In 1980, Hagio's frequent editor Junya Yamamoto [ja] became the editor-in-chief of Petit Flower, a new manga magazine published by Shogakukan aimed at an audience of adult women.

Yamamoto granted Hagio full artistic and editorial freedom over the manga she published in Petit Flower, allowing her to create series with more mature themes and subject material relative to her previous works.

Notable titles published by Hagio in Petit Flower prior to A Cruel God Reigns include her 1980 crime thriller Mesh, which focuses on parricide in the drug trade, and her 1985 post-apocalyptic science fiction series Marginal.

[9] Translator and cultural anthropologist Rachel Thorn praised A Cruel God Reigns as an "amazing contribution to graphic literature", calling it "beautifully executed, yet brutal in its frankness and often painful to read".

[3] Sociologist and cultural historian Mark McLelland cites A Cruel God Reigns alongside Marimo Ragawa's New York New York as an example of a manga in which depictions of male-male sexual violence mirror that of sexual violence committed by men against women, where the female reader is "clearly supposed to identify" with the abused male character though the manner in which they are "placed in a subordinate (read, feminine) position.