Manga Thoughts: Bloom into You 4

[krpalmer]

First drawn in by a perhaps unusual interpretation but finding it intriguing myself, "Bloom into You" is one of the manga series I'm most interested to see new releases of. As I bought its fourth volume, I did wonder if this would be the instalment at last that would have its protagonist Yuu "bloom" to the point of not just accepting the desire of Touko but returning it. At that point, the story might either end or become just a more conventional "girls' love" series. Starting to read it, though, I was hit most of all by the feeling the three volumes before perhaps hadn't planted themselves as deep in my memory as I might have thought they had. I did start thinking of how I'd taken a few chances in recent months I don't often take and started watching the anime adaptations of manga series I'd already read; getting over "the artwork might not look as distinctive when many hands draw it over and over" and not being hit too hard by "things getting toned down for TV broadcast," I did find myself thinking that seeing an episode every week, I was noticing things I seemed to have forgotten after getting one fair-sized burst of story every few months, just as I've thought at times I'd like to go back to an anime series I've watched at an episode-a-week pace and take the development of things in a bit faster (if not "binging," though).

What took me a moment to sort out and get over was realising Sayaka, a third girl who had a more conventional "girls' love" interest in Touko, had been worked into the story in the third volume. In this fourth volume, after an opening that also took a little while to sort out but had me thinking we were to see new complexities in Touko too, the three girls wind up together in a summer retreat to prepare a play for school, one which just happens to express "works of art in a fictional story can reflect what we're supposed to see in the characters." The back cover promised "super-charged emotions!", but I have to admit Yuu's essential calmness still seemed there, and that this was an amusing part of the story for me. At the same time, I could imagine something new might happen in the next volume; I'm just hoping now that when it does show up I won't end up with much the same realisation of things forgotten again.