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the first (and probably only, for the sake of length) facet of tamaki’s personality that I want to talk about is how he treats his relationships with other people! this excerpt from the novel’s mezzo-centric chapter sums it up fairly nicely:

tamaki was raised in an orphanage. there are a few important facts to consider about this:

despite having a still-living father, he and his sister (aya) were taken in as wards of the state following the death of their mother. this means that dad yotsuba was either legally denied custody of his children, or he was otherwise somehow absent at the time of mom yotsuba’s death. in other words, tamaki’s mother died when he was very young, and his only other parental figure (his father) was AWOL for one reason or another. the adults in tamaki’s life have a tendency of “failing” him by not being there for him!

tamaki lived in this orphanage from when he was around three years old to sometime after his seventeenth birthday, when he was scouted by takanashi papa and moved into the dorms. this is fourteen years that tamaki spent living in a place that, for all intents and purposes, should not have been his permanent home. fourteen years out of seventeen is a really long time!!!

despite point (2), tamaki’s little sister was adopted at some early point, and so the two of them were separated. although they continued to correspond until aya’s disappearance, the fact stands that a family came to the orphanage, and decided that they’d adopt aya, but not tamaki. whatever the reasons (there are a lot of potential ones! only wanting a girl, the fact that younger children generally have a higher adoption rate, only being able to support one kid, etc.), I think that this, along with his mother’s premature death, gave tamaki major abandonment issues. or at least contributed to them but y’know

basically what I am trying to illustrate with these three points and the above novel excerpt is that tamaki yotsuba has serious trust issues when it comes to his long-term relationships with adults/other people! I’m using the term adults though because being 17歳組 it is kind of hard for other characters to Not Be Adult in relation to tamaki.

tamaki’s M.O. when it comes to interacting with adults is simple: push their buttons all you want and get whatever you can, because they won’t be there forever and once they’re gone they’ll never come back. this makes him seem spoiled and apathetic, but for tamaki it’s actually a learned behaviour resulting from a history of not being able to rely on anyone but himself!

NEXT I want to touch real quick on tamaki’s relationship with specific adults and by specific adults in this case I mean mostly sougo “problematic fave” ousaka. so let’s take a look at why it is tamaki has such a hard time with sougo.

tamaki may seem like he’s more influenced by actions rather than intent, but he’s actually incREDIBLY SENSITIVE to what he perceives as intent!! (sometimes he is incorrect about the person’s intent but it all comes down to how tamaki parses information really!!) what’s important to him isn’t the person’s action, but what he views as their reasons for taking the action! tamaki’s emotional sensitivity is actually very high, so he’s a lot more bothered when he can sense duplicity or anger from someone! sougo is aware of this, but unfortunately, due to his upbringing his personality is one where he tends to be unintentionally strict/harsh on reflex!

I don’t really know what to call this, but tamaki is very fixated on/aware of his position compared to the people around him. in other words he doesn’t like feeling like other people are getting “better” treatment than he is!

I don’t have screenshots because this comes from the main story, but tamaki’s more lax/laissez-faire tendencies are shown as clashing very strongly with sougo’s by the book/strict/stay on top of everything nature!

so the reason for why I’m focusing on these points is because I wanted an excuse to taLK ABOUT THE MOST RECENT MANGA CHAPTER (chapter 10)!!!! hint this is where the promised but also incredibly few pictures come in

ok so the short summary of the chapter is that basically it’s from tamaki’s point of view and describes the events of the kiddie crew (nagi/riku/iori/tamaki from idolish7 & ten from trigger) filming a high school variety drama featuring the five of them as the main characters! which is incredible and amazing but moving on, tamaki goes into the filming with the idea of “we have to all work hard on our own to pull this off”, so the majority of the chapter focuses on tamaki’s efforts to make the filming a success using 100% Kodomo Power

the long summary is that this chapter is so important to tamaki’s character development and I will eat my entire foot

since I addressed this more recently first I wanna talk about how the manga addresses tamaki’s relationship with sougo! you cannot tell me that was a huge subtle point in the chapter because why else would tamaki be reprising slicked back hair a la sougo’s joker flag card

for the better part of the chapter, tamaki’s motivation for getting the group to stick together and do their best is essentially to prove sougo wrong, or to show him that they’re capable of doing things on their own. he goes to huge extents to keep things under control (sometimes to the point where he is kind of going overboard but nobody can say he wasn’t WORKING REALLY HARD AND DOING HIS BEST OK!!!!) (can you tell I’ve been writing this post for like five hours I’m starting to lose it)

I literally only just realised that this was inadvertently a mezzo-centric arc because the suits half was sougo-centric and the school half was tamaki-centric ok moving on

OK THERE IT IS THE ENTIRE REASON I WANTED TO WRITE THIS POST IN THE FIRST PLACE let me compose myself. Okay. at the top of my text wall I talked a bit about tamaki’s 1. tendency to rely on people mercilessly combined with his 2. subconscious distrust of adults! at this point in the chapter, tamaki has pretty much exhausted his brainpower with regards to how to make the filming go smoothly. as a last ditch (LAST DITCH!!) resort, he begins to contemplate calling tsumugi for help to get her advice, but he hesitates!

THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT for a bunch of reasons!! first of all tsumugi is probably one of the first “adults” in tamaki’s life who has shown herself as being willing to pretty much drop everything to be there for him, and she’s been constantly present and largely on his side for all of the time he’s known her. in most other cases tamaki has shown himself as very willing to pretty much go straight to tsumugi for help whenever a problem crops up! but in this case, he’s hesitating, and not only because he’s thinking about how sougo will lecture him, or how he can stick it to sougo.

chapter 10 is about tamaki trying to take on responsibility all by himself, struggling under the weight, and ultimately questioning one of his longstanding life policies of taking advantage of adults and the people around him. remember that this stance of tamaki’s comes from this idea that nothing is permanent and the people around him are going to abandon him eventually, so it might be a bit of a stretch to argue that this page shows how he’s begun to manage to think of everyone in i7 as something permanent in his life, BUT I’M GOING TO MAKE THAT ARGUMENT ANYWAYS

90% of why I’m emotional I will admit is because I’m pretty tamaki-biased, but if we think of tamaki’s apathetic-seeming behaviour from the early story as being a byproduct of his underlying belief that none of these people were going to stick around, I think that the fact that he’s become more and more invested in everything shows that his way of thinking has begun to come around!!

tl;dr my son has found his family and as his mother I could not be more proud