#azul x yuu shippers win this one i s2g

[cheekinpermission]

I wanna talk about the scene in the museum with Azul...

(SPOILERS FOR BOOK 3 AHEAD. ALSO LOTS OF RAMBLING! :D)

During Ch. 38 of Book 3, Azul and Yuu have a short conversation post-overblot in the underwater museum place. I always felt that this bit of dialogue was weirdly charged? The whole scene felt very intimate to me (and the soft music in the background doesn't help lmao), but I never knew WHY since nothing said was inherently romantic.

So, I went back and re-read through every post-overblot and realized that Azul is the only who who has a one-on-one conversation with Yuu after their overblot??

It's rare enough to have one-on-one conversations between Yuu and another character, but then Azul goes a step further. He's the only one to open up to Yuu about his problems:

Some of the other overblot boys talk about their problems, but not to Yuu specifically. It's more of a declaration than confiding in someone, you know? (E.g. Riddle talking about how he prefers milk tea even though the rules stipulate lemon tea)

We, the players, are shown flashbacks of the overblot boys to explain how they reached this point but I can't recall if Yuu is privy to this information as well. (It's theoretically possible since Yuu already has visions / dreams of the Great Seven, but no one ever mentions it so who knows. I'm personally on the side of Yuu NOT knowing because it feels a bit invasive that they'd have this knowledge of people who weren't ready to share it.)

Regardless of whether Yuu can or cannot see those flashbacks, Azul is the only one to willingly talk about his motivations to Yuu. For Azul, this is especially important as he's so protective of his image as a clever and upstanding housewarden, and yet here he openly admits to Yuu that he was a bit of a loser as a kid (his words not mine!).

I guess you could argue that he felt there was no reason to hide it anymore since Yuu already saw him as a chubby octopus baby, but he didn't have to talk about it at all if he didn't want to. But he did. On his own. With no prompting. (Really, though. Yuu can either say they want to make sure he puts the photo back or that they're worried about him, and either way he drops his lore on them lol) And then Yuu tries to help him feel better??

To my knowledge, Yuu doesn't do this with any of the other overblot boys, either. I could have missed it during my research, but if they did it wasn't nearly to the same extent as with Azul.

I still don't know why Azul felt like opening up to Yuu. He didn't have to, but maybe he wanted to? Maybe he wanted to try his hand at being genuine for once and felt Yuu was the least intimidating person to do it with (the magicless human that they are). Who knows? I wish there were more scenes like this. It makes Yuu feel more included in the story. I also think it shows a lot of growth on Azul's end to open up about his problems to Yuu of his own volition.

I'm not sure what I wanted to say with this post, only that I wanted to get my thoughts out there about this scene because it always stood out to me. I felt there was always an undercurrent of something and I think it's because this was the only post-overblot private conversation we got with Yuu and an overblot boy, plus the added encouragement from Yuu at the end.

I'm curious to know if anyone felt the same way about this scene or if I'm just imagining things. I'm also interested in hearing any theories why Azul suddenly felt the urge to open up to Yuu, if you've got them!

Thanks for enduring my rambling!

Bonus!

Azul's so funny for trying to play it off all cool like he isn't doing flips and princess twirls in his head rn. Yuu laid it on THICK. We all know he's freaking out internally.