Friday, February 11, 2011

Confusion


I got the issue of Ribon Special that has the 100 page epilogue to Blue Friend, Blue Friend ~after days~, and started flipping through it. I started reading ~after days~ verbatim, but a feeling of, "Wtf- how did the story travel from point A to point B here?" overwhelmed me by the end of page one and I decided to skim it. This epilogue raises more questions than it answers but it does clarify that Blue Friend has a yuri ending.

Steer clear from the remainder of this post if ye want to avoid spoilers.

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  • The chapter starts with a flashback of Misuzu lying in bed in a hospital, with Ayumu next to her saying, "I'll always stay beside you." (Ayumu's face isn't shown.)
  • Misuzu's sitting on the hospital lawn when she should be in her room, and she sends Ayumu a text message saying she'll go back to school soon. Ayumu smiles at the message at school.
  • They walk to school holding hands, hoho.
  • A flashback shows that Misuzu's mom was an alcoholic who told Misuzu that she wished Misuzu hadn't been born. She seemed to be happy after marrying Misuzu's doctor stepfather, but then she died in a car accident that people speculated (within earshot of Misuzu) may have been a suicide. Misuzu's stepfather ignored her to work, and that's when she decided that she was fine with always being alone. Yeesh.
  • Misuzu is drafted into playing the heroine in the school play. She has a hard time with the role (unfortunately, it looks like she still has trouble interacting with men), but she's able to do a great job in the play by imagining that the male lead is Ayumu.
  • Misuzu almost falls down some stairs after running away from her co-lead during a rehearsal, but Satsuki catches her. She has a band-aid on her face and doesn't seem like she wants to destroy Misuzu anymore, although Misuzu still looks wary. Later, she freaks Ayumu and Misuzu out by draping her arms around both of them from behind at the same time and congratulating them on graduating. Her hair is suddenly much shorter. In manga, characters nearly always lop most of their hair off because they've lost or been rejected by someone they love. It could be that Satsuki really misses her relationship (or the potential for one) with Misuzu from before everything was shot to hell between them (she does briefly flashback to when they knew each other as children earlier in this epilogue), and is mourning it in that way or using it to represent a fresh beginning. She walks away from them while waving goodbye, not looking back.
  • Ayumu's hair is a little longer in this chapter, which is a nice touch. Misuzu looks the same as ever.
  • Misuzu and Ayumu have graduated, yay!
  • They kiss, yay! 
  • The last page is really cute.

And, that's it for ~after days~. How will Eban Fumi develop the series proper up to this point? Dun dun dun.

Added a little later:
All of my earlier questions still need answering, but my one real concern is the issue of how Misuzu's fear of men will be handled in what's left of the series, given that it's still present in ~after days~. (Although for something as traumatic as what happened to Misuzu, it would be irritating if it were resolved in an overly convenient way also, like the awful, pat resolution for the subplot with Takeru's sister in Last Friends.) There have been titles that have had yuri characters with similar issues while still managing to be good (Marimite, Moonlight Flowers, Love SlaveOniisama E). Love Slave and Moonlight Flowers mitigated that problem by showing that Ureha and Kaoru were interested in women since before their bad experiences with men, and Oniisama E and Marimite had sympathetic male characters and a larger cast of yuri characters who didn't have any issues with men. And of course, Ichijou Yukari's "That's Why I Sigh" one-shot did a great job of handling that issue by showing that Mako still likes women after resolving her fear of men. (Oh! And chapter 9 of Honey & Honey addresses this issue directly- and very amusingly.)

So...anyway, I'll see how it goes for the rest of this series.

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