#fawnfare

them labeling it as youth horror instead of romance is not an attempt to downplay the queer elements, but to specifically express an aspect of queerness that is often overlooked -- one that is all too familiar to aro/ace individuals. calling it a romance would simply give people the wrong idea of what to expect from the characters and story.

i don't think i've ever seen any author outside of fandom spaces explicitly try to portray this gray area of not-platonic-not-romantic queer love, and as an aroace queer person myself, it really means the world. usually this kind of "representation" comes from the typical yaois i ship -- "best friend" pairs who cross lines and are speculated by fans to be queer but are never confirmed in any way by the authors or story, leaving it open for this aroace-brand queer interpretation.

since the anime came out, i've seen a lot of discourse about the differing feelings of original hikaru and ヒカル (and treating them as two completely different ships), and although obviously a big theme of the manga is that ヒカル is not hikaru and that's important for yoshiki to understand in order to move on from hikaru's death, he also... isn't that separate after all.

the ヒカル we know would not exist in this form without the original hikaru's wish for someone to stay by yoshiki's side. hikaru poured all of his love for yoshiki into the entity that became ヒカル, and he was reborn with all those feelings, along with his memories and base personality. yes, ヒカル has his own feelings, but they're born of and built from the feelings of the original hikaru, and i think that's so beautiful...