Names hold important significance to one's person, even more so if you're a character written by Riyoko Ikeda, living your worst life in high school (Manga centered analysis unless stated otherwhise).
What I want to focus on specifically is the repeated presence of "Ko" in most of the girl's names. Nanako, Mariko, Fukiko and Tomoko. The Kanji used to represent the sound "Ko" it's the same for all the names: 子, meaning Child. One could argue that, it's a common ending for names in Japanese, especially feminine ones, but things change when we shine the light on the fact that, among the main cast, the only ones lacking 子 in their names are Asaka Rei and Orihara Kaoru.
As we know, Oniisama e focuses on the feeling of disenchantment that comes from stepping into the harsh reality of the adult world, the inevitability of growing up, the necessity of having to leave the past behind you.
Rei and Kaoru are the two characters who were basically forced to grow up. They know of all the emotions linked to becoming an adult: love, rage, hatred, sorrow and so on. They have already experienced suffering, they are aware of death's presence looming oved everyone's life, and both feel it drawing close, even if the the reasons for that closeness are diametrically opposite.
Kaoru is easier to understand and analyze. Because of her illness she has learned of death and yet she decides to move forward and grow up. Her friendship with Rei has thought her patience, care and bisexuality, her relationship with Henmi has thought her love, selflessness, the concept of letting go. The experiences she has had give her the chance to be an emotional support for Mariko and Nanako and her maturity in this regard too are part of why she is so universally loved.
Let's move onto Rei now. Whilst she is surely still stuck in the past, and unwilling to let it go for most part of the manga, she still lives and experiences adult-aligned emotions, parallel to the ones Kaoru herself goes through. Fukiko teaches her Love, Selflessness, Hatred, the concept of being stuck. Both Rei and Kaoru are extremely lonely characters, part of their friendship is linked to that exact loneliness and consequential pain it derives, along with their attempt to understand each others' respective ailments (cut to Kaoru's roughly translated quote "No one can trully understand someone else's suffering but if their heart is in the right place they can try to"). While they both understand suffering, one glances away from it, the other embraces it in order to dampen it, different approach same fundament. Same undestanding of its core and same maturity in that regard.
Nanako, Mariko and Tomoko are clear examples of young girls that just need to grow up. Tomoko isn't broadly explored in the manga so I will mostly ignore her for this analysis, but it is still clear how childish she is, even if we just as much glance at her reaction to Nanako not being able to maintain her promise over the cake they were supposed to bake. Nanako, on her account, embodies the figure of the pure innocent doll, completely unaware of a broad cathegory of sentiments, mostly negative, that the students all around her feel and occasionally inflict their whiplash on others. Mariko is forced to be more mature by the looming presence of a powerful sexually charged figure in her life. But the way she deals with sentiments is still childish. This is both seen in the way she experiences and displays her love for Kaoru and her obsessive affection she feels towards Nanako and the need to keep her just to herself.
Fukiko is the trickiest one of all, reason why I kept her for last. At first glance, she might appear to be one of the "Grown ups". Her prideful persona and heavy influence inside Seiran's hierarchical system seemingly hinting at her being able to shoulder the weight of responsability with her characteristic grace. In addition to that, she is shown to feel love either for Rei or Henmi, Sorrow for Rei's death, Hatred for the menace that Nanako represents in her feelings towards said Henmi. To put it crudely: it's all a big temper tantrum of a rich girl who has always had everything she desired served on a silver platter. Her pride is nothing more than the manifestation of her life as a rich spoiled girl. The fact that Rei adores it so, can be traced back to the same reason she enjoys Nanako's character, it's childish, pure, true. The main difference between the two is that Nanako was thought to share toys in preschool, while Fukiko owned said preschool. The sentiment of "love" she feels it's shallow, and childish. The one towards Henmi is never truly explored in the manga, it's a faint crush she has that she has learned to obsess over because it is her right to own it. Even in the animated serie, where her crush on him is further explored, we are shown that she had been deeply fascinated by him as a kid and the lingering, current obsession she has basically stems from her inability to move on from the fact that he failed to show up for her x birthday (the talk about comphet and allegories for lesbianism postponed to a future post). The same modus operandi applies to Rei. She is her doll. She decides how to play with her, break her and toy with her feelings (once again, this is further explored in the anime and packaged to us under the glass figurines metaphore). Only she gets to own her. The way she establishes such ownership it's through the golden bracelet and the way she imposes Rei's role it's through le puopée (which, in turn, further chains Rei to the useless chase of an unbreakable, eternal purity and innocence). Even her sorrow, at this point, feels more akin to a temper tantrum than to true sadness or even remorse. She cries once when Rei dies, then she disappears from the narrative completely.
She is an incredibly well disguised character, one that amost disguises herself on purpose because it's in her blood to do so. To appear better, more graceful, older.
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