also, i'll probably wait until i'm done reading the whole [arc] before writing another post; that'll let me write some proper analysis, rather than (cough) embarrassingly incorrect speculation on where the story is going to go.
well, so much for that!! guess i'm a big fat liar too.
when we last left off, hime and yano had finally managed to put all their feelings out in the open, cleared the long-standing complications in their relationship, and started taking the first steps in figuring out how this new more-than-friends-less-than-lovers thing works. getting here took a lot of work and courage from both of them, but they can rest easy knowing that everything's ok for now! yay.
of course, there are a lot of ways the last arc could have gone wrong, too — and indeed, some of these ways are how i thought things would actually pan out. it's for the best that we got the resolution that we did, but i still ended up being a tiny little bit disappointed that we didn't get to see what these alternate endings might have looked like......... and i guess miman felt the same, because as it turns out, this arc is basically a comprehensive list of all the most fun and interesting ways hime and yano could've ruined everything! lmao!!
and! it does this while expanding the thematic scope of the series even further out, taking the display of how yano performs neurotypicality and applying it to sexuality. we see this in nene performing being straight (that is, being closeted) for much of her life, or sumika absorbing the performance into herself so completely (that is, accepting the heteronormativity standards of society) that she doesn't even realize she's performing, or youko... youko..................
we'll get to her eventually. for now, let's go back to what i mentioned before, and take a look at all the awful ways hime and yano's relationship could've ended, starting with...
what if hime's straight, and yano never confessed to her?
well, this one's fairly simple — because it's the one kanoko's already accepted will be how her relationship with hime will turn out. but it is also, as we see with nene's failed crushes in chapter 47, a depressingly boring outcome due to how real it is. in most yuri works, everyone is gay, so there's little chance of this happen, but in real life? it could very well be the case that the girl you're in love with doesn't just not like you like that, but that it's impossible for her to. how do you even deal with that?
chapter 47 is incredible for how it explicitly acknowledges real-ass lesbian identity (which it had already implicitly done in volume 4, btw), but also for how it accomplishes this in a way that feels completely congruous with what the series has been up until this point. it's only natural, then, that nene's fatalistic view of her own luck with relationships is broken by mai recruiting her to the café.
as an aside: lmao holy shit mai literally went to a lesbian bar to recruit people for the café, AND THE BARTENDER KNEW HER
what if hime started dating yano while only pretending that she liked her?
this is probably the most obvious comparison to be made here, since hime explicitly brought it up in volume 8. she wisely discarded the idea, however, because she knew that there were some things she just wouldn't be able to fake. yeah, yano probably would've been happy simply being in a relationship with hime at all and made absolutely sure to never do anything that could possibly make hime uncomfortable... but that would only make it worse for hime, who would, the entire time, be haunted by the thought that she's lying to someone who loves her so innocently, and doing a piss-poor job of being a "girlfriend" while she's at it too! so yeah, that's a terrible idea. i mean, obviously, right? haha, surely there's no one in their right mind who'd actually do something like this,
RIGHT???????????
kanoko. kanoko. KANOKO GIRL WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE YOU DOING
and well, what do you know: that is EXACTLY what happens. sumika is so happy just having kanoko around that she asks nothing of her, which only further confuses kanoko as she twists herself into pretzels trying to figure out how to act like a girlfriend. she has no idea how to do that, of course, but amazingly, it's not just because she doesn't love love sumika; it's also because even though she loves hime, she can't use that as an example of how to act because she has always actively gone out of her way to not let that show. incredible.
and yet. and yet, just like how hime decided not to pursue this path because she cares about yano, we can clearly see, in kanoko's desperation, that she does sincerely care about sumika. that she doesn't want to hurt her. she legitimately wants to be a girlfriend who sumika will be happy with! ...regardless of what it means for herself?? god, here we can see the extent to which her relationship with hime informs her view of romance in general. she chastised yano for not thinking of hime's feelings enough, yet here thinking only of sumika's feelings and giving no thought to her own makes her blind to the possibility that sumika wouldn't want... anything in particular from her? and this, in turn, flips back to inform the specifics of how she sees hime.
even if, by some miraculous happening, kanoko confessed to hime and hime turned out to like her too and they started dating, i can't imagine it'd work out. just like with sumika, kanoko would think only of pleasing hime, and yes that's an extremely unhealthy way to handle being in a relationship, but also? there's no way hime would be ok with that! not the hime of right now, who's trying so hard to negotiate her and yano's vastly different wants and needs. she wouldn't want kanoko to never ask anything of her... and neither does sumika, in all her innocence. which i guess mirrors what hime and yano were like before, huh.
god, what a mess. good job dodging this bullet, hime!!
what if yano had believed hime when at the end, she said she didn't like her at all?
if there's a single thing in the previous arc that i'd point at and say "this, this right here is what allowed it to end well", it would without doubt be yano's success in seeing that one lie of hime's for what it was: the proof of its own falsehood. it's the perfect climax to that arc because it's the culmination of their entire history together up to that point and shows how much yano had come to understand hime by then and etc. etc. i talked about this before so you get it. unfortunately, nene and sumika don't have that history and understanding yet, so when she similarly pushes sumika away in an attempt to get her to admit her own feelings... sumika does believe her, and their relationship falls apart.
now, you might notice that the comparison doesn't quite fit perfectly, because the situations are mirrored; hime did want to push yano away, while nene wanted to get closer to sumika... but that's exactly the point! the same lie, used for the exact opposite purpose we saw hime use it for, was still a mistake because the root of the problem here is the nature of the lies themselves. these were not like the performances of the café, which in safeguarding the performer's feelings were the final key to hime and yano's reconciliation. no, instead these are... well, what we actually think of when we hear "lie": manipulative and cruel. even when spoken with the best of intentions, they speak to a belief that direct and honest communication is impossible, and that therefore your only choice is to trick people into doing what you want. by the time nene realizes this – realizes just how deeply she's hurting sumika – it's already too late.
in a way, the biggest mistake both she and hime made wasn't telling this lie; rather, it was thinking that being honest would have led to nothing. after all, hime did all that because she didn't want to hurt yano yet again... even though she didn't actually know if that would happen, and still doesn't! and likewise, nene assumed that this was simply another doomed crush, because sumika was straight... which she turned out not to be. does that mean that they could've gotten together, had she confessed back then? well... no. they don't know what would've happened, and they never will. but even the worst-case version of that scenario would've been preferable to how things actually panned out! and they know this, because that worst case is how they finally cleared everything up in chapter 55.
what if hime really was just an awful human being?
oookay. there's one thing i've neglected to mention until now, which is that neither nene nor kanoko thought of doing those things themselves. no — it was youko who gave them those ideas! and,
oh boy. youko. where do i even begin here.
she's... an incredible character, honestly! like i said at the beginning, this arc has blown the series' thematic scope and metacommentary wide open, and youko embodies all of this perfectly. hell, she even says some of that stuff out loud, making it clear that she finds little value in the whole schwestern thing, being proud of her sexuality and preferring explicit romance instead. and you know what? i can get behind that! i've been criticizing the yuri subtext we often see in more mainstream works for a long time, after all, and nowadays prefer more realistic yuri manga for precisely this reason. my own identity as a lesbian is inextricably linked with how i think about the genre, which seems to be the case for youko as well, so i can definitely see where she's coming from.
but.
but then you stop and ask what, exactly, she's talking about when she says "romance". and you remember the aloofness with which she treated her relationship with nene; the contempt she seems to have for sumika's ignorance of her own sexuality; the venom in her voice when she said "it's hard to talk about this with normal people, isn't it?" to nene; and, yes, the unbelievably awful advice she gave to nene and kanoko. all things that, as i said a few paragraphs ago,
... speak to a belief that direct and honest communication is impossible, and that therefore your only choice is to trick people into doing what you want.
this! this is what she means when she says romance! this is what she dismisses the schwestern concept – the exact thing that allowed hime and yano to find common ground in their relationship – for! the most toxic and unhealthy view of interpersonal relationships we've seen yet. and it's not like she's just confused or misguided, as has been the case with all of the conflicts in the previous arcs; no, she knows exactly what she's doing, and she loves doing it! she just doesn't think it's wrong, because of course she doesn't. to actually this all into the "what if" conceit of this post: this is basically what i thought hime might be like after the end of volume 6, if you remember my reactions at the time, lol.
again: absolutely incredible!! youko is a perfect antagonist for this moment in the narrative, for all the reasons already outlined but also because having someone like this around represents an enormous escalation of the stakes and dangers the girls have to deal with. we're no longer dealing only with miscommunication, or being confused about one's feelings, or not knowing how to be sincere, but with someone who's intentionally deceitful and manipulative! and—
what if yano was actually going to sexually assault hime during th—
no no no no we're talking about that in this post. go away for now please.
oh ok sorry
alright, where was i... oh yeah, youko's an incredible character. yeah that's basically it. now i can say that i hope someone punches her in the face lol, but... well, more soberly, i'm also really interested in seeing how, exactly, the series will refute her worldview. primarily because i really don't think watayuri would let someone like youko remain its most visible capital-L Lesbian character, so where do we go from here? nene's already been pretty open about her sexuality, sumika's started thinking about herself, and even hime had that painfully real talk with kanoko on the rooftop, so we can already tell that these girls being GAY gay is not something the series will avoid dealing with in the future. oh baby, remember that theory i had for what hime and yano's next arc might involve?? hell yeah.
ok i think i'm finally done here! i probably forgot to mention something because this post sat untouched in my drafts for days while i went to have hip prosthesis surgery (it went well and i'm recovering just fine, don't worry) but these are the main things i wanted to touch on. yeah this series is fantastic and i'm amazed at how it's still finding ways to surprise me, even 11 volumes in! and that it still feels so carefully thought-out! i've probably said this a bunch of times already, but really, the way this entire arc has been informed by how the conflict between hime and yano resolved in the previous one, while also informing just how important and difficult them managing to achieve that resolution was?? chef's kiss. (by the way, this is why it kinda irks me when people say that hime and yano are side characters now or whatever; the two of them are still all over the story, even if they're not getting much screentime!)
oh cool, while i was writing this the scanlation for chapter 58 came out! can't wait to read this one and see how the cliffhanger in 57 will turn out to be a false alarm because i mean there's no way they'll go there, right guys? right?????????
