#HikaAi

[yuseirra]

A farewell

they had two beautiful children together so.. they can cuddle and all

what I can't fully predict is what Ai would react towards him. That's something canon should give out but.. I have no idea if they will. For the time being I think it'd be a mix of Kana and Akane's reaction towards Aqua, something in between the two but who knows

I wish the writers would have some pity on him because his life was horrible...; He never had a chance to be happy even while having started out as a really good person; I still trust there is a reason why he's written this way but still, I find they handled him pretty cruel.

[deathberi]

HOSHINO RUBY... YOU'VE GROWN TO BE A REAL BEAUTY. I'D EXPECT NO LESS... SINCE SHE'S OUR CHILD.

[aihoshiino]

the anime has been doing a lot of interesting, anime-original work to build up to both the HKAI dynamic in general and Hikaru himself specifically and this visualization of them in S2E10 is probably the most fascinating so far.

on a first/unspoiled viewing, it reflects Aqua (& Akane's) interpretation of Ai as a victim of a catastrophe, unwittingly consumed and torn apart by a monstrous inhuman force that invaded her life.

But with the knowledge of how that relationship actually played out, several details come into much sharper focus - Ai's total absence of fear or hesitation and the tenderness with which she embraces what looks to the viewer to be a terrifying monster. It is, abstracted into pure visual symbolism, the reality of the HKAI dynamic - someone warped into monstrousness by self loathing and drawn to Ai's radiance, who takes in that pain and, through her compassion, purifies it into uncompromising love.

[insertname099]

[oshinohoshi]

Regarding Hikaru's culpability in Ai's death

The question of whether Hikaru meant to hurt Ai is still up in the air but in this post I'm going to make an extremely messy argument that Hikaru loved Ai and didn't mean to kill her!

Above: Hikaru said Ai had selfish and cruel sides (more like extremely avoidant tendencies but I digress) but there's no menace to his tone. He believed it was only natural for her to leave him.

I will say that Hikaru's below statement from ch 160 is pretty weird, especially after just learning that Ai loved him. Is that how he saw Ai? As a woman who deceived him and tried to make him obey her?

It does kind of align with the below Fatal lyrics which I can't see as anything other than a Hikaru song:

You have given me a fatal flaw Selfish giant star, ruined lives

I think both things can be true. He didn't hate Ai. He loved her more than anything. But he was bitter because he thought she didn't care about him.

He created a warped view of their relationship in which he was never loved or needed. But that bitterness, even anger at times, never appears to have devolved into murderous intent. Not when he was still so soft on her despite some of his more accusatory statements.

OK you're saying he didn't mean to kill her. But what about this?

I don't know, man. I just don't know. It's so antithetical to everything we know about him. It's one thing to lash out in a moment of pain but a slow burn manipulation like this requires intention. There's two explanations I can come up with.

He was twisting the screws for another reason. Maybe he wanted to exert control because he felt so powerless over the situation with Ai. Or perhaps he wanted a fellow Ai fanatic. Someone who would understand her significance.

Aqua is wrong.

But why did he change his story from stating he wanted Ryosuke to scare Ai (you fucking idiot, Hikaru) to just giving her a bouquet?

I'm a bit stumped here too. This guy is supposedly a master manipulator yet he couldn't keep his story straight?

Perhaps both of these were his motives but I don't know why he didn't say that from the start. I just don't think this is proof that he lied because it's not hard to keep such a basic story straight.

The best explanation I can come up with is that he told Ryosuke the address in a fit of anger and despair. He thought Ryosuke would scare her. He then gave him the bouquet. It was an "I love you/I want you to feel my pain" message for Ai.

OK, but if Aqua was right about Hikaru manipulating Ryosuke, then he knew Ryosuke was an Ai fanatic who could go off the rails in an instant. Especially if he learned that Ryosuke killed Gorou. And anyway, what the hell did he think he was going to do to scare her?

Augh. I'm just going to hope that Nino filled Hikaru in on Gorou's murder after Ryosuke died and therefore he didn't realize that Ryosuke was dangerous. As for what he thought Rysouke would do... I dunno. Give her the bouquet and glower at her? Tell her he knew about her kids?

My man was an idiot but I don't think that makes him a killer in this case. I mean, it would be scary enough for a fan to show up at your door with flowers from your ex.

My last piece of evidence that Hikaru didn't want to hurt Ai is that he was desperate to ensure nobody would surpass her, he wanted to feel her presence, and imo he was trying to preserve her memory.

Offing Ai is the opposite of all those things. He said that he killed Ai out of spite but I don't think that we're meant to take that literally.

Those panels at the top of my post and his obsessive adoration of Ai make it hard for me to believe he would try to harm her. Instead, he blamed himself - rightfully so - for sending Ryosuke to Ai's apartment and that's what he meant by killing her out of spite.

But this goddamn back and forth is why I'm so frustrated with Hikaru's characterization.

Is he a man who loved Ai, inadvertently caused her to die, and then spiraled into madness fueled by grief and guilt? Or is he a man who loved Ai, used Ryosuke to kill her, and then spiraled into madness because he regretted his actions?

Well, aside from all the reasons presented above, the story never explicitly tells us that he tried to kill Ai. Given that Crow Girl walks around spouting monologues about who is doing what and why, and Hikaru never thought about how he tried to murder Ai in his final moments, I've settled on: Hikaru is by no means an innocent man but he never wanted Ai dead.

I rest my case. It was shaky but I did my best.

[hikaru-kamiki-truther]

What the latest chapter felt like basically :

[ameltouati1]

Oshi no Ko Chapter 141 : Hikaru And Ai

I know the latest chapter of oshi no ko was very controversial and everyone is making their own speculation about what might happen but can we take a moment, just a tiny moment to appreciate this panel :

Hikaru has been lying his whole life, always fooling people and never showing his true colors. However, for the first time in his life, someone was able to see through his lies, someone who could tell that Hikaru wasn't fine as he always says.

And he opened up to her, we saw in the last chapter that both of them were enjoying each other company and having fun together but Hikaru seems to trust her a lot to the point of telling her about the abuse

And Ai, Ai went to confront Airi the moment she heard all of his story, which was huge change in her character, she usually seems detached from the world and not getting involved and always saying -not what she want to say but - what people want to hear, but here, she stood up for Hikaru's sake and made Airi know what she truly is (nothing but an abuser).

[futuristicmiraclenightmare]

And some Akane/Aqua and Ai/Hikaru parallels(google translate was a bit wonky)

This one below was figured out by @usagiakane on twitter so I can't take credit for that

I feel like Ai and Hikaru have more in common with Akane and Aqua rather than him with Kana if I were being completely honest, but again these are very different dynamics but in a weird way past Hikaru reminds me of Akane like they even the same flustered sweat drops when they talk to their crushes.

And the scene where Ai said she understood he was lying,and the scene Akane said she'd go to hell with Aqua if that'd make him happy those are very different scenes but the meaning of understanding the other was more of less the same and Aqua and Hikaru had a similar shocked expression as well.

Plus the casual age jokes 🤣

[dallina17]

My new reason for crying is that Ai's color palette is more purple and Hikaru is yellow (for me he has golden eyes fight me). And purple and yellow are complementary colors.

I am going to die now.

[rosaniruby]

I want to write fics about what would happen if Hikaru visited Ai in the hospital after all or if he was the one to give her flowers instead of Ryouske (without the whole killing thing of course), but I'm too scared to get something wrong because for example, how did Hikari even get the location of Ai's hospital? Did she text him or what? He knew she was there for pregnancy so he was aware she's decided to give birth to twins. Did Ai just want him to be there for a labor (Nino and Ryouske came only at the end of her stay there and I doubt they would wait several months) ? If we assume he was sincerely considering going there and visiting - then I doubt he simply stalked her lmfao. So many questionsss.

[yuseirra]

How many times have I dreamed of it? How many times have I wished for it? For your hands to caress the wound that continues to fester in my chest

It's sad when you're sick and alone, especially as a kid. He didn't have anyone to look after him from a very young age, did he?

[deathberi]

[isara0408]

So, I've joined a new Fandom and I wrote a story about it. That's what I've been doing this whole time, lol. So, yeah, enjoy it, whoever is in this Fandom! :D

What would have happened if Ai had left the twins in the hands of Hikaru to take care of? What if the twins were able to change the fate of both Ai and Hikaru? ____ After the tragic separation between Ai and Hikaru and the birth of the twins, Ai made a hard choice of leaving her children in the hands of their biological father. Knowing she couldn't love them the way she wanted or understood how to love someone or something and her being an Idol, she knew she wasn't going to give her children the love of a parent that they deserved and give them the normal life they deserve without needing to hide from the toxic world. In the hands of Hikaru, Ai hoped to see the man, who always wanted to be loved, could give their children what they needed and save him from that dark place he was trapped in. Hikaru, now, had to handle being a father to his two stars that the woman he loved gave him along with dealing with the monster who began his trauma while hoping to be with Ai again one day.

[aihoshiino]

chapter 154 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 11

Aqua Hoshigan Status: (Still) white

man

This is one of those chapters where, technically speaking, I should probably be tearing it to bits (AND I DEFINITELY WILL) - it represents a pretty substantial break in or retcon to the series continuity as it's been presented to us thus far and the actions of certain characters in the lead up to this event don't quite make sense if they've had access to some of the information that's seemingly been in their hands for a while but… would you guys forgive me if I said I didn't really care LOL. As I've said before, I'm the sort of reader who can excuse a lot of raw Plot Bullshit so long as I feel like the hearts of the characters are intact and for all its fumbles, this is a chapter I think is unerringly dedicated to the hearts of its characters. I've made no secret of the fact that Ai is and always has been my main avenue of investment in Oshi no Ko as a series and in this chapter, we uncover the final secret in her heart in particular after having the entire series thus far dedicated to laying it bare to us.

We pick up exactly where we left off last chapter with the reveal that the HKAI breakup was indeed founded on Ai's pregnancy, as a lot of us had predicted.

This, uh, does not quite line up with previous events!

From what we'd previously been told, in terms of placement in the timeline, the death of Airi and her husband happened after the twins were born and sometime in the leadup to the Dome concert, which would put it in the ballpark of Ai's 18th to 20th birthday depending on how long it was in the works for. But based on how this flashback section is structured, it seems to place their deaths before Ai even knew she was pregnant, let alone giving birth. If it was just clashing with 15YL's retelling then I could dismiss that as an element of the movie's fictionalization that we've seen and Kamiki alludes to but this also clashes with where this event was placed temporally by Ichigo, when remembering a real life event. So… What gives!!!!

Like, at the end of the day, the exact placement of Uehara's death only matters inasmuch as it needs to be before Ai gets her new apartment, since the point Ichigo is really making is that Aqua is pinning his hopes on a dead man who was dead before he could have ever contributed to Ai's murder. But placing it that far back in the timeline - before the twins were even born! - just makes Aqua's willful ignorance in relation to it come off as a lot sillier and more difficult to swallow than if it happened closer to Ai's actual date of death.

I'm also a little disappointed that we really quickly breeze past Ai revealing she's pregnant - it's not the point of the scene overall and it would be weird to go really deep into her POV in the middle of a Kamiki flashback but one of my big issues with the Movie Arc was that it ripped past anything and everything to do with Ai's pregnancy, including how she herself felt about being pregnant. Like I said in my 145 review, skipping over the parts of it we've seen makes sense but I think there's still a bunch of really fascinating potential in exploring how Ai felt when she realized she was pregnant - how did she hide it for long enough that she was almost halfway through her pregnancy and getting fucking enormous before her first checkup? How did Ichigo and Miyako react when they first got the news? There's so much juicy character and relationship work you could mine out of that but the story fails to do so. We sort of get a crumb of this in the DVD but her feelings there are all centered on the pregnancy in relation to Hikaru and even then she breezes past it so fast it's clearly not meant to be the focus of any of what she's saying and idk. For a character whose entire hook is her struggles with motherhood, familial love and all the rest of it, that's a little disappointing.

THAT SAID!!! All that makes me sound like I didn't like what went on with Ai this chapter but I actually loved it. It's so painfully in line with everything we've been told and shown about her thus far in the manga and in this chapter, we see all her strengths, weaknesses and human contradictions laid bare in a way I find incredibly rewarding and compelling.

The HKAI breakup especially is just soooooo deliciously cringe inducing. It's an echo of the argument with Nino that 15YL portrays, where Ai's good intentions, avoidant tendencies and absolute absence of tact all snowball and end up ruining one of her most important relationships. Like… I can't believe I'm about to say this about a conversation in which Ai is one of the people talking, but she really is the reasonable one here! She's right to identify that their relationship is not working, that adding babies and marriage to the mix will only make things worse - her intentions, as they always are, are good and she's making her decisions with Kamiki in mind… her delivery is just absolutely dogshit!!! GIRL, PLEASE, YOUR WORDS!!!! USE YOUR WORDS!!!!!

For all my issues with Akasaka's writing lately, I think he portrays these kinds of two sided failures of communication so well, where you can see exactly where both characters are coming from and why they are failing to get their feelings across to each other. From an outsider's POV it's clear as day that Ai views herself and her children as the burden, one she doesn't want to put on Kamiki for the sake of a girl who doesn't even know if she can love him… but is it any wonder why Kamiki took it the way he did and why his guts were so utterly wrenched out as a result?

Kamiki's attempted proposal and Ai's immediate rejection of it are really interesting with the context of 45510 in particular. Extrapolating from her talk of marriage there, she brushed him off so quickly because she simply didn't believe he was serious… and yeah, he's pretty clearly not fully cognizant of the weight of what he's trying to propose, never mind that he's meeting "let's break up" with "LET'S GET MARRIED" lol.

Also interesting to extrapolate from both 45510 and other material surrounding Ai is that, at that point in her life, she simply didn't understand what the point of marriage was. On top of her being Literally Sixteen And A Child right now, Ai is said to have come from a deeply dysfunctional home where her mother engaged in a number of equally dysfunctional relationships, at least one of whom was with a man who was creeping on Ai even as he was working up to marry her mom. It's no wonder she doesn't really take the idea of marriage seriously, but it still hurts so see her reject Kamiki so bluntly - even more bluntly in the Japanese text somehow, simply chirping ���理! (Muri!) in response, i.e, not just "no way" but telling Kamiki to his face it's impossible.

Honestly this whole breakup scene is so darkly hilarious just in terms of how bad Ai is completely beefing it. Congrats babygirl that's the worst anyone's ever done it!!!

And we finally get the "I can't love you" drop after just shy of 25 chapters of buildup…….. And honestly, it feels a little hollow.

I talked about this a little before so forgive me for repeating myself but that line - or rather, Aqua and Ruby's implied misunderstanding of it - from Ai to Hikaru was given a huge amount of weight in the story when it was first introduced. It was implied to be the lynchpin in which everything else about the HKAI romance rested only for the story to go UH WELL ACTUALLY IT'S ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT AI FORGIVES HER KILLER which is like… fine, it just feels very jarring on a reread or when trying to sew together a plot thread like this. It especially feels strange because the emphasis is placed on them not getting it right or at least that Gotanda disagrees with their interpretation, only for the manga to whip back around and not only return this line to its previous heightened importantance but also to largely not line up with what was established about this line and its place in the narrative when it was first introduced. It's just more evidence that Akasaka's plans for the Movie Arc and its resolution changed in some way during serialisation because these inconsistencies are pretty glaring.

Not just that, but like… it's hard to feel impacted by this line when we didn't even see it in the Movie Arc. In general, it's so fucking weird that so much about the main emotional resolutions going on right now revolve around Ruby's performance in the movie when most of the big emotional moments people are reacting to are happening entirely offscreen. This would already be bad even if it wasn't taking place in a manga like OnK with its increasingly frustrating habit of offscreening more and more bits of the story that are extremely important for the characters. Before this chapter I would've said that maybe we'd see some of it after the movie released but given that Kamiki's arc and the revenge play as a whole is pretty clearly wrapping here, what would even be the point of it?

Idk. It's just increasingly obvious (and just as frustrating) to me just how much of the Movie Arc was wasted time and how much of the setup that needed to happen to make what follows really land just… didn't. This chapter's resolution for Ai and Hikaru, both separately and as a couple, is still excellent, but it could have been a lot better if its foundations weren't so meager.

We also finally get concrete proof from the horse's mouth that Kamiki was the one who deliberately leaked Ai's address and……. honestly this is kind of a wet fart too lol. OnK has previously very strongly implied that "Kamiki is Ai's killer" was a red herring or that we should at least be slightly skeptical of Aqua's assertions and conclusions but… nope, he was right all along, I guess?? Alright………………………… I certainly don't believe his insistence that gosh he totes didn't think Ryosuke would go THAT far and I'm still wondering wtf the two of them were doing at the hospital the night the twins were born but like. Honestly at this point, I don't really think it matters and I care much more about emotional resolutions than I do granular plot details - and boy do we get one hell of an emotional resolution.

I haven't shouted her out yet because I was saving it for this section but fuck, man, Mengo's expression work told chapter is killer as usual but this final stretch of pages is just gutwrenching. Ai's gentle, rueful smile on the DVD contrasted with the look of shocked, dawning understanding on Kamiki's….. Jesus Christ.

And at last, we uncover the final secret hidden at the bottom of Ai's heart. The entire manga thus far has been a process of stripping away the viewer's willful ignorance with regards to Ai's humanity but the DVDs had been an oddly ominous mystery box floating around, containing some implied dark secret that would change the entire trajectory of Ai's character as we knew it… but of course, the person who tells us that is Ai herself, a girl who hates herself, thinks of herself as dirty and impure, irresponsible and incapable of love.

So is it really any surprise that her darkest secret, the thing she can only confess with her eyes shining with black stars is simply that she's a fallible human? That she was a lonely young girl, confused and hurt in her own ways and that she hurt someone she dearly cared for and wanted to take it back?

Is it a little convenient that she put all this in the DVD? Yes, absolutely, and I'll be the first to say that the DVDs existing at all are a pretty clear retcon in service of getting info onto Aqua's hands. But it's also perfectly in line with Ai's timid, avoidant methods of reaching out. It parallels both Viewpoint B and 45510 (moreso the latter) where she pours her heart out in words, waiting for others to read and understand her. In 45510 in particular, her leaving the blog post is an extremely clear and strong parallel to the DVD - love letters put into bottles and thrown to the ocean in desperate hope the person they're addressed to might find and understand them.

As Akane says, Ai is torn between secrecy and a desire to have her true self exposed, so she attempts to craft scenarios in which this must happen, even if her avoidance can only allow her to do so with indirect methods. With the blog and moreso the DVDs & their method of delivery, Ai attempts to create situations where the initiation confrontation and disclosure is out of her hands and she has no choice but to tell the truth.

Ai's entire speech here is just heartbreaking. If the start of the chapter didn't make it explicit enough, we see her here put her good intentions into words to better understand how they were misinterpreted.

This adds SUCH a fascinating additional layer to her death that has me gnashing my fucking teeth. One of the things I've talked about a lot in my Ai meta is that Ryosuke is essentially an agent or even an embodiment of the entertainment industry and the way it has exploited her - the misogyny, entitlement, purity culture and abuse that ruled her life went on to end it. With this additional detail, though, Ryosuke becomes an agent not just of the things that plagued Ai of B-Komachi, but Ai as a human, too. All her life, Ai is willfully misunderstood and mischaracterized by the people around her, assigned narratives and roles without her consent and punished for both living up to and failing to live up to them. Ai's death is the end result of a lifelong cascade of failure on the part of every system and individual that has had the opportunity and responsibility to care for her - and, as Aqua throws in his father's face, that includes Hikaru.

Hikaru's supposed understanding of Ai is not one based in empathy or love but projection and possessiveness - understanding in this context is ownership, exclusivity and frankly, arrogance. A claim to a piece of Ai that no one else knows. But as Aqua forces him to realize… Hikaru never understood Ai, even as she did her best to make herself understood. For all his arrogance of understanding Ai and the nature of their relationship, Kamiki is ultimately just the same as every other person who idolized and objectified her then discarded her when the image they'd created in their mind didn't match reality. Ai wasn't his pure and perfect soulbonded saviour - she was a lonely, broken kid like him, still struggling to understand love after a lifetime spent starved of it.

Once, Kamiki begged Ai to save him. And here, the bitter truth is laid out for all of us: the salvation Kamiki had wished for was waiting for him, reaching out with open arms and he not only desecrated it but irrevocably destroyed any path back towards it. In killing Ai, Hikaru Kamiki killed himself.

The imagery of this moment is so fucking gorgeous. The visual of Kamiki and Ai reaching out to each other, in mutual understanding at last but separated by time and death… the "what if" happy Hoshino family… Ai's words being framed as a 'love letter' that transcended time to reach Kamiki and Aqua's eyes blazing with white as tears pour down his face… Jesus fucking Christ Mengo I'm already dead!!!!!

Like I said up top, I make zero secret of the fact that I am primarily invested in Ai above everything else in the manga and the way her importance has been seemingly downplayed since the late 130s mark chapter wise has really bugged me. As such, this chapter was INSANELY cathartic for me. Not only do we get a really beautiful cap to Ai's post death arc (hopefully finally killing those dumbfuck Secretly Evil Ai theories for good) but it's done in a way that once again recenters her love and her wishes as the heart of everything. Even Aqua's revenge play is completely redefined in this context - no longer the childish, selfish and self destructive lashing out we've seen before but as a quest to both honor Ai and to punish the person arrogantly assuming ownership of her heart even as he so catastrophically misunderstands her.

This is a really fantastic end to Aqua's arc too… on paper, that is. I know for a fact that a certain genre of OnK readers are going to bitch and moan that Aqua didn't run his dad over with a 2003 Honda Civic but I really can't imagine Aqua's revenge quest going any other way unless OnK was intended to be a pure tragedy. Over and over, we have seen that Aqua's revenge is at odds with not just his happiness but with Ai's wish for him to live a full life with a bright future. It is self destructive, hurtful to the people around him and antithetical to any of them moving on and reclaiming what their futures. With the emphasis the story places on moving towards a happy future, in selfishly reclaiming your happiness even in the face of systems that seek to crush you and on honouring Ai's wishes and legacy, it would be flatly thematically incoherent for Aqua to choose killing.

The issue is not with this as Aqua's end point but with the path we've taken to get here. As was the issue with Ruby during the Movie Arc, we don't actually see any of the internal work that happened in service of this arc, just the big emotional end points of offscreen development. But it stings especially bad with Aqua when such a huge chunk of the last few arcs locked us out of his head, sharply contrasting the start of the story that lived and breathed his interiority - AND when this is more or less the capstone to his series long struggle to choose love or revenge. It's not that I dislike this as an emotional payoff for Aqua's revenge - this is more or less beat for beat what I'd expected - but that it lacks proper support from the rest of the story. In general, this chapter falls flatter than it should because all this heightened, dramatic emotion rests on arcs and setup that simply have not been shown to the reader, save for Ai.

Speaking of Ai, the info in the DVD here potentially represents a pretty major break in the continuity of Aqua's behaviour based on when we're told he had access to it but I'm willing to bite my tongue and see if that gets filled in, if only because this chapter review is already so fucking long. Let's just say that I Noticed and I sure hope Aka or his editors did too.

And finally… Oh, hey there, Ruby! Aren't you an interesting little snarl to this chapter. Or maybe "snarl" isn't quite right, but her presence here is potentially interesting either way. I'm not quite sure how to read both her expression and her presence - the expression on her face looks VERY displeased and it looks to me like she's outside the room, so is she maybe eavesdropping and not happy with what she hears? Or is she in on Aqua's talk with Kamiki here and just struggling with her emotions with regards to it all? I'm quiety hoping it's the latter, because it would confirm that Ruby DID recognize her dad in 147 and Akasaka wasn't expecting me to believe he was hitting her with the stupid stick quite that hard lol.

In either case, I'm actually excited to see what Ruby takes away from this. In the ways that AQRB has echoed the HKAI dynamic, Ruby has always been in Kamiki's shoes - the one desperate to be saved, clinging to her oshi and relying on him as her sole bastion of light in the world. So what will she think now after being faced with the logical endpoint of this wished-for codependence? When she sees how destructive and self destructive it can potentially be? Just as she saw Ai reflected in herself, will Ruby see her father in her own reflection - and if so, what will she do about it?

Break next week! So we'll be sitting pretty for two weeks to find out. Not that I actually mind this time because with a chapter like this on top of season 2 of the anime coming back today, a week without a break might have actually killed me… please, akamengo, i'm just a little guy!!!!

[manyaplayers]

"Save your tears for another day"

Now whenever I hear the song I will think about them. My most favorite tragic ship

[oshinohoshi]

Let's talk about Ai's decision in Ch 154

This is a reaction to some people saying that Ai was stupid in this chapter or that they dislike what this did to her character. I'd like to dig deeper for the sake of organizing my own thoughts on the matter.

This post is long so just skip to the TLDR if you want!

Ch 154's big reveal was that Ai wanted to love Hikaru. She wanted to raise a family with Hikaru but felt that it would be too much of a burden on him because "he was being crushed by the weight of his life" and was "on the verge of breaking." She also acknowledged that he was dependent on her. So she broke up with him in a harsh manner, believing he would be okay once she and her kids were gone.

Let's break this down.

Was Ai stupid for this?

No. Could Hikaru have handled fatherhood at such a young age when he was already suffering from so many emotional wounds? Probably not. It's not inconceivable that starting a family with the girl he loved could be healing, but he couldn't even take care of himself, much less two kids. This was a recipe for disaster.

We could say that the way Ai did it was stupid but I would like to be more generous than that and I'll elaborate below.

Was it unfair of Ai?

I think it was unfair to take the decision of whether he could handle the pregnancy out of Hikaru's hands. That said, if we read this as Ai also recognizing how unhealthy their relationship dynamic was, it's not unfair to end things in part because of that.

Was the way she broke up with him cruel?

Yes, and I'm sure this is why some people feel so negatively about Ai in this chapter. Ai claiming that the product of Hikaru's rape was too much for her led to Hikaru framing Taiki's birth as "something I had done" and stating that Ai leaving him was "only natural."

Still, Ai was not a cruel person. She was gentle and loving but she was also timid. Her coping mechanisms for handling confrontation were to bury her true feelings and put on a suffocating smile. She shouldn't have said what she did, but it was an effective way to make him hate her. She wanted a clean break to free Hikaru from herself and the twins, who she felt were a burden to him. She just didn't have the emotional skillset to handle this correctly.

And she was just a teenager!

As Oscar Wilde wrote, "It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done." Ai's intentions were kind. Her delivery was almost comically bad.

But why didn't Ai try to get back with Hikaru when she called him or at least try to make amends?

Ai was confused about what love felt like and how to express it. We also don't know how she felt about him almost 4 years later. My take is that by the time she called Hikaru she had moved on from the idea of a romantic relationship but still cared deeply for him.

As for why she never reached out to make amends, Ai does avoidance like she's training to be the avoidance champ of the world. Just look at the short story 45510 where she explains her feelings to her fellow B Komachi members in an unpublished post on their defunct blog. There is also a manga panel showing that Ai had over a hundred unsent text messages. At the time I assumed they were all to the B Komachi girls but some could have been intended for Hikaru.

Ai's regret

Finally, Ai regretted this. Yes, trying to fix it 15 years after the fact is absurdly late, but her heart was in the right place.

TLDR: Ai was just a normal person, as flawed as the rest of us, who experienced hurt, anger, loneliness, and uncertainty. She was misunderstood by everyone around her and commodified by the entertainment industry.

She hurt someone who loved her but it was not out of malice. The extremely poor delivery of the breakup was inevitable given Ai's avoidant tendencies and that she was a teenager. Criticizing Ai without acknowledging everything that led to this point just doesn't sit right with me.

And finally, this panel broke me and I will be suing Akasaka and Mengo for damage to my heart.