#aoko's mum was truly disappointing and unnecessary

[potahun]

sob. thank you op for raising that...i have been thinking about this azusa and furuya exchange again since reading on the Q&A about the 'romantic pair he cannot yet talk about', which made me go 'ah, ok. amuazu a real likelihood if it's a thing that is likely to make waves'...

and yeah...if it really happens, then it means we have to live with them being an item while this exchange also happened. we have to live with GA making us believe furuya would end up with someone who knows him only superficially and has done to him what he's been struggling with all his childhood (and faces into adulthood as well) i don't know how much character distortion or super intense development it requires (how many years is he gonna use) for me to believe this is a credible and lovely romance...

i am guessing that, in the cultural context, what azusa does here is simply considered innocent and quite common. but nonetheless, it really is a blatant statement of "I don't know you beyond the superficial". and furuya's response is the equally superficial "^^" and light impersonal rebuking that amuro does, he's not trying to get her to know him either.

of course, it's all extrapolation whether the remaining romantic pairs rly do include amuazu. but there simply arent many mf pairs left, and we know GA loves his comphet even if it adds nothing to the plot or makes little sense (he introduced a character like chihaya who screams lesbian and even has a dear uni friend only to pair her up immediately with juugo). there are even less mf pairs that would make a fuss. like, what, yoko x kazami? jodie x camel? wouldnt even make a ripple. the only other pair i can think of would be akai x rumi...or an unknown pair with haibara... so if amuazu does become canon, i might have to at least start adhering to the belief that ZTT/movies are in a different parallel universe as the main timeline (even if movie-canon facts are also manga-canon). azusa and furuya would still know each only superficially, with azusa only knowing his amuro persona, but eh, at least this specific characterization of azusa would be out of the way.

i did see that the original tweet came from an amuazu shipper account, while it seems most of the other tweets about the Q&A phrase the answer to that question in a more neutral way. so i will wait a bit...but i also feel like it's a possible thing for GA, especially considering the latest chapters where he's been teasing the ship more and more (WHILE NOT MAKING IT ROMANTIC) he's also done some very weird narrative choices lately, introducing aoko's mum in MK and doing acrobatics to explain her absence, thereby completely messing up the perfectly logical narrative of nakamori being an overworked single dad. im worried he might go ahead and do something equally crazy for furuya, like introducing that he actually had a family all along! who's proud of him and raised him normally but he just cut ties because of his job or whatever! so he's never really been isolated! azusa was his childhood friend but she forgot! and oh! somehow, amuro is the real persona, let's forget about grumpy, high-strung furuya of ZTT, so amuazu can work as a wholesome pair because azusa knew the real him all along!

that's the type of thing that would disappoint me the most. like, yes, i would also be a bit heartbroken because i like hc-ing azusa and furuya as lesbian and gay respectively. i like their dynamics as co-workers who dont really want to know each other on a deeper level, but work well together. but beyond that, i mostly worry that GA has to distort their characters as we currently know them to make this pairing work, and that he will do it, because unfortunately, he HAS done narrative choices before that were not bound by logical narrative flow and were only made to serve a purpose that only he enjoys...

But really, that dialogue in ZTT Ch. 1 that Aoyama either wrote himself or signed off on is insane, especially when you compare how Rei’s mixed heritage is addressed in WPS by his friends:

vs. in ZTT:

The only way this makes sense to me is if it was meant to further emphasize how alone Rei is in the here and now. He has no one who sees him as himself anymore, and neither does he have anyone who’d get angry enough to defend him. He himself is used to this level of othering- it’s not even worth getting mad at anymore, even if he might spitefully overcompensate at home by cooking up a storm of food that actually suits his tastes. So he’ll never bite back against it himself.

I assume Aoyama was planning an am*azu endgame from before ZTT started, considering that early am*azu fantasy chapter. Why in the world wouldn’t he have instead written Azusa as an ally to Rei, in that case? She could’ve defended Rei against a casually discriminating background character, cementing her as a proper friend to Rei that he hasn’t had since he lost his last police academy buddy.

Instead, he chose to do the exact opposite.