#and it's a problem much bigger than project sekai imo?

[butterfly-ribbon]

i love that kanade canonically has disordered eating to the point of collapsing once due to how much she overworked herself composing music and needs a housekeeper to help care for her? the nuances ... it's all right there in the text - how ena also never eats at the table if her father is there and how mafuyu can't taste or enjoy any food. there are so many meaningful little details like kanade and mizuki talking about constantly eating cup ramen and little else. i also think about mizuki having disordered eating a lot and throwing up when stressed about the others realizing she isn't a cis girl and how she only ever eats french fries when they go out. empty calories. i also think it's adorable that she can't eat hot food but likes spicy things. i did initially have mixed feelings about mizuki teasing ena about her weight bc ena likes eating sweets a lot and she has reasons to worry about her appearance due to being an 'influencer', but the more i thought about how mizuki can only eat in very specific ways and ena being the only one who can actually enjoy food of all of them the more i realized there's so much to read into here. i can see it as normal teasing on a certain level, bc it's clearly mizuki trying to defuse situations - especially ones that might draw attention back to herself. she constantly wants to turn attention around while vilifying herself in tiny ways. she also needs to make sure ena doesn't like her too much so she 'degrades' her femininity as a a cis girl to affirm her own. it's mizuki's troubled way of subtly pushing ena away through their usual banter by projecting her own struggles with food. i can also easily buy that mizuki refrained from eating much for long periods during middle school out of fear that her body would grow too much or that she might gain weight in the wrong places before she was finally given permission to be on puberty blockers and hormones... usually this kind of thing annoys me in such media bc it reminds me of the first season of love live where it feels more fatphobic and mean-spirited, but i think there's much more genuine intent behind niigo's writing?

with mizuki also recovering after ena5 and ena finally knowing about her being a trans girl, she might have the option to have a more relaxed expression of femininity. like how for the second year she wears her cute overalls when pants likely made her dysphoric before. and even when mizuki made jokes about ena "gaining weight" or "getting wrinkles" in the past it didn't make her any less endearing to me, bc it's nice to have a trans girl who's allowed to be imperfect and weird and such a teenager in how she does these things? all the girls in niigo have very complex relationships with girlhood and femininity, and it helps that ena doesn't actually ever let it get to her bc she knows mizuki isn't being actively malicious.