Sou's adoptive sister Ai is an accessory to the murders, but it is shown that they also suffered from Abusive Parents, and the murderer became a loving and caring Parental Substitute for them after killing said parents. In light of that, it's understandable that they'd excuse the killer's actions, and you can't really blame them for viewing Tokiko with disdain at the end of the story for taking away the good home they had.
• Moral Event Horizon: While Sou killing Ai's Abusive Parents was arguably understandable, there's no justification for their subsequent murders of "pure" people to "purify" themselves.
• Narm:
  • To some, the deaths can be too over-the-top to take seriously. In particular, Haruka's death is reminiscent of Yukari Sakuragi's infamous death in Another; both characters fell down the stairs and get stabbed in the throat, though the exact details are different (the former fell backwards onto a pen, whereas the latter fell forward onto her umbrella).
  • When Sou is contemplating killing himself after murdering Ai's parents, the moment is undermined by the long vertical panel that causes the character's body proportions to seem off.
  • To some, the Title Drop at the very end comes off as the story trying too hard to be meaningful.
• Spoiled by the Format: The rate at which the main characters die seems to suggests that the series will only last a single volume. However, the series goes on for four volumes, meaning that not only is the answer to the Driving Question a good while away, but that more characters than expected are also going to die.
• Squick:
  • The investigators uncover some hidden bodies beneath the floorboards of the Shiroki house, many of which are bloated.
  • After Aoya kidnaps Tokiko, he decides to give her a last meal of curry. He notes afterward that if he killed her immediately after this, her stomach would cause a mess when cutting her up, so he explicitly tells her that he's willing to wait an extra 48 hours for her body to finish digesting and excreting the food.
  • After Tokiko commits suicide by walking in front of an oncoming train, all that remains of the person is a severed arm that is catapulted away.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It isn't uncommon for readers to lose interest in the story over time, due to how almost everyone dies senselessly and very few of the characters are likable.
• The Woobie: Miyuki. One by one, her family members die, with some of them even dying while trying to kill Tokiko. The strain eventually drives her to hang herself.

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