#but still... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mari-lair · 9 months

Text

That’s a lot of questions, but I’ll try my best to answer them all!

Aoi doesn’t care about an individual perception of her, she genuinely has no interest in a stranger because she always assumes they have bad intentions. They want to hurt her: It does not matter if they are jealous or worship the ground she walks on, they they will hurt her. Which is a sad way to view the world, so she defends herself.

Her attitude is a big wall that says “If I don’t care about you or your opinion, you can’t hurt me”.

She detaches herself from it all, preferring apathy over being vulnerable and opening herself to be hurt. This lack of confrontation, this apparent lack of care (she doesn’t seem to ask even simple things most kids would in her situation “Why are you bullying me?”) makes her feel arrogant, which feeds into people’s bad view of her and prove her trust issues right, which gives her more reasons to believe she is right and became more arrogant.

Akane was always there to stop anyone from going too far when messing with her, so she can look down on others even when they got aggressive without fearing for her health. She can’t be hurt emotionally in her indifference, and she doesn’t care about physical injuries, not when the most she’ll get with Akane around to protect her is a scratch.

So she keeps this up to the point Akane genuinely starts believing she is a tough girl that doesn’t care when people are mean to her.

But she does.

She just pushes it all away, and pretends she is above it all. Growing genuine in her arrogance after training herself to not care all the time, convinced the way the world sees her doesn’t matter, because they don’t matter.

Aoi can’t use this defense when she already cares about someone, but she still naturally assumes the worst of people when it comes to how they view her, so something as small as a petty fight with someone whose views she deeply values can be extremely hurtful.

She is scared.

“Akane hates me, he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, he never liked me in the first place!"

She is also visibly angry: She hates that she cares, she hates that she can’t hide it. Notice how she doesn’t say anything or try to run after Akane. She is trying very hard to convince herself she “Doesn’t care”, she wants so badly to ignore Akane, or to hate him, but she can’t do either, so she defaults to being angry at herself.

The reason Akane finds her crying so cute is not because the tears look cute, is because it shows how much she cares about him. Under all that bravado and arrogance Aoi is a sensitive girl who wants to be loved, and she is very attached to the people she considers friends, she can act tough all she wants but if a loved one says "I hate you" she is so distressed she cries.

Aoi hates how sweet and 'weak' her heart under all her icy defenses. Akane finds it cute.

Akane was her only friend for most of her life, so the person she pays the most attention to, and the one she compares herself to the most is Akane.

Akane is the direct opposite of her: People are unfair to Aoi and she react by closing her heart so no one can hurt her. People are unfair to Akane, making him do annoying work without giving him anything in return, and he reacts by loudly acknowledging people are being unfair instead of bottling up any discomfort, and trying his best anyways instead of running away, keeping his heart open and wearing his emotions and feelings on his sleeves.

Akane doesn’t care about others opinion of him, he’ll swing his bat like a crazy person at school and be rude as fuck to people he just met, but he help other because he wants to help, he is a nice person.

In comparison to Akane, Aoi feels selfish, cruel, and cold. She only ever cares and worries about her close friends because their opinions matter to her.

Akane is someone even she, with all her walls, can’t help but love. And since she is the oppose of him... Is easy to come to the conclusion she is unlovable. She may not care about a stranger calling her a slut, but she can see people don’t like her. Again and again, people always find some problem with her.

She hates herself too, so she is convinced even the people that claim they love her don’t care about her, they just love the sweet personality they come up with after seeing her pretty face, and they’ll hate her when they realize there is more to her than a cutesy smile.

She is unlovable by design, so she assumes the only reason her friends don’t hate her yet, is because they don’t know her true self.

The “cute, sweet, and friendly, popular girl with a pretty face!” is loved. She is Nene’s best friend, the girl all the guys want and all the girls envy.

But Aoi? The arrogant and distant coward that is scared of caring too much? She isn’t loved by anyone. She is sure she will be rejected if she act honest, so she doesn’t even try.

Her life was never a “perfect life”.

Aoi is either by Nene's or Akane’s side. She isn’t close to anyone else.

The manga is in Nene’s point of view so her situation is narrated through rose tinted glasses: Nene lives in a fantasy world where Aoi’s life is perfect since being popular is Nene’s dream, so Aoi’s popular life must be amazing! Right?

Nene can’t break this view. Even when the truth stares her in the face. She does not change her view.

Aoi was a wreck when she tried to apologize, but she does regret trying to kill Nene, she wants to apologize, so she tries her best to get out of her comfort zone and face her biggest fears for Nene: She is willing to have a confrontation instead of hiding

Instead of asking Aoi how she feel, or making any questions about her behavior, Nene immediately dismissed all of Aoi’s actions. Nene doesn’t want to deal with Aoi’s problems, she just wants her popular bubbly friend back.

Their hug in chapter 96 means Nene embraced the “popular girl bff with a pretty face” and rejected Aoi.

Aoi is hurt by this, but she is a coward, so she accepts it, pretending nothing happened. (I go into more detail about Nene’s views, and why Aoi doesn’t open up: Here.)

Despite all her flaws, Aoi is not nearly as bad as she sees herself as, she is mostly insecure, desperate to be loved even when she feel like she doesn’t particularly deserve it.

She is harsh on herself, wanting to keep all her emotions under tight control, but she is sweet to her friends, she genuinely loves them and tries to fight her bad habits. She wants them to be happy!

She’ll get invested in topics she doesn’t personally care about, because she knows Nene likes it, and worry about Akane’s health for the simple reason that she cares, she wants the best for them.

Her sweet side clashes with her bad habit to always assume the worst.

Despite being a sweet girl at heart, caring about others is still very painful. It does not come easy for Aoi, who has trained herself to be isolated from her peers.

She wants her friends to look at her, she wants to be important and be reassured she is loved! But even when she is shown love, she doesn’t believe in it

She convinced herself they don’t care about her, just like all these strangers don’t care about her. And she is arrogant enough to believe she is always right, so if she can’t see this ‘wonderful girl’ Akane sees, it just means Akane is the wrong one. That this isn’t her insecurities talking, Akane is the one lying, he is the one that doesn’t truly love her.

Aoi believes she has misled him just like she had misled Nene, and she wants to talk about it, she wants to be honest, she is so tired of hiding her flaws! But she is too scared to risk losing the love she is given so she will keep hiding, she’ll keep lying to herself that it doesn’t matter, as she has done since she was a small child.

All the things that she claims to hate about Akane, the things that make her feel envious, and lacking in comparison, are also what she wishes she had, things she genuinely admires about him. Things that make him so special and “easy to love” in her eyes.

The idea Akane isn’t lovable does not compute to her. She never says “he is not my type” even when she is neck deep in denial because to Aoi, only an idiot wouldn’t see how lovable Akane is, and Aoi is too arrogant to lower herself to the level of an idiot.

She adores him so much that even when she believes the “cute humble and popular Aoi” is the only Aoi he’ll ever love, she can’t let go. She keeps him at arm's length to not get too attached, but she can’t bring herself to truly run away, to reject him point blank.

She wants him after all, when we get a glimpse of her alone with her defenses down, she melts just from watching him work hard.

She wants them to be closer (unrelated but I can’t get over how she went “watching Akane from my window isn’t enough, let me lean on my balcony, so we are closer.”)

She wants them to be side by side. She wants to accept his confessions. But she is too scared to admit even to herself that she is smitten.

Opening up is hard for her after all, and admitting he cares about him so much? That’s terrifying.

So she runs.

Because if Akane gets too close he might see her flaws, and if her “unlovable self” make him stop loving her, if her flaws make him leave her, she will crumble.

When her usual defense of “I don’t care, you can’t hurt me!” isn’t effective, her second one is to distance herself from what is hurting her so she has some ‘control’ of the situation.

The drug no.6 gave her may have lowered her empathy, but “discarding people so they can’t hurt her” and “running far far away” has always been an itch she had. She always dismisses any stranger from her life, because she doesn't need them. She always runs away when she is hurt.

Is a desire born from the ugliest, most selfish, and insecure parts of her heart, something her kinder and friendlier side never allowed her to act on. But it is a part of her, the one she hates: this is the “unlovable Aoi” to the extreme, fully out.

Is a part she constantly tries to hide, but is always there, as important to her character as her kindness. A part of her that is resentful of the world and wants to stop caring altogether, to hide and hide forever, make it so only she can hurt herself.

She assumes if Nene asks Akane out he’ll accept, despite how much Akane only focuses on her, so she spends a week without going to school to spare herself the pain.

She accepts Akane “have been lying and secretly still likes Lemon” right away because of a silly ghost game, going straight into depressive mode and running away from the pain.

She genuinely wants Akane to be happy, and while she wants him to be happy with her, she hates her possessive nature, using her usual defense mechanism and trying to convince herself she doesn’t care about him, that he is disposable.

She doesn’t want to hurt anyone but she is arrogant, so she doesn’t protest or do anything to show she likes Akane (even when its obvious), going “I hope you’re happy” and running before she says what she really wants and ‘ruin their fun’ and ‘give her feelings away’.

She wants control over the situation: To leave before others ‘inevitably’ leave her. And Akane knows.

But he genuinely like her for who she is, he know how sensitive she is under her smile, so he always run after her to calm her down.

Akane is her biggest weakness and Aoi despises feeling weak and out of control. So her crush on him is a two edge sword.

She genuinely believed Akane doesn’t love her real self, but she also used it as an excuse to have control over her crush, to justify her lack of courage to pursue a relationship.

She is still the same scared kid that cried when Akane said he hates her and got mad at herself for crying about it.

She is too arrogant to admit Akane has control over her feelings even when her composure is shattered.

Part of her genuinely doesn’t want to care, she wants to raise her walls and keep Akane away so he can’t hurt her! That is why she stabbed him and tried to throw him away in the first place.

She tries so hard to use her usual “I don’t care about you, so your opinion can’t hurt me” strategy with him, it's frustrating that it doesn’t work.

She is a flustered mess by the point Akane start gushing about a flaw she hates so much and makes her life difficult.

The reason she is uncomfortable with Akane is because she is uncomfortable when she can’t control her emotions. And Akane? He could make her blush even when his approach was so tactless she dissociated from his shower of neverending compliments, so this assertive approach, practically forcing Aoi to accept that he likes her for who she is and that she can’t run away from his love no matter how hard she tries, it’s as much of a dream (she always wanted to be loved fully) as it is a nightmare (he is too direct! He does not give this poor coward a break!!).

He doesn’t allow her any escape. He is taking her far far away from her comfort zone. Her panic is completely and utterly genuine. Help her cause she does not know what to do.

She isn’t able to give him a verbal answer when Akane asks “Do you like me, even just a little bit?” but Akane never expected an answer.

He only acted so bold in the first place (holding her and kissing her neck) because at this point, he already knows she loves him.

Aoi doesn’t deny his claim, she doesn’t use meaningless excuses like “We can’t marry because that would make me Aoi Aoi” , she just... cling to him, holding on.

Only after she hugs him back (which is a silent “I love you too” in this context) does Akane go for the kiss.

Let's compare when Akane tries to kiss her to a similar scene where she is genuinely uncomfortable so I can show you she is more nervous and flustered by his advances than truly scared or uneasy.

In chapter 24 Hanako possessed Nene and tried to ‘seduce’ Aoi. Aoi had no idea supernaturals exist at the time, and she even goes “Nene-chan...?” to show she fully believes this is Nene, not some ghost possessing her friend.

There is a lot of focus on Nene’s reaction, an attempt to make it comedic, but Aoi is extremely uncomfortable with this forceful behavior.

Aoi likes Nene, Nene is one of the two people she considers a friend, but she hated this: She is sweating, there isn’t even a hint of blush on her face, and she keep her hands far away, having her back on a wall. She likes to hold hands with Nene, comfortable being touchy with her friend, but in this situation, her instinct is to lean away. She doesn’t want it. She is uneasy.

Now let's go back to chapter 69. There are a lot of similarities, both Hanako (who she assume is Nene) and Akane hold her chin before trying to kiss her and both have her backed into a wall. Akane should arguably be worst cause she hasn’t been touchy with him in years while she is constantly holding Nene’s hand, but not only does Aoi blush, she doesn’t try to run from her feelings like usual, she reaches for him, holding on to his jacket.

She isn’t confident, she is sweating and shocked, (which makes sense considering how chaotic her night have been) but there is light in her eyes: She is scared, but she wants to kiss him too.

She have craved to be closer to Akane for ages but this talk didn’t magically heal her issues, no matter how much she dislikes this part of her, she is still an arrogant coward at heart: This kiss is hard for her. Any sort of intimacy is. It goes agaist her instinct to hide and sabotage herself.

That’s why she always blushes hard and gets extremely nervous with Akane when he gets too close. Even when what he is doing isn’t forceful, it feels overwhelming to Aoi.

She needs to hold back the urge to run. She needs to fight the urge to think about the worst and trust him, allow Akane to have sway over her emotions.

She still have a long way to go, and I’m rooting for her.

#tbhk #toilet bound hanako kun #jshk #jibaku shonen hanako kun #aoi akane #akane aoi #nene yashiro #aoiaoi #aoikane #I think i trimmed down enough to take away the 'read more' actually #but still...#long post #i hope this helped cherrynene i swear i did my best #character analysis

259 notes · View notes