Mitsukou Aquarium Date!

I personally love to see the characters in JSHK get pushed to their limits and do horrible things, out of desperation. It's not a rulebook on how to behave irl... 🥺 (I would love for everyone to be happy though)

I have one last thought : Kou forcing Mitsuba was fucked up but clearly Mitsuba doesn't hold it against him at all, so we shouldn't either, and just look at this like the parallel to tsukasa it is + insight on how selfish and desperate Kou gets

For MitsuKou, since Picture Perfect arc, we've had:

Kou offering to kill himself for Mitsuba

Kou ignoring Mitsuba's attempts to help him in turn

Kou wishing that Mitsuba would ask him to kill himself, knowing that Mitsuba had already rejected that offer

Kou force-feeding Mitsuba a heart in direct opposition to Mitsuba's request, in a scene reminiscent of the previous one with Tsukasa

There's a trend here and it's not "friends talking things out and reaching a healthy solution collaboratively."

Something else that's not official canon but does give some really solid insight into AidaIro's view of the MitsuKou relationship is the Phantom of the Opera story, which of course ends with the reveal that Kou poisoned Mitsuba without his knowledge to force him to end his career and come live on Kou's estate.

The series puts a big focus on the relationships between humans and supernaturals and how these relationships always end in tragedy (We’ve already seen how Sumire and No.6 ended up). Hanako accepts that he and Nene can never really be together because of the fact that he’s a supernatural so instead what he really wants is to do everything he can to grant her wish so she can live a long life. On the contrary Kou does not want to accept that he can’t be with Mitsuba, he’s willing to do anything really if it means he can be with Mitsuba. Kou also has the added bonus of being an exorcist so who knows what kind of consequences he’ll have to face once his family finds about his relationship with Mitsuba (or if he becomes a supernatural himself).

Anyways what I’m trying to say is that Mitsuba and Kou’s relationship itself is very good, they should be together because they make each other better and happier but the world is against them and I’m sure they’re still going to have to endure a lot more shit in the future. Will they have a happy ending? Probably not but it’d be nice.

As for the hoto au there’s a few things I’d like to point out that you didn’t mention:

-Kou knew that Mitsuba was unhappy at the opera house because his performances were not as good as they used to be

-In order for Kou to free Mitsuba from Tsukasa he has to poison Mitsuba so he can no longer sing perhaps something similar could happen in the actual series. We know that Tsukasa has Mitsuba’s heart in chains so maybe if Kou wants to free Mitsuba then he’ll have to do something to hurt him

-It is implied that Mitsuba knew that Kou was the one that left him the juice because he was the only one that knew that peach was his favourite