holy SHIT it's so fucking good! wow! oh my fucking god!
ok, so. as i've said before, the first arc of watayuri (the first 2 volumes) is already really, REALLY good. even by itself, i'd say it's easily one of the best yuri manga i've ever read... so i was struggling to imagine how, as i kept hearing from others, it could get even better? what the hell was going to happen between these girls from now on??
turns out the answer is pretty simple. just have a huge brain like miman does
you start with the fiction-within-a-fiction of the café's setting: the all-girls school that is obviously a pastiche of classic class S and other yuri tropes. then, you pull back the curtain to reveal the real world of the café as a place where the girls work. the Yuri that their customers go there to see is, of course, just a performance the girls are putting on... and the tension between that fiction and reality mirrors that of hime and yano's relationship, where neither feels like they can tell what the other is thinking (and this, at the same time, acts as a sort of metacommentary on the artificiality of those tropes). great stuff! awesome job, watayuri!! you sid your homework, and it shows. but where to from here?
well. what if we pull back the curtain *even further?*t hen we can see that the "real world" of the café, too, is an artifice — the artifice of the manga itself!! because yes, hime and yano being cluelessly and casually gay after resolving their old grudge is still a fantasy! as is kanoko's self-assigned role of the girl who quietly suffers while watching her crush from afar, or even sumika's multilayered "cool senpai" and "drama-hardened girl who has to fix this before it's too late" personas. these, too, are characters that these girls are playing; not for the café's customers, but for us the readers who have surely seen all these tropes a bunch of times before.
so what vol4 does is reveal this artifice for what it is. we see that sumika can't just simply solve the problem here, because... does she even know what the problem really is, and whether it's one that can be solved? we see kanoko having to truly reckon with the fact that swallowing her love for hime will do nothing but make her miserable, and finding comfort in sumika's acknowledgement of her feelings... and we also see kanoko cut right through the goofy thing hime and yano have going on and just saying that yes, yano is in love with hime, because of course she is! it's obvious! only in a story would no one notice two people being so lovey-dovey in public.
and it's SUCH a genius move to have it first laid out here, in the real real world of the narrative, that yes these girls are actually gay! to have their feelings and problems be so much deeper and more complicated than the basic "how will they get together"! augh!!! this series is seriously light-years ahead of everyone else!
finally, the summer uniform chapter neatly summarizes the series' priorities. even though it's a lighter-hearted chapter after all of the heavy drama of the previous ones, and also a return to hime and yano's far more tropey drama, the realness of the situation can't help but leak through the gaps some. going from "haha this outfit looks really horny when yano wears it" to "uhhhh is it ok for her to appear in public like this" to a really quick but sincere discussion of how much it stresses her out to have everyone deny how she sees things is! really! really good!! oh hell yes, i love hime and yano so much you guys. sumika and kanoko's drama eas the Real Fucking Deal, but these two are great too, just in a very different way. i hope that dumbass neurotypical and her worryingly autistic big-boobed gf will kiss soon.
anyway... where do we go from here? hell if i fucking know, but at this point i trust miman with my life