Manga Thoughts: Bloom Into You 8
Sep. 10th, 2020 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe release date of the final volume of Bloom Into You was marked in my calendar, but when right after that date I checked the online store of the area comics shop I’ve been patronizing, I found the volume listed as “special order.” For once, I was the one skipping over reading list entries. As I prepared to make another manga order, though, I checked again to now see the volume in stock. Even as I ordered it, however, I was uncertain just what I’d make of it myself. When a review of the very first volume had happened to suggest one of its main characters Yuu could be read as sort of asexual, that got my attention. As multiple volumes kept stretching out Yuu’s uncertainty about just what she felt about Touko Nanami, it certainly seemed a change from “are my feelings even allowed?” (and the apparent additional familiarity, however reflective of hard truths in Japanese society, of same-sex couples keeping things very much between themselves), but did get to poising me on the horns of a dilemma in which anything not “a reluctant realisation things just aren’t working out and a rebound partner for Touko” might seem to amount to “whatever Yuu is dealing with, it’s something you get over.”
The resolution of the previous volume’s cliffhanger straight off at the start of the eighth, though, did seem to work for me (including a comment from Yuu about how she’d once thought love “would come crashing down from the sky one day” but is fine with something different), and with plenty of chapters left the slow build of the story began to build in something else. After “managing to shift from family name to first name” and “the third woman Saeki offers her blessing,” that ever-famous development “I sent my parents on an overnight trip” leads to a consummation scene, and a nice one. That I can react that way rather than just with something like “Oh. Well, that happened,” however, does remind me the subject is complicated, I don’t know as much about it as I could, and I should perhaps be very careful about saying too much following “Yuu got my attention because...” I’m at least ready to suppose a proper evaluation might only get me a pat on the back and the explanation “You were just psychologically damaged to start with, then further skewed by unrealistic representations too easily available.”
In any case I’m contemplating the translated novels about Saeki and the anime adaptation I managed to get the Blu-Ray of a while ago, for all that I wonder just how far it managed to get into the story. Re-reading the eight volumes of the manga is one more option, but for the moment I’ve managed to work my way back to “having lots of manga waiting to read for the first time,” which isn’t bad in itself.
The resolution of the previous volume’s cliffhanger straight off at the start of the eighth, though, did seem to work for me (including a comment from Yuu about how she’d once thought love “would come crashing down from the sky one day” but is fine with something different), and with plenty of chapters left the slow build of the story began to build in something else. After “managing to shift from family name to first name” and “the third woman Saeki offers her blessing,” that ever-famous development “I sent my parents on an overnight trip” leads to a consummation scene, and a nice one. That I can react that way rather than just with something like “Oh. Well, that happened,” however, does remind me the subject is complicated, I don’t know as much about it as I could, and I should perhaps be very careful about saying too much following “Yuu got my attention because...” I’m at least ready to suppose a proper evaluation might only get me a pat on the back and the explanation “You were just psychologically damaged to start with, then further skewed by unrealistic representations too easily available.”
In any case I’m contemplating the translated novels about Saeki and the anime adaptation I managed to get the Blu-Ray of a while ago, for all that I wonder just how far it managed to get into the story. Re-reading the eight volumes of the manga is one more option, but for the moment I’ve managed to work my way back to “having lots of manga waiting to read for the first time,” which isn’t bad in itself.