I could give her several absent parents so she could take care of herself, entertain herself, and make it through college, even though her parents apparently didn't support her in any way. Sumire comes from a poor family, where her parents worked and didn't pay much attention to her as people, so she matured early because she had to work herself, which is why she's so hungry for success, to, well, break out of her subsistence level. Sumire looks very much (well, because she is in canon) like a precocious onee-san type girl, so that's what the absent parents are all about. That's why she's like Teru, she seems so mature and smart, and then bam and she turns into a fool because she didn't get enough attention/free time.

Sumire also had an imaginary boyfriend as a child, with a tan and horns, and his name was something like Damian Twilight, lol. Hakubo, twilight, you get the idea. She's just a girl 💅🏻 so she drew him in hearts in her notebooks, lol. Because if you don't take into account their weird Hakusumi situationship, which translates rather strangely into modern, then it's literally it. If Sumire knew Teru since childhood, then at about ten she thought that maybe he was a cool guy, but still not Damian Twilight 😔

I also wonder who Teru even had his first crush on. It depends on who ships what...what's nice to think about and what's not. I just get the feeling that both Terukane and Teru experienced their first bi panic with each other, and Teru, like, any kind of youth panic. I can barely understand the meaning of that line about the girl he likes. I always thought that Teru just politely refused, and not that he really loved someone or that it was Aoi, this is already to some extent just a convenient tie-in of facts.

Well, in my AUs, where don't I want Akane to be an yandere idiot, I don't let him be friends with Aoi since childhood, nor do I let him have crushes on her, lol. So if there are a ton of AUs where he's Aoi-less, then maybe he could really have something first with Teru? Of course Akane has a weird way of forming attachments. Is this just his own thing or the tbhk writing thing, btw, because Sumire, Aoi, Teru, Nene, Hanako, and Tsukasa did the same thing, and if something weird in tbhk is repeated in almost all of them, then it's not their thing, but an Aidairo fetish, and I don't take it seriously, so what? So what could possibly trigger this wild imprinting in Akane? But then I can't imagine him, Aoi-less, having a crush on anyone else as a kid...

Aoi-less Akane really vibes with those who've been tsundere for a long time, like "ugh, your romance 🤢," and then suddenly Teru shows up. Akane probably doesn't like anyone in cartoons, if we think about Damian Twilight again, or he would say "it's male admiration, not experiencing your feelings 🙄". Micro Akane is such a self-important tsundere. 😭 Imagine the joke: he'd be "admiring" some older villain with an aura, and then he turns twenty-five and Natsuhiko is standing right in front of him. Who are you trying to fool, bro?

But Teru have Aoikane and Nene in his tastes...what do they have in common?...the strength of friendship, a bit of abrasiveness, educating others and caring for them...sounds like adventure MCs or that tsundere character who sides with the MC. So Teru is such a normie; he'd like some MC in cartoons. Who likes MCs anyway? It's so obvious, they count on it, and yet somehow it doesn't happen very often. Teru would be kicking his legs and saying, "No, mom, don't change the channel, the magical girls haven't saved the baby yet." So Teru likes good MCs, Akane likes villains, and Sumire likes Ikemen 2015, okay. Lol. Good for them.