Question about Teppu’s end
poketin replied to your post “I’ve seen two people now in the last day or so who seem to have…”
ooo, im really curious about this! is it okay if i ask you to elaborate? (i dont remember much about the ending but im super curious about what others think of it!!)
I’ll try to answer this somewhat briefly, but first and foremost please don’t read this if you haven’t read Teppu yet! I don’t want to be giving anything away to future readers. Also, of course, if you enjoyed reading Teppu and it’s been a while since then, why not reread it! (Lord knows I have plenty of times)
Okay. So, in the chapter leading up to the ending, Natsuo spends a lot of time thinking about the things she did and said to both her brother and Sanae (the high school karate champion). We saw that Natsuo’s brother started resenting her from an early age because he couldn’t live up to both her and his own expectations and was being bulled. When she got older she started becoming strong and protected him from bullies, and he lashed out at her again. Then she went at beat up Sanae, who had beaten him when they were all younger and he was still trying to do karate.
After protecting her brother she asked him if he was okay, and after beating up Sanae she yelled “Eat that, bitch” at her. Her relationships with both of them were ruined. The climax of the story is essentially Natsuo realizing that she should have reversed what she had said at these moments. Sanae didn’t actually do anything wrong, while her brother was the one who deserved to be told to eat if for taking his anger over his inadequacy out on his sister. Natsuo losing the final match was her proof that her brother was wrong. She couldn’t just do anything she wanted with her amazing talent, since she lost to someone who got to where they were with hard work. Natsuo’s final “Take that, bitch” to her brother when she finally lost was her saying, “See? I’m talented and I worked hard and I still lost. You? You just gave up and stopped even trying.”
Anyway, the specific part that I’ve seen people apparently misunderstand is in the final chapter, when Natsuo gets home. There’s a sequence where her brother comes out of him room, they watch a movie together, and they’re happy. It never happened though. We see Natsuo in a change of clothes in this scene, but then we see her sleeping on the couch in the same clothes she was wearing when she got there. I’ve seen a few people who have expressed annoyance over this weird, sudden, and unrealistic resolution between them, but again it didn’t actually happen. Personally, I’m fine with Natsuo still wanting to be close to her brother again and having that dream. The important thing to me and the main point of her development was that she finally stopped blaming herself for her brother’s misery and life as an angry shut-in. And at the same time what did happen with her brother is that he at least spoke to Natsuo (”I saw your match”), and came out of his room to talk to their mom, indicating that he’s making progress of his own and starting to realize that he’s been wrong in how he’d been acting this whole time and wants to change it.
At the end Natsuo still wants to beat up Yuzuko in her weird, high-key romantic, sadomasochistic way. She’s still has a shitty personality. And you know what? I like that. One of the amazing things about Teppu is that it treats women as complex, multi-dimensional characters who aren’t bound by societal expectations that they be nice, be pretty, cater to the wants and needs of others, care about what boys think or anything else like that. They exist and act for themselves. And Natsuo? She’s a got a shitty personality. That’s who she is. But now she’s just a bit less of a jerk who doesn’t seem to be harboring the same sense of constant unhappiness and resentment that she had at the start of the manga that was so wrapped up in the damage that her brother did to her. She’s growing and moving forward and actually coming into her own, shitty personality and all. Teppu may have been cut short, but there is still a lot that I found interesting and enjoyable about the ending that we did get
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