did you hear that noise, folks?
that was the sound of one of the monkey's paw's fingers curling when i said i hoped hime and yano would kiss.
oh god. okay! so yano got sick due to being out in the rain, and hime goes to check on her. they talk things out and open their hearts to one another and make up and it's all fine! yay!
except. except that hime made a mistake. and honestly, i don't blame her for it! sumika made the exact same one in volumes 3/4. so i get it. but she made a mistake.
she severely underestimated just how much yano was putting into her performance for hime.
in hindsight, this too is obvious. the fantasy of the café is that of a class S/traditional yuri setting, and yano is a smart girl. surely she studied the genre a lot, and learned what it means for a girl in one of those works to say she "likes" another girl, and to have that other girl as her "sister". what it really means. that is what she has been saying to hime all this time, and she's been saying it like this because, well... it's part of the performance! but almost no one else got it. kanoko did because she's that attuned to this stuff, but sumika didn't until kanoko told her, and hime definitely didn't. (which... kinda casts her complete inability to understand the café's setting in another light, doesn't it. suddenly it's not just an indication of how comically incompetent she is (or was) while working.) so they talk, hime finally convinces yano to tell her what she's really thinking, and hime accepts yano's possessiveness and jealousy of kanoko and everything, completely failing to realize that when yano says she wants to be hime's number one, she's not talking about being best friends or something. she only realizes that when yano, in all her innocence, casually kisses hime — which of course every yuri fan knows is the one thing you can't easily "they seem like very good friends :)" out of!!
so we're back to where we started. hime fucked up. she said she'd accept yano's feelings, but she didn't expect them to be something that she can't accept, because (deep breaths) she's not in love with yano. in fact, it's really starting to look like she's aro/ace, though i can't speak to that as well as i can to yano being autistic so i'll just leave it at "extremely likely" instead of "absolutely certain" for now. point is: she needs to do something here, because once yano finds out she and hime were talking about completely different things there she's going to be really, really hurt. and hime knows this. and i know that she knows this,
because she doesn't do anything.
she doesn't apologize, she isn't honest about what she's thinking at that moment (you know, like she was just telling yano to do moments ago), she just. pretends everything is fine and leaves, and she can do that because she knows yano has difficulty telling what she's thinking?? and then she lies to kanoko about what happened. she lies to kanoko, and she does it easily because kanoko would never imagine that hime would lie to her??? finally, she decides to quit liebe, even after saying that she wouldn't.
honestly i have no idea what the hell she's doing here. i don't think she's panicking about having hurt yano when she was supposed to be doing the exact opposite, because we know what it looks like when hime's panicking and this is not it, but i guess it's a possibility. it could also be that, having fucked up so badly, she's thinking it's best if she just removes herself from yano's life entirely.
ultimately, though... to me, what this looks like is that she's resentful. resentful that someone would love the real her, and not her façade. so resentful, even, that she's ok with immediately destroying everything all of them have been building up for the past 6 volumes, and yeah that's basically what i'm expecting to happen because this is the exact situation sumika was trying to prevent with kanoko in volumes 3/4! the exact same thing as what happened with nene and goeidou before! oh, and of course it's also the exact situation kanoko was antagonizing yano for before. holy shit! these are literally the absolute worst possible things hime could do here!!! what the fuck?? she has to know, right?? she has to!
it's absurd. in one fell swoop, she's validated yano's old impression of her as a lying backstabber, and also shown us that kanoko and sumika were right to worry about the things they were worrying about in volumes 3/4?? and for what???
ah, shit. i can't even think about the themes anymore. what the hell does this all mean lmao. the most i can come up with is that hime doesn't want people to love her real self for whatever reason, and that's why she wants everyone to love her façade. but what that could be that'd make her react like this to being loved, i have no idea; and even if she has a perfectly good and understandable reason for doing all this, that's not going to excuse or justify any of it. not treating yano like this after that girl trusted hime with her truest feelings even though she didn't want to and had to be told multiple times by hime herself that it was ok. not doing what's basically the single most cruel thing she could do to kanoko. oh my god i hope sumika punches her in the face.
okay, so, yeah this is basically the best yuri manga i've ever read in my life and nothing else comes even remotely close lmao. mind, it was already the best before, but now? with this unbelievably fucked up drama brewing?? there's no contest. i've only ever seen stuff like this in either one-shots or very short serializations, and here watayuri is pulling it off in a long-runner, while also tying it to all the themes and metacommentary and shit and consistently having impossibly good and expressive art (look at the pained nuance of hime's expressions in chapter 31! holy shit!!) and just being one of the best-crafted stories i've seen in a manga?? wow.
really, i have to kneel to miman. even setting aside the technical mastery on display here, i couldn't do this. i couldn't have one of my characters act like hime does in chapter 31. i'm not courageous enough. so, yeah.
i'm scared of reading volume 7 lol.
