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everythingsinred · 1 year ago

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Let's Talk About NatsuMikan: Mikan (pt. 36)

We're picking up now after a very dramatic and tragic event has taken place. Despite everything the story has built up to so far and everything it will continue to claim moving forward, literally NOTHING that happens matters at all.

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Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Seven

Mikan has used the very last of her power to insert the stones into Natsume’s body. She again faints from exhaustion, but she comes to rather quickly, and her first concern is Natsume. She looks up at his face, probably hoping to find his eyes opening or him making some kind of sound to signal that he’s alive, but there’s no change.

Mikan is in despair. She gave up everything and it still wasn’t enough. She even asks out loud how come nothing changed. This was supposed to fix him, to bring him back to her. THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO GO ON DATES AND GET MARRIED. They can’t do that if he’s dead!

Subaru orders Sakurano to teleport Natsume to the hospital, and while they start teleporting, Mikan continues to cry, asking what’s wrong with him, why he isn’t getting better, and insisting that she wants to come too.

This sucks!

She doesn’t want to leave him, but more importantly, she doesn’t want him to leave her. Natsume underestimated her love for him. He told her he’d never give her stone back, that she was his forever, even if she came to hate him. But she’s his forever, even if he dies, even if he breaks all his promises. He was supposed to never leave her, but now he is. Sakurano and Subaru are taking him away, and she might never see him again.

Hotaru feels guilt. She pleaded with Natsume to stay behind in the first place, to save Mikan, when he was on his way back to safety. Her tranquilizer spider might have also helped to kill him.

So she grabs Mikan’s hands and promises that Natsume will be okay. He will come back to her. She pleads with Mikan not to give up.

Hotaru doesn’t tend to say empty words. She doesn’t make grand promises without intending on fulfilling them. If she is telling Mikan that Natsume will be fine, then that means more to Mikan than anyone else’s promises. If Hotaru says so, it must be true.

Hotaru rushes to Noda and although she seems to be speaking loudly, I don’t think Mikan can hear what she says… otherwise it kinda defeats the point. So Mikan doesn’t know that Hotaru and Noda are acting in the effort of putting on an “act” to save Natsume, just to hold Mikan over until she leaves the academy. If Mikan has just a little bit of hope, then maybe she’ll be okay. Because right now, with her parents’ deaths still so fresh, Mikan will be devastated by another loss. She might not recover.

Good-bye, forever!

The last Mikan sees of Hotaru and Natsume is them disappearing into space-time for a moment, with Hotaru giving her a meaningful look. She knows that Hotaru will fulfill her promise. She can count on her.

She has hope.

She faints once more, since she has expelled so much of her alice--which we know is a physically taxing ordeal--and because emotional exhaustion can take a physical toll. It makes sense she’d pass out. Mikan wakes up a little, but doesn’t move too much, always crying, just to hear Luna’s heartfelt apology.

Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Eight

Mikan, completely exhausted and miserable, can’t even force a smile at this point, though I bet she wishes she could. She tells Luna that she’s happy for her, that she and her mom can make up now. She keeps crying, but she wishes the best for Luna. Then her thoughts devolve into Natsume, Natsume, Natsume.

Mikan means it when she tells Luna that it's good she finally made up with Yuka, but she can't smile. She doesn't have the physical or emotional energy to pretend right now.

And who can blame her? Her fiance is dead! Maybe? Maybe he’ll come back! But for now he’s dead. And even though other things are happening, that’s all she can really care about.

She faints again, dreaming of him.

But even though they’re on the same page, they’re on opposite corners. Reaching for each other, but not at all close enough to touch. She can’t reach him. He can’t reach her. He’s too far away now, even farther away than when she was locked up in the tower.

A week passes and Mikan wonders about Natsume and Hotaru’s whereabouts. She tells us that all she ever thinks about, night and day, is whether Natsume is still alive. She is consumed by worry and grief and heartbreak. But she wants to believe Hotaru’s promise that Natsume will be okay. But in the meantime, she’s not smiling. Who could be happy in this state? She has no alice, her best friend is missing, and her boyfriend might be dead. It’s not a particularly cheerful situation.

She is now at a staff hearing, to see what will become of her now that her alice is gone. She knows she will have to leave the school. She’ll have to leave all her friends and family that she’s gotten to know here and go back home. Even if Natsume survives, she’ll never see him. But she knows that. She knew it when she gave up her alice in the hopes of saving Natsume. That’s the price she has to pay. That’s just how it is.

What she is not expecting is to hear that every memory of her time in the Academy will be erased on top of that.

She starts to cry again. All of her memories? All of them? Of all the people she knew? Her parents? Her friends? Natsume? They’ll all be gone? All she had was this hope for Hotaru’s promise, this last grain of faith that things might turn out okay, that she might have her happy ending and her forever with Natsume, even after she leaves the Academy. Wait? She can wait! She’ll wait forever if she has to! But now she’s being told that even that last dreg of hope is lost. She’ll lose her memories and she’ll never get them back. Her life at the Academy and everything that comes with it--including forever with Natsume--is gone.

(What a pointless storyline.)

She starts screaming. Hasn’t she lost enough? She pleads with the staff not to take her memories of everyone, not to take her hope of Natsume away. Because it was all she had--just the idea that she could wait, that she could bide her time until graduation came around and then look for Natsume until they were reunited. Hotaru’s promise was all she had left and now she doesn’t even have that anymore. Natsume will be gone from her life for good. That’s essentially what she’s being told.

I cling so much to her tantrums in this arc. They're all I have.

It was all for nothing. (Just like everything else! Including this plotline. Guh.)

Narumi uses his alice successfully on her for the first and last time, to calm her down. He tries to explain that she’ll be in danger if they don’t erase her memories, that this is for her own safety and protection now that she’s no longer an alice. He assures her that they had considered multiple alternatives, but this still ended up being the best, safest, and most viable choice for everyone involved.

She knows he’s being honest, that he’s her ally and wouldn’t lie about this. She'd promised early in the story to trust him and believe in him, and she's never faltered in that before this point, and even now she has no choice but to believe him.

But that means there really isn’t anything to be done, that this is a done deal and that she will lose Natsume forever.

Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Nine

Four months after Mikan had to leave her friends to hide away in the labyrinth, she is back in class. She reunites with everyone, a huge smile on her face. This is not the same Mikan we saw last chapter, who was grim and sullen and despairing. One might immediately assume that maybe Mikan has found some sort of hope or comfort to ease her pain right now, but that would be misled.

Ruka rejoices that Mikan is still upbeat and cheerful, that she hasn’t changed at all since everything that happened. Ruka notes that he and the rest of the class are still upset about the uncertainty of Natsume’s condition and Hotaru’s whereabouts, but Mikan’s cheer gives them the drive to be positive too, even though their time with her is running out.

She's a hero for pretending, I guess. (That was sarcastic. No child should have to pretend like this.)

The thing is, though, that Mikan is not actually happy. She is not cheerful or upbeat inside. In fact, her last hope was recently crushed and destroyed. She is dreading her future, missing Natsume, worrying about Hotaru, frightened about the prospect of losing her memories of all her friends… She’s just not showing it in front of the others. She’s keeping her misery to herself. When she’s on her own, she thinks of these concerns, but when she’s around her classmates, she smiles.

She tells them that she’s cried enough, which is silly because there’s no such thing. That’s not how tears work. She frets about looking pathetic, about being despairing and hopeless and miserable--always crying. She wants people to remember her smiling and happy, so she will smile until the end, even though she doesn’t feel that way inside.

I HATE THIS.

Like I said before, there is a difference between a character’s thoughts and feelings, their arc, and the story’s narrative. In my opinion, this is a deeply unhealthy and tragic character devolution. Mikan started this story as an upbeat and cheerful girl, but she didn’t consider herself personally responsible for everyone’s happiness. Over the course of the manga, Mikan’s crushing insecurities became heavier and heavier, that stressed value of her smile looming over her, overshadowing every other thing she has to offer. We are now at the part where Mikan’s feelings don’t matter to her at all--instead, she must push aside her misery and mourning to comfort her friends. Her friends, being children, find this a relief because a crying and traumatized girl can be a lot to handle, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact, it’s pretty clearly not!

How interesting that this scene takes place on a balcony, with her looking out at the night sky, at the moon. But because, she's surrounded by people, she smiles here. When she's by herself, she cries.

Emotions don’t work the way Mikan describes here. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe anything that happens to you is simply meant to happen to you, and that there is a set amount of tears you can cry. Sometimes a lot of bad happens to you, and it feels like it’s too much. Then something good happens, just to be followed by another bad thing. That’s just how life is. It’s a medley. It’s cliche at this point, but Forrest Gump was right--life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get.

And it’s certainly not how crying works! Crying is a biological function that helps us process our emotions. There’s a chemical reason why you feel better after crying. Tears of sadness are chemically unique from tears of joy or tears of eye irritation. Crying doesn’t necessarily heal your pain, but you can imagine it works kinda like a scab, your body’s effort to help close a wound. Mikan refusing to cry anymore (at least in front of her friends) isn’t doing her any favors.

I’m a big proponent of crying, in any case. I’m not impressed by people who boast about never crying. I find that concerning. Yeah, no wonder you’re miserable. You’re holding it all inside. Repression has never helped anybody.

And again, it'd be easy to give Higuchi credit for writing such a complex emotional situation here, but I don't think she did it on purpose. I think her intent was to further elevate Mikan, to further emphasize her wonderful personality. What Mikan does causes her suffering, but it's ultimately the right thing to do, according to the narrative. What a terrible message to give a demographic of primarily young kids!

In any case, Mikan’s class is having a lesson of memories, where everyone will talk about their favorite memories with Mikan as a tribute to her before she leaves. Mikan beams, and I think her happiness here is genuine, as she’s sincerely touched by her classmates’ and teacher’s efforts to remember and treasure her. My opinion isn’t that Mikan has no good experiences after losing Natsume, but that her insistence on hiding all her bad feelings isn’t healthy.

The next scene we have of Mikan is pretty vital to my feelings about where her character is right now emotionally. Mikan has been sleeping over at different people’s rooms, to relish the little time she has left with her friends. Tonight, she’ll be sleeping in Natsume’s room. Her classmates urge her to sleep over with them, or tease her for being a pervert, and she smiles it all off, until the door shuts, they’re all gone, and Mikan is alone.

It's chilling, how you can almost hear the sudden and stark silence after all the light-hearted shenanigans. And all the happy pretending comes to a shrieking halt. This is how Mikan really feels.

The mood instantly shifts.

Mikan stands by herself in Natsume’s large, lonely room, approaching his balcony, and then she starts to cry.

When Mikan was in the labyrinth, she would often go to the balcony at night, listening to Natsume telepathically calling out for her, comforted by his voice, searching for him. She can't hear him now. She won't find him looking for her below. She won't see him climbing up the side of the building to reach her. Not ever again.

What Mikan needs is comfort, but she doesn’t let anyone in class do that for her. She instead pretends that she’s fine and saves her sadness for when she’s all alone. This scene always reminds me of 95, when Mikan cries about Tsubasa's disappearance, but only when everyone else is gone. She cries on her own until Natsume comes in through the window to comfort her, to embrace her. Natsume has always been one of her biggest comforts, capable of cheering her up no matter how badly she felt. He was her sunshine and now he's gone. The one person who could definitely comfort her right now is the one person she fears she'll never see again.

This scene reveals more than any other that Mikan is still just as depressed as she’d been before. Nothing has changed. She’s just pretending for everyone else’s sake now.

A few pages ago she was looking at the same sky, on a balcony, looking at the same moon, and yet she was smiling. No she's crying because there's nobody to pretend for. She can let herself feel.

She misses Natsume, remembering his request that she wait for him, and his promise to save her. She stares at the moon, the only witness to their Christmas rendezvous, the only one who remembers now. She asks him how long she’s supposed to wait. This isn’t a testament to weak love, but to desperate love. She has very limited time left before her memories are erased forever. She doesn’t want to never see him again. She doesn’t want him to die. That means he needs to hurry up and come back as soon as possible.

She’s still constantly thinking of him, worrying about him, worrying about her memories. “Anguish, love… Will it all fade away?”

Though one might assume forgetting anguish would be a relief, Mikan worries about it. The anguish is the consequence of her love, and that’s not something she’s willing to forget. She was prepared to love him for the rest of her life, to marry him and be with him forever. She’s not just concerned about forgetting him but of losing the love that she has for him. It’s not something she is willing to part with.

“All the things Natsume has given me, my beloved, are my treasures.” Natsume has given her a lot, but there’s very little left that’s concrete. He’s given her memories that will soon be erased, alice stones that she inserted into him in vain, the misery of widowhood that might flicker away after her last day, and the overflowing feelings of love that she wanted to last forever. She doesn’t want to lose any of it because everything Natsume made her feel--good and bad--is something precious to her.

She goes to bed and pleads with him to stay alive, to not leave her. For most of the manga, as I’ve discussed to death, Mikan has feared one thing more than any other, and that has been losing Natsume. She now has, and the only hope she has left is that he will return to her before she leaves for good.

Her calling Natsume "my beloved" means a lot to me.

To me, this scene demonstrates Mikan’s pretense, that most--if not all--of her smiles are forced and hiding a deep despair that she refuses to share with her friends out of the concern that her sadness is a burden on them. They could all probably benefit from mutual comfort right now, but she’s not even considering that. She won’t cry with them. Only by herself, in Natsume’s room, staring at the moon that symbolizes promises that never came to fruition.

Conclusion

The balcony scene is one of my favorite Mikan scenes, actually, because it feels genuine and gives her some credit. I don't need to see her smiling all the time. Just like Natsume's smiles always stand out to me, Mikan letting herself feel negative emotions stands out to me. I love analyzing her less pretty moments, her misery, her rage, her grief. Natsume's smiles remind us he's human, the same way Mikan's anger and sadness remind us she's not just a beam of sunlight. They're both so much more than they put off.

I'll keep posting! Four more parts, I imagine, and then I'll be done. I hope the upcoming parts are a good read, if nothing else. They'll probably be pretty short. Thanks for reading!

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