What an absolute masterpiece. I hadn't read this since years ago. It's astonishingly good, nothing like this going on right now.
I miss when all the yuris were red hot and there was just one fantastic piece after another, before COVID. Bloom Into You gives you a lots to think about.
It's a little hard to read about their lives post-high school in the last chapter. And perfect high school romances are bittersweet for people leading real lives that are so much more variable than a storybook.
I know it's supposed to be basically Japanese lesbian empowerment and awareness, the manga, but things end up a bit too perfect for the characters here. The cafe lady has a new floor and more customers (snore), Touko is an actress with constant auditions (everything worked out), Yuu is just on the cusp and getting job mail, must be great (free tentacle semi-porn and job offers are the best), the writer girl is getting her book published (snooooore) and Saeki's life is working out fine. It's a bit too "bright sunshine on the horizon" for me. Not realistic at all.
So, I think I kind of cringe at how unrealistic the ending is. It's also weird that Yuu won't move in with Touko because she's afraid to tell her mom. She wouldn't already know? Odd.
Like all Japanese manga, but especially here, the last chapter is heavily nostalgic and romantic. "We're as together (not married but kind of married?) as we can be", and everything is working out fine, and they visit their old high school, and everyone is doing great. It just doesn't feel like real life at all.
I get that this isn't the point of this manga, it's supposed to be about happy lesbians having a happy normal life like other regular people. After all, gay marriage isn't really legal in Japan because of the heavily senior population. But this last chapter, while beautiful, is highly cringey on the Japanese high-school romantic side.
Career? Great! Relationships? Great! Rent? Wonderful! Mental state? Perfect! It's just a bit, c'mon, ew. Bloom was always a bit of the 'too perfect for normal life manga'.
Also a bit unrealistic that Yuu scores basically a 20 on the hotness meter in girlfriend Touko. That's just kind of...a girl like that would probably find a wealthy husband in three seconds in modern Tokyo and be very happy likely, or have an arranged marriage through her family. She's too good of a catch. It seems unrealistic in modern Japanese terms.
It really does all seem like the perfection yuri manga, the attained dream, the rosy horizon waxing totally nostalgic, hazy red-pink-yellow sunsets of forgotten days.
It's ironic that people enjoy high school in Japanese manga when it's the worst time in anyone's life in my country. I just can't ever get over the way "everything perfect happens" in high-school in a Japanese manga. Just, ugh, you know? Haha. It makes you feel bad that you didn't have the perfect high school life for those four years. Japan makes it seem like Japanese high school is like ascending to heaven, and then the perfect working life, etc.
In modern wealth inequality it doesn't seem realistic, but they still punch out these hippy-drippy romantic endings over there. It seems to be an impulse they can't get away from, every story has this perfect end of the rainbow feel.
It kind of makes me want something a little more realistic, like Octave.
Like, don't get me wrong, this is a masterpiece of astonishing quality, well-drawn, well-written, with an incredible story, but it's lesbian wish fulfillment. It was always the most unrealistic yuri in existence. Yuu is a dumpy high school girl one day, getting hit on by basically a genius super model most popular top of their class girl in school the next and helping her fix her poor character through a high school play.
Don't get me wrong, I love it, but it's hella' unrealistic and the bittersweet nostalgia makes me want to puke a bit. I love it, it's one of the most well-drawn, written manga of all-time and especially recently, but damn, I find many other mangas WAY more realistic in how they portray human emotion, the real world, love, romance and everything else.
It's kind of the perfect lesbian high school tale, which we needed, but I kind of want to see the more true-to-life darker side of this fictional world now. And the lesbian always gets hooked up with the most attractive girl in class, sort of like Fragtime. It's the opposite of hetero male harems. Same attractive harem, just a different sex.
Citrus is like this, Mei is super attractive on the ten-scale, while Aoi Hana was way more realistic and Girlfriends was equal attractiveness. Whispered Words on the other hand is very realistic.
This is all kind of why you can't rank this series very high because it just doesn't feel like the real world, all while being a truly excellent piece of fiction. It doesn't totally ring true like it could happen in real life so I was always kind of blah about it.
IMO, while the ending tries to give you everything you ever wanted, I'm not sure the author really stuck the landing. They were kind of a note off here, sort of crude in short. An impressive series but things go so well that it seems like a romantic fantasy than a crucial real life story.
A masterpiece for character movement, intrigue etc. But short of being something anyone could relate to, take seriously or hope to achieve. It's just too much teen fantasy.
I still give it a ten regardless because it's Bloom Into You, but I don't know that I'd have it in the top ten yuris of all time for the simple reason it exists in a bubble universe. It's too pretty and too perfect in the end, I also could've used more development of Saeki-senpai and wonder what she's doing to this day. |