good news, everyone: i was overthinking things, and the situation isn't nearly as bad as i thought it was!
bad news, everyone: it's better in a way that makes it way worse!!
so, yeah, i was wrong about hime. that she was just panicking and running away after realizing she messed up big time was actually my first impression, and it turned out to be correct! i only started questioning that after rereading the volume. i definitely think this is better for the story than if she were acting out of malice or something, too... because it just makes the situation that much more fucked up, right?? if hime were just being an asshole, then it'd be so easy to blame her for everything; make her the "problem" that needs to be solved here, and there'd be numerous ways to do that. but if that's not the case? if she's doing this because she understands just how horribly she'll be hurting yano if she were honest, and is simply trying to minimize the damage? then... what? what the hell can anyone even do here?
oh, right, i was wrong about yano too. i also thought that hime shouldn't have run away after yano kissed her; that if she'd realized how badly she fucked up (which she did), then it would've better if she just cleared things up right then and there. i figured that yano would've been ok, since she obviously wasn't expecting hime to return her feelings... buuut as the end of this volume shows, all that would've accomplished is kick the can down the road. yeah, there's no way yano would've been able to not show her love for hime constantly after all that, and how is hime supposed to deal with that?
oh god there's so much going on in this one that i don't even know what to talk about next. so how about, uh... kanoko. alright i said that and then immediately realized i have no idea how to start talking about kanoko either lmao
on the one hand, she's definitely changed for the better! she's come to care about liebe, and wants hime and yano to make up so that things can keep going like they were before! ...but at the same time, actually helping them accomplish this will require her to disentangle her feelings for hime from the situation. and she didn't when she first talked to yano, which is why that scene turned out like that — because even as she was screaming at yano to do fix this mess, she was jealous of her, right? she was unbelievably jelous that yano was the one who got to confess to hime, that hime likes yano as much as she does kanoko herself... and honestly, i'd even say that she's jealous that yano is the one who's hurt like this, and not her. she probably wishes she could hurt and be hurt like this, but she can't! she's never going to do that! jeez, girl.
next up we gotttt... ok let's go in order. that scene where yano talks to nagisa at their school! and it's a pretty minor scene, but there's a specific moment in it that i want to focus on, and it's when nagisa realizes yano is talking about having confessed to a girl. it's clear that right then she's thinking 1. "oh snap, yano's gay too! i have a buddy to talk about this stuff with now!!", which is very cute, but also 2. "oh, so maybe that other girl just doesn't know how to react to having been confessed to by a girl! yano still has a chance!", which says a few things about what she must've gone through in her past... but. but. the key here is not either of those things, but that nagisa reacting like this at all is a reminder that... straight people exist! right? i've been thinking of this as a yuri manga plot all along, so i just assumed all these girls are gay... but are they actually? well, nene and kanoko clearly are, yano hasn't thought about it any but probably is too, sumika likely is as well... and hime? well, she's really clueless about relationship stuff. comically clueless. suspiciously clueless, even, and in the previous post i said that i've started wondering if she's aro/ace... completely not realizing that she could also just be straight, lmao. i don't know if that's actually the case, but, oh boy
hey, we haven't talked about the themes with the performance/reality dichotomy in a while, huh? well, there's no better time to get back to that (and the arc's question, "what value do these performances have?") than the scene that follows after yano's conversation with nagisa, where she manages to connect with kanoko for the first time while in-character at the salon! that's how she's best and most carefully able to communicate her feelings, after all, and this allows kanoko to talk to her more calmly as well. so here, the performance has gone from not just being a blueprint for yano on how to act, but also... a cushion of sorts that shields them from the rawness of their respective feelings?? fascinating stuff. and afterwards, kanoko even finds it in herself to tell hime to not hide her feelings, just like how hime told her when they first met! their earlier conversation in the stairwell even mirrored their first meetings in the stairs to the rooftop, and the flashback kanoko had when talking to sumika in volume 4.
finally, there's hime. she fucked up. she knows she fucked up, and... you know it's actually really funny seeing her try to come up with some way in which this is all not what it looks like, and having all of those ways be the most "they seem like very good friends :)" yuri stereotypes lmao. she just wanted to be my number one friend, right? that was just a platonic "like", right? she only kissed me as a joke, right? this is all just subtext and yeah i can read into it but it's not actually canon and these girls aren't acutally gay, right??
no. sorry, hime. this series is too meta for that.
so we're back where we started... quite literally, in fact, because the conversation hime and yano end up having at the break room is almost exactly the one they had at yano's house, just with the roles reversed. yano wants hime to open up, hime doesn't because she knows that if she does it'll just make things worse, yano keeps pushing her and eventually hime does say what she's thinking! and. yeah! it does make everything worse! in ways that yano didn't even think were possible, even! and the real genius of this scene is that... it's impossible for me to look at it and think "they can work something out!" nnnnno. i... really don't think they can't.
throughout this entire volume, the impression has been created that it's not that hime doesn't love yano, but that she's never going to love yano. for whatever reason. whether it's because she's actually straight or ace or something else... well, it's like kanoko said — she's never loved anyone. why would yano be the first? also, "hime just needs to start liking yano" would be an awful way to resolve this, and this manga is too good for that lol.
and yano. oh, yano. both she and kanoko think it'll all be fine if she just stopped loving hime, and yes if she could do that then everything would probably turn out ok. but that's never going to happen. and i know that's never going to happen, because oh my fucking god! that panel where yano is desperately telling hime that she'll stop loving her if it means they can go back to normal!! probably one of the most painful moments i've ever seen in a yuri story, because simply saying that proves that she'll never be able to stop loving hime!!! fuck!!!!
oh my god. imagine. yano and hime are friends as kids, but they break up because they don't communicate well enough and end up thinking the other hates them and it ruins everything. so years later, they meet again and clear things up, and become friends again! and this time they're determined to make it work! so when they run into problems with their relationship, they actually sit down and talk things out and are honest about their feelings,
and it ruins everything. again.
i guess this, too, is one of the values of the performance... but it's not everything. it can't be everything, because well just look at the cover for volume 8 lol. also it'd be too doomer of a note to end this arc on and it's incompatible with all the times anyone in here being open about what they're thinking has ended well for them. and yet, like i said, hime's probably not going to start loving yano, and yano's definitely not going to stop loving hime, so... what now?
well. now i remember that nene hasn't really done anything this whole time, huh? and oh, would you look at that, she's gone through a situation almost exactly like this one before. the way sumika put it even made it sound like goeidou was as callous and awful as i was thinking hime was being! it really makes you think.
some other assorted things that i couldn't fit anywhere here but that also made me think:
- bruh... the cover and mirror illustration at the end switched places, and now it's the cover that's showing reality......
- alright, probably the one thing that made me go "HMMMMMM???" the most in this entire volume is... how viscerally negative hime's reactions to yano's physical displays of affection were. she visibly recoiled when reached out to at the salon, then during their talk she instinctively slaps yano's hand away... and of course she also admits that she could fake going out with yano, holding her hand, hugging, etc. — but not kissing. what does this mean? well it could mean a lot of things, but personally i'm hoping that it means hime has some deeply-rooted and unexamined homophobia. that would be a terrible thing for this to be! and, it'd also be the most incredible and galaxy-brained option possible!! i'd never consider this a possibility in any other series, but in watayuri? after all the impossibly fantastic drama it's already done? ...we'll see!
so that's an entire volume of the slow-motion car crash slowing down even further, to make sure i get a perfect look at the collision. awesome! love it!! keep it up, miman!!!