#taitouma

ready to love (your choice, 2021) / taitouma (blue flag, 2017)

note: i forgot to post this i’m clowning so hard rn anyway i made a separate post bc long but uh enjoy

@waywardfacegarden

OH MY GOD YOURE AMAZING YOU LITERALLY WROTE AN ESSAY ANBDABSHSHASAKKQ. never apologize for writing something so in-depth and passionate!! i really loved hearing your take on it all and like wow there were a lot of good points.

(also sorry if i get any of this wrong it’s been a hot minute since i read the manga lol)

uh but basically when i first read the last few chapters i was literally so shocked like NSJSJSAJSSM I REALLY WASNT EXPECTING ANY ACTUAL LGBT+ RELATIONSHIPS FROM THIS SHONEN JUMP MANGA BUT NO. they de👏🏻li👏🏻vered👏🏻. i was one of those people who thought the ending was kinda rushed but i think part of the reason for that was because i literally zoomed through the last chapter when i heard about the taichi/touma endgame LMAO. but also i felt like the transition was just very sudden. i’m generally pretty neutral towards timeskips because, while realistically the most important events in your life do not all happen in one year, story-wise it leaves a lot unsaid and often feels like an excuse for when the author doesn’t really know how to transition one event to the other smoothly. (this is not the case with all time-skips but it does often happen when a story is rushed to a sudden conclusion.)

i do agree that taichi and futaba breaking up was realistic! okay, but when i read “i broke up with futaba” i was actually shocked, haha. i was just thinking “what? they were doing so well though??”. but after a while i kinda just accepted it. i mean, that’s what happens. you aren’t always going to end up spending the rest of your life with your high school sweetheart and that doesn’t mean that something horrible happened between the two of you. break ups happen for a lot of different reasons. maybe it just isn’t the right time or you’re just heading in different directions.

one of the core aspects of the story for me was platonic vs. romantic love and how a lot of characters outside the main trio would push the idea of romantic love being more important than platonic love on taichi and how he felt he had to choose to either keep his best friend or his crush. it felt kinda contradictory for the story to go “lmao well you see the solution is to just marry your best friend” lol. when put under the context of what you saw as the main theme though (as in make decisions that will make you happy in the moment) the ending makes a lot more sense.

i think the contradiction of this theme i had set for the story (which had made me so invested in it) was what tipped me off about the ending for the most part. there is also the fact that the story spent so long on convincing the audience that taichi did not reciprocate touma’s feelings. many of the major conflicts in the later half of the story rooted from touma’s one-sided love. even though taichi did love touma very much, he still could not just lie to him to make him feel better. that’s just not the type of person he was or is. (okay, but taichi totally had a crush on him when they were kids though i will not even try to argue with that LMAOAOAO.) some romantic development between the two would have been nice, like literally just three panels of taichi slowly becoming more fond of touma would have been enough lol. i do understand that it was probably difficult as hell to even have a taitouma endgame (i mean touma’s face wasn’t even shown for the entirety of the last chapter like mm censorship is fun). the fact that they were even allowed to show taichi and touma being married is so. significant. thank you, wow. but i am still allowed to give “what if”s and such.

overall, i think i had my expectations for ao no flag way too low while reading it which is why the ending caught me off guard. if i re-read it today i think i’d be able to appreciate it a lot more but the stuff i wrote above is pretty much the thought process i had directly after reading the ending lol.

(btw you can call me galaxy/hayes/lila/audrey or like all of the above lmao!! i don’t really have a preference :0)

ready to love (your choice, 2021) / taitouma (blue flag, 2017)