This volume honestly made me legitimately angry. In the wake of a tragic event, we get to see through the eyes of all of the side characters. Some parts of this are great, like Shoko's chapter, in which an imaginary, idealized past is interspersed with a painful present and her hearing limitations are visually represented by misspelled and partially missing text. But most of this volume is sympathetic point-of-view sequences for absolutely horrible people. There is no sympathetic backstory or perspective that can redeem a person who literally beats someone for attempting suicide. The beating goes on for a few pages. And some characters honestly wonder if it was "right" to put a stop to it. This is NOT how helping a depressed/suicidal person works. This is how isolation and abuse works. In fact, the number of times Shoko gets hit in this volume is honestly disturbing and it's made all the worse by her persistence in getting the group of "friends" back together. Some of them are worse now than when they bullied her as kids. I can't stand this volume.