The protagonist is drawn as a crude bird-like scribble while everyone around him is fully human, visually encoding the felt sense that one's own interior is cartoonish, provisional, and unlike real people. Depersonalizing the self in this way lets an audience project onto a near-blank figure while isolating that figure from the social world it moves through.
A childhood promise to escape together hardens into a fixed ideal that both people measure adulthood against, so that reunion becomes an attempt to restore a fantasy rather than meet an actual person. The book shows this fantasy curdling into mutual harm, suggesting that fusing with someone to escape your damage tends to reproduce the damage rather than cure it.
After years apart, Punpun reunites with his first love Aiko and they flee together, but their shared escape unravels into violence, Aiko's suicide, and his survival; the dream of being saved by another person ends in catastrophe. The episode functions as a concrete case of two wounded people who mistake each other for rescue.
The narrative juxtaposes mundane routines, side characters, and background cults against the protagonist's quiet disintegration, so that despair reads as something invisible happening inside an unremarkable surface. Viewed this way, suffering is not dramatic or legible from outside; the people around a collapsing person often register nothing.