In Bloom Into You, Volume 4, as the Student Council goes into a stay-over training camp in order to work on their play for the school festival, the principal characters encounter issues they’ve brought with them from their past into their present.
Sayaka is forced to deal with a memory being pissed all over by her first lover. The sempai, in attempting to absolve Sayaka of any blame for their gay relationship, forces her to use Touko to make a point about being gay anyway. Touko doesn’t mind, but the whole thing is awkward and uncomfortable. Sayaka’s then brought into close quarters with the girl she desires, but cannot have. She cannot not see Touko’s interactions with Yuu, she cannot not know what they mean. She has no course at all but to be stoic, which is in unfair step down from just having an unrequited fantasy. I am still primarily reading this series for Sayaka and really want to see her happy by the end of it.
Yuu learns from a friend and teammate from middle school that her current state of dissatisfaction at being overworked with Student Council stuff marks a pretty major shift from her previous lack of engagement with pretty much everything. I read too much manga, I know, but my mind went directly to another MediaWorks manga that used pathological lack of engagement as a plot complication, Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl. Is this a key development moment for Yuu, or just a thing that is told to us to explain her ambivalence? Unfortunately for readers, we cannot be sure if anything we’re presented has weight of meaning. It could easily be a handwave.
We can be sure that something came to some kind of head when we all see Touko get extraordinarily emotional as they rehearse the play. Kanou-san just got way too close to the truth (as Yuu notes privately,) with her script. Touko is competing with the ideal of a dead older sister who turns out to have actually been a bit of a jerk. She learns her sister used the people around her and is then told, quite incorrectly, that she’s nothing like Mio. But we readers can see that she is much more like her sister than anyone knows.
If the book took a direction that made me happy, Touko would confront her own behavior in regards to Yuu and change. Yuu would be then given a chance to decide if she wanted to be with this Touko. And Sayaka would meet a nice girl. But realistically, I’m just waiting for the magic handwave that will make Yuu decide she loves Touko and they’ll get married on a rainbow-bathed chapel in the sky. Oh, sorry, switched to Kashimashi again.
Seven Seas has given us an excellent, authentic manga reading experience with this volume, so we can relax and be perplexed by the story. ^_^
Ratings: (quote directly from the review of the JP volume)
Art – 8
Story – 5 This issue has issues
Characters – 8
Yuri – 7
Service – 4 Bathing scenes with three girls, two of whom are lesbian.
Overall – 8….
I really want to like this series. I just still don’t know if I do. Huh, just like Yuu feels about Touko. How ironic. ^_^
Volume 5 in English hits shelves in June 2018. Thanks very much to Seven Seas for a review copy, but I had already gotten it for myself. ^_^
Sayaka has grown on me considerably; she gets a lot of really good moments in this book. Her asking Yuu if she should buy her a treat was so brutal, it deserves a thread full of gifs of people comically over-reacting.
Yes, so very yes.
I didn’t get the sense that Touko’s older sister was a jerk. She just wasn’t the serious honor student Touko thought she was. That’s why they tell Touko she’s nothing like her sister. Meaning her facade of honer student, meant to emulate her sister, its meaningless now. That’s the take away for me at least.
Someone who uses other people to do work she shirks is pretty much my definition of a jerk, no matter how likable she may be. ^_^