#anime interpretation

I’ve been thinking about "The summer Hikaru died"....

and how the whole story kind of shifts depending on perspective.

So, the thing is..

At the beginning

Hikaru dies in a really symbolic way. He’s looking at this tree shaped like a woman’s body, and then he slips.

And I can’t stop reading that as something deeper, like the moment he “lets go” of his straightness.

Almost like his heterosexual identity literally dies with him in that moment.

After that...

The new Hikaru appears

And from Yoshiki’s perspective, everything changes.

Yoshiki immediately sees this new Hikaru as something monstrous.

Not just different, but wrong, disturbing, almost inhuman.

And that framing is really important, because we’re stuck inside Yoshiki’s head the whole time. So we don’t see Hikaru “as he is,” we see him as Yoshiki feels him.

And that’s where the internalized homophobia becomes so clear.

The new Hikaru is actually not rejecting himself.

He seems aware of his feelings, even comfortable in them in a quiet way. But Yoshiki interprets everything through discomfort and fear.

So every interaction becomes distorted.

There are those moments, like the “so gross, so gross, so good, so good” scene-- where Hikaru’s touch or presence is framed as something almost bodily and overwhelming.

And Yoshiki reacts like a kid who doesn’t know what to do with emotions he doesn’t understand yet.

The monster imagery really builds this up too.

Hikaru is shown in this weird, distorted way, long, unsettling shapes, almost bodily horror-like features. Even things like raw chicken are used to create that sense of disgust.

It’s not random, it reflects Yoshiki’s internal reaction. It’s literally his perception made visual.

So the “monster” isn’t really Hikaru.

It’s Yoshiki’s fear.

And over time, something slowly changes.

The monster stops feeling as scary.

The imagery becomes less overwhelming. Yoshiki starts to sit with it instead of instantly rejecting it. (Where he also got that "mark" on his wrist-- it's indicating that he's slowly accepting the new "Hikaru" and slowly starting to be a part of it...)

And by the end....

when Yoshiki says something like “then I will be part of you,” it feels like acceptance.

Like he’s no longer fully separating himself from Hikaru, or in this case from what Hikaru represents.

He's accepting. Not just of Hikaru, but of the fact that he himself isn’t as “fully straight” or as fixed as he once thought.

So the whole story becomes less about a literal monster…

and more about how Yoshiki sees desire, identity, and his best friend that came back and never fully turned "normal"...

What do you y'all think...??