The structure of Otherside Picnic 10 is almost like a parlor trick. Each of the three segments are basically about different ways that ghost stories reach out to touch their audience. File 30 has Kasumi turn to camera and communicate directly with the audience, calling back to self-responsibility type stories. File 31 narrates the discussion of the rinfone in such a way that mirrors the hypnotic induction of the puzzle itself. File 32 has the steadily building tension of Sorawo and Toriko discussing their genre-savviness before their curiosity brings them to one of the common pitfalls. Part of this, I think, is to illustrate that while there is a core theme of wanting to understand the inexplicable, that interest doesn't always manifest in the same ways.
Which is a neat parallel to the story's aroace take on relationships—while there is fundamentally some form of attraction at the heart of any relationship, the basis of that attraction comes on a case-by-case basis. Yet the romance genre, in taking amatonormativity and elevator relationships as the baseline, comes with invisible assumptions of how a relationship should look and progress. To put it in ghost story terms, it is like thinking that stories about haunted houses are the only thing that will resonate with horror audiences. Otherside Picnic 10, in showing us the diversity of ghost story formats, is gently nudging us to consider other ways that relationships might work.
Sorawo has spent much of the last three volumes wondering about what she wants specifically from a relationship with Toriko. We know she rejects "romance", but is unable to articulate the basis of her attraction outside of that term. It scares her that she can't. She doesn't want to force an interpretation onto it, but is frustrated that other people can and will.
I think it also leads to this idea of queer immiscibility, that existing outside of existing frameworks will slowly push you into or out of the mainstream. If a queer relationship/identity can be squeezed into something the cishets understand, it becomes "romance"; if not, it becomes a source of terror. Sorawo's attempts to define her own unique relationship mirrors the way she straddles the immiscible worlds of the surface and Otherside. She can describe it as "romance" and continue existing in the surface world, or have it become a source of terror that permanently pulls them into the Otherside's depths.
