With Touka set on doing what her sister could not — have the student council perform a unique play at the school festival — Yuu’s friend Koyomi has been recruited to write it. In the way that only a fictional character can, Koyomi creates a play that perfectly mirrors Touka’s inner life and, combined with other events, nudges Touka to again reconsider who she wants to grow up and “bloom” into being.
The more I read Bloom Into You, the more I get invested into the idea of Yuu slowly falling in love with Touka but also the more concerned I get with Touka being so pushy about it. I get it, your high school years are complicated and Touka is less honest with herself than most teens, so her moments of saying both “I love you, Yuu” and “don’t fall in love with me, because I can’t stand the idea of being in love with someone who is in love with the person I hate the most, me” fits.
But at the same time, given the moments we see that make it clear that Touka thinks her older sister’s death was directly her fault, have her parents considered therapy? It’s never a good sign when a story could be resolved “by actually talking to someone” but it’s certainly what Touka needs. Although, even that probably wouldn’t stop Touka from forcing kisses on Yuu (which is my bigger issue with any future relationship between them) and it certainly wouldn’t stop the story from depicting this lack of consent as a “romantic, not an issue at all.”
These two volumes also establish a bit more about the queer side-characters in Bloom Into You’s cast. As mentioned recently in my review of the new yuri manga How Do We Relationship? many yuri series seem to look rather inward and won’t feature many, if any, queer characters of any stripe outside of the couple, something very at odds with my own experience. By introducing the girl’s teacher and a local café owner as a lesbian couple it was doubly surprising to see both another couple and an older one at that.
The only other two series that immediately come to mind that feature a queer couple that’s older than the main cast are Wandering Son and Our Dreams At Dusk, something that is enough of a rarity that I both appreciated it and it led me to wonder why this is the case. Is this absence of larger, queer casts merely because of the simplification that must occur to tame fiction into a story (like having a small cast or “easy” to resolve issues) or if it’s a reflection of the creators who have been published here in English (ie, a lack of “Own Voices”). The two women are, by the way, both lovely and the café manager seems willing to be a bit of a guide for fellow student council member Sayaka as she comes to understand that she is fully, 100% in love with girls and 0% in love with guys.
While this is my first time reading these volumes, I have previously seen the entire anime adaptation of Bloom Into You, which covered these volumes and a bit more. When I was watching the anime I was a bit puzzled why I saw some fans referring to yet another member of the Student Council, Yuu’s fellow first-year Maki, as asexual when the only scene in the anime to even suggest this idea painted him as more voyeuristic than “personally uninterested.” But in volume 3 there is a quick, almost casual scene (that I didn’t remember in the anime) with Yuu when Maki brings up that he too has never fallen in love; it just doesn’t seem to be a big deal for him (both the idea of romance and personally worrying over it) and that explained for me where this interpretation of Maki’s character came from (and I now agree with it).
While it’s still debatable at this point whether or not Nakatani Nio was even aware of asexuality when she started the manga, she’s still written Yuu as someone who would fit well under the asexual umbrella (my personal interpretation of her is being demi, someone who needs an emotional connection before sexual/romantic attraction kicks in). By writing Maki as someone who’s experience is undoubtedly there to contrast with Yuu (in a “see, HE’S truly not interested in people but Yuu seems to be growing interested in Touka!” sense), this does mean that Nakatani Nio has definitely written at least one ace character into this yuri romance. Maki’s internal questioning of whether or not Yuu is truly like him is however, I suspect, a signal to the readers that no, Yuu isn’t like Maki and will fall in love with Touka, especially since the next and final chapter of volume 3 has Yuu initiating a kiss with Touka for the first time (although under some duress).
This questioning does make me a bit sad; it would be nice if Yuu truly did already know herself and that she wasn’t “lonely” at the idea of not falling in love. But, at the same time, I’ve been expecting some turn like this since the beginning (since, after all, this series has explicitly been a yuri romance from the beginning and as far as I know Nakatani Nio isn’t ace) so I’m not surprised by it either.