#kyun onk

[aihoshiino]

What had terrified me was Ai. She’d become something otherworldly and inhuman that night, an unstoppable force of nature that swept up everything in her wake. She was a star, brighter than any of the rest of us, burning so brilliantly that she eclipsed everything else in her path. I watched her, paralyzed, as she captivated the hearts of the entire stadium and I was stricken by the overwhelming realization that once again, I would never measure up. No matter how hard I practiced, no matter how much I sacrificed, I would never be able to reach that same height she had.Oh, I had thought. So that’s what true talent looks like. ✧✦✧✦ The former B-Komachi member known as Kyun mulls on her past and a possible path to her future, only for an unexpected encounter to open a door for her she had long since sealed off. Canon divergence.

Chapter 4 of An Invincible Girl is out!

While already reeling from her own personal setback, Kyun stumbles into a much bigger crisis that impacts not just her but Ai, her former groupmates in B-Komachi and potentially all of Strawberry Productions.

[aihoshiino]

What had terrified me was Ai. She'd become something otherworldly and inhuman that night, an unstoppable force of nature that swept up everything in her wake. She was a star, brighter than any of the rest of us, burning so brilliantly that she eclipsed everything else in her path. I watched her, paralyzed, as she captivated the hearts of the entire stadium and I was stricken by the overwhelming realization that once again, I would never measure up. No matter how hard I practiced, no matter how much I sacrificed, I would never be able to reach that same height she had. Oh, I had thought. So that's what true talent looks like. ✧✦✧✦ The former B-Komachi member known as Kyun mulls on her past and a possible path to her future, only for an unexpected encounter to open a door for her she had long since sealed off. Canon divergence.

Chapter 3, the penultimate chapter, is live!

Kyun considers the offer laid before her by Ai but just as she settles on a decision, an unexpected roadblock derails everything.

[aihoshiino]

What had terrified me was Ai. She'd become something otherworldly and inhuman that night, an unstoppable force of nature that swept up everything in her wake. She was a star, brighter than any of the rest of us, burning so brilliantly that she eclipsed everything else in her path. I watched her, paralyzed, as she captivated the hearts of the entire stadium and I was stricken by the overwhelming realization that once again, I would never measure up. No matter how hard I practiced, no matter how much I sacrificed, I would never be able to reach that same height she had. Oh, I had thought. So that's what true talent looks like. ✧✦✧✦ The former B-Komachi member known as Kyun mulls on her past and a possible path to her future, only for an unexpected encounter to open a door for her she had long since sealed off. Canon divergence.

Chapter 2 is live!

After an unexpected meeting, Kyun sits down with the indomitable center of B-Komachi to process not one but two bombshells - and to make a promise she's not sure she'll keep.

[aihoshiino]

when I think about Ai doesn't know things that are normal for people because she didn't grow up normally.

Pretty much! Like I said in a prior ask, a lot of what's considered 'common sense' is only that because we have guardians and peers to hand it down to us, but a lot of people who grow up in situations like Ai did have nobody to teach them that kind of thing. Not only that but even when Ai is struggling, people often just... leave her to it. Either because her helplessness makes her 'cute' as an idol or because they assume she's playing 4D chess and only PRETENDING to struggle.

Kyun highlights this in a really interesting way in Viewpoint B:

She’s one of those people I can’t imagine fitting into the rhythm of life in the real world. But instead of dismissing her as "scatterbrained," everyone takes it as a sign that she's some sort of genius. I bet if Leonardo da Vinci were here today, we'd be giving him the same treatment.

Because people project the image of a 'genius idol' onto Ai, they fail to account for her being a flawed human who needs other people just like the rest of us do.

[aihoshiino]

I have a question do you think that the two hairpins for these people Kyun and Nino have any symbolism for their characters and the animals themselves 

Nino's panda hairpin is pretty straightforward! It's more of an in-universe thing than the layered bunny symbolism Ai has.

In chapter 109, when we're first introduced to Yura, she introduces this idea of actresses with name recognition being used as 'pandas' to attract an audience.

Chapter 117 ties this motif to Kana, too - the chapter is even called 'Panda'.

At the time, this was more about connecting Kana to Yura (as she is becoming increasingly heavily foreshadowed as a potential Kamiki victim) but it also served as foreshadowing for the B-Komachi member she'd be playing - people correctly guessed based on this that she'd be playing Nino (even if we didn't know her name at the time).

As it later turns out, though, Nino was also a panda in the way that OnK has assigned it symbolism - she was used as an attraction to draw in an audience, at least before Ai joined B-Komachi.

As for Kyun and penguins...

I have no shame in admitting I have no idea lol. People smarter than me, sound off with ideas in the notes!

[aihoshiino]

when Kyuun found the lyrics "Lying Me.” and this "Optimism and good cheer... I guess those things are all lies for Ai. The truth is that she's in pain and suffering, to the extent that even writing lyrics like this makes her a liar." I thought it was heartwarming when she said this because she was one of the people who noticed her pain and suffering and acknowledged it.

YEAH EXACTLY!! I think this is why Viewpoint B is my favourite of the two Akasaka side stories, specifically for this sort of bittersweet element. It's such a fleeting connection and it doesn't really change much about Ai's situation but it still *happens*. Ai gets the proof of something she's been searching for her whole life - that there really are people who can get a peek at her true self and not recoil in disgust. Kyun might not have been the person to wholeheartedly unconditionally embrace her in the way she needed to be, but the acceptance that Kyun affords her in Viewpoint B must have been so incredibly wonderful to experience. It's really no wonder Ai describes her as the B-Komachi member she was closest to, even years later.

[aihoshiino]

In Viewpoint B (thank you for that TL of it, by the way!), Ai says to Kyun that she was a liar even before becoming an idol. Ai also describes herself as a liar in her inner monologue in the flashback to when she was scouted in Chapter 8/Episode 1. Do you have any ideas about what lies/"lies" she could be referring to, or how her self-hatred generates this specific self-perception?

You're very welcome – glad you enjoyed! Viewpoint B is my favourite of the sidestories so I'm really happy I was able to make it more available to everyone else, too.

Talking about 'lies' in OnK is kind of messy sometimes, honestly! I think this is where a lot of the weirder/more off base interpretations of Ai in the fandom come from because people get tripped up by how the story uses the word and assume that it begins and ends with the very literal dictionary definition of like, "an intentionally false directly expressed statement". And while this isn't not part of what OnK means when it talks about lies, there's a lot more going on than that.

'Lies' in OnK are essentially an umbrella term being used to cover a whole shitload of thematic ground via abstraction. When Oshi no Ko talks about lies, it's talking about falsehoods, inauthenticity, the sanitized and manufactured versions of ourselves we wear for social approval, the idea of persona, celebrity culture, idol culture, parasocial relationships, abuse, purity culture, misogyny, art, fiction, mental illness, love, hate and all manner of other things.

"Holy shit, Claire" you may presumably say "That's a whole lot of things for just one word to cover???"

And I would say... yep it is! But that's why just one word is used — because the story has so much ground it wants to cover, some of it needs to be abstracted just to not exhaust the audience. To quote Dan Olson's weirdly relevant video on the NC's The Wall review:

"Abstraction is, counter-intuitively, really efficient. It allows a movie to be about a lot of things simultaneously by letting symbols bleed into each other. [...] Symbols shift and merge and break apart, juxtaposed and contrasted in order to create an impression of their interconnected relationship in a way that is difficult to do with mere words."

Accordingly, it's a little hard to express this idea without just vaguely waving my hands and going "oooo the vibes" but I think it is something you end up just kind of vibing with when you have spent enough time chewing on the characters and why they do and say the things they do.

In Ai's case, when she talks about 'lies', she is generally referring to the performance of a sanitized and idealized self by omitting the parts of herself that do not line up with her public image. I've previously noodled on this topic in an older post that I still stand by and this basic idea still forms the foundation of most of my Ai analysis: "Really, the biggest “lie” Ai is telling is the one people have demanded she tell: the illusion of an eternally pure and cheerful idol. But being an idol has become so forcibly entangled in Ai’s personhood at the expense of allowing her to just be a human that of course she thinks of herself as a liar for being unable to live up to that image."

To Ai, any failure to disclose her true, ugly self is a lie. Her performance of a self that other people find lovable is the thing she thinks of as lying. It's also worth noting that in both Viewpoint B and her flashback, she's describing her younger self in hindsight and attributing the label of 'liar' to her rather than this being something Ai called herself before meeting Saitou, who went on to completely rewire her brain by teaching her that this performance for social approval was lying and that it was okay and even necessary for her to do it.

I also think Ai's history of abuse at her mom's hands also contributed to this a great deal. I, uh, don't want to go too deep into this in my silly Oshi no Ko meta tag but speaking from experience: growing up with a parent like Ayumi, you get really good at lying. You get really good at saying "I'm sorry", "I forgive you" and whatever the fuck else they want to hear from you just to calm them down and make them happy. You get really, really good at performing the most perfectly sanitized version of yourself possible just to keep the peace. Knowing just how long and how violently Ai was being abused by Ayumi, it's really hard for me to not project that survival tactic onto her.

[aihoshiino]

chapter 129 thoughts

Takamine confirmed! She's the B-Komachi member with the dog pin, which confirms that Watanabe is the girl with the frog pin. I honestly think I felt a bigger sense of closure over that than anything else in this chapter......................

Takamine's open hostility as portrayed in the movie is also interesting, though it does make me raise an eyebrow. It contrasts Kyun's description of B-Komachi from Viewpoint B where she explicitly says there was no bullying - even in 45510, the narrator only ever mentions one of the girls starting shit with Ai and never any internal nastiness. If the 45510 narrator is Takamine, this makes sense given that she's quick to insist she's just giving Nino some tough love and that hostility framed as reverence matches the 45510 narrator's entanglement of desire and spite directed towards Ai.

Still, it does feel like a nod that we should be taking the framing of the movie with a grain of salt - this is a fictionalized, dramatized version of events filtered through at least two very pissed off people, after all. Aqua, if nothing else, has good reason to make the people who were cruel to his mother look particularly bad and the screenplay has been described as a particularly malicious one.

Akane interacting with characters who aren't Aqua!!! Blessed be!!! Honestly, the Akane & Kana interactions this chapter got a good chuckle out of me, moreso than I was expecting. Akane's "i'm not having fun bullying her :)" [internally: i'm having the time of my life] made me do a solid out loud Sensible Chuckle. That said, I really do hope the movie arc takes this chance to progress their dynamic past this sniping, because as funny as it is... man, they've been doing this shit since before Tokyo Blade and I've said before that it feels so weird to me that the end of that arc ends on what should feel like a big change in the status quo of their relationship but it's largely just been the same hostility over and over and over again.

On that note, it feels odd we didn't get a reaction of any kind from him to Ruby's portrayal of Ai given how uncanny the similarity is, down to Mengo basically just drawing her as Ai with one hoshigan this entire chapter lol.

Speaking of Ai... I think the best way to nail down how this chapter made me feel was uneasy.

I'm hoping this is me focusing too much on something that's ultimately not important, but the idea that Ai's 'hidden feelings' were those of anger really doesn't sit right with me - especially with the implication that this anger was fundamental enough to Ai's person that Ruby needed to tap into it to properly portray her.

I'm not at all against OnK diving into the idea that Ai had darker, messier feelings than the ones we've been privy to. In fact, I think it would be a good way of resolving a trap it threatens to fall into sometimes, where Ai is a bit of a 'perfect' victim as far as storytelling is concerned and letting her having some blemishes would be interesting.

My issue here is more that this characterization of Ai hiding anger specifically is what feels weird to me - it doesn't feel like it coheres with the Ai we get such a clear view of in volume 1 and Viewpoint B. The impression I get much, much more strongly there is of deep sadness and loneliness, desperation and fear. If there is anger, it's pointed inwards at herself in frustration and self-blame, so the idea that Ruby needs to Be Angry to properly get across Ai's feelings on camera makes me more than a little worried for where the movie arc is going to go in terms of characterizing Ai lol.

Basically, I don't necessarily mind the story deciding to recontexualize Ai and add this new layer of hidden bitterness so long as it's actually consistent and additive characterization and not just replacing and retconning what we've been given before.

Again, though, this is in-universe fiction that has been dramatized and warped to suit a very pissed off person's malicious purposes, so I think there's some wiggle room in terms of how accurate it can be assumed to be in its portrayal of Ai herself.

I also have mixed feelings about the way Gotanda's directing is being portrayed, but that's something I'll be able to dig into and talk about more the more we see of it.

[aihoshiino]

what's your #1 chapter/moment? by character if you're up to writing another essay

"if you're up to writing another essay". you guys know me so well <3

For the sake of not taking like 8 weeks to answer this ask, I'll limit this to just the Hoshinos for now.

Ai: So, my actual fave Ai moment is not from the manga itself so I'll pick my fave manga moment then talk about my actual fave moment. It's fine, she's my favourite so she gets preferential treatment!!!! (saitou behaviour……)

From the manga itself, my favourite Ai moment is her death, believe it or not lol. I'm one of the Oshi no Sickos who think her arc being capped by her death is narratively speaking the perfect conclusion to everything we learn about her life – the entertainment industry ruined every opportunity Ai ever had at a normal life up to and having that conclude with Ai's literal, actual life being taken by an embodiment of the misogyny and violence that's been inflicted on her since she was a child is such a miserable, cathartic bit of tragedy. But moreso than that, what resonates with me so strongly about this moment is how Ai responds to it - or rather, how she fails to respond.

Even though it would make so much sense for her to be bitter or angry or upset, she makes an active choice to spend her last moments alive pouring out love and literally spends her last breaths on telling Ruby and Aqua she loves them. It says so, so much about what a deeply kind and incredibly strong person Ai is that she was able to do that.

My actual favourite Ai moment is her conversation with Kyun in Viewpoint B and the reveal that their meeting in the park was so impactful to Ai that it lead her to consider Kyun her closest friend for years afterwards. Like her death, the way Ai goes out of her way to approach Kyun and try to reach out to her speaks so deeply so her kindness and her desire to connect with other people and there's a little part of me that always wonders if maybe if this fleeing friendship had come to pass for real, Ai might have been saved. At the very least, there's something bitterly sweet about knowing that for as alone as Ai was in B-Komachi, she had someone she called a friend even so.

Aqua: Honestly, I love so many Aqua moments, it's hard to pick just one but I will never be over the Piyeon ruse. Aqua was so put out by the girl he has a crush on not talking to him that he dressed as a bodybuilding chicken with a squeaky voice for a week. Literally the most teenage thing any teenager in this series has done. Embarrassing ass kid.

My actual serious answer is Aqua's breakdown during Tokyo Blade - specifically, the 'internal' scenes where he's confronted by both Goro and his younger self. These are so, so important for getting at the core of who Aqua really is and they're honestly bone-chilling to read. Seeing Goro as this malicious, intrusive force who is preventing Aqua from being happy, seeing the words he batters Aqua with and realizing that this is the kind of shit Aqua probably thinks about himself every day honestly kind of turns my stomach a bit! It's clear before this that Aqua struggles with self-hate and self-blame but seeing the sheer extent of it is so horrible.

That this confrontation essentially climaxes in the hallway where Ai died, with Aqua face to face with his younger self, also underlines something that's really fundamental to understanding who Aqua is; at his core, Aqua has never stopped being that little boy covered in his mother's blood. He has, emotionally speaking, never been able to leave that hallway and until he allows himself to do so, he's going to continue self destructing and taking everyone down with him.

It's honestly the scene I'm most excited to see animated... season 2 can't come soon enough!!!

Ruby: Without a doubt it has to be her and Ai's dance practice scene back in volume 1, but especially in the anime's portrayal of it. I think OnK's handling of the past life stuff is at its best in moments like this, where it actually meaningfully engages with what it would mean for someone to carry such deep trauma from their past and how it would continue to affect them going forward. We get little hints of this leading up to it, like Ruby outright saying she's never thought about her future (implicitly because she was aware she would not have one as Sarina) and the way she so enthusiastically gives her all to playing and having fun with other kids at school - because those are things that she never got to do as Sarina. But her dance scene and her thoughts leading up to it really hammer in just how deeply this has affected Ruby - she spends almost three years living with the expectation that at any moment, her body will betray and hurt her for seemingly no reason to the point that it affects how she walks and carries herself moment to moment.

This is also a really good Ai moment for her as a moment and it also highlights something really special about Ai and Ruby's relationship I feel we don't get as much post-timeskip; how genuinely healing and wonderful their connection was for both of them. I've talked before about the running motif of toxic motherhood on Oshi no Ko and how Ai, as a character, is sort of a refutation of the other shitty oshi no moms in the series. Knowing that both Ai and Ruby are victims of toxic mothers, it makes it so deeply, incredibly powerful that these two victims find healing and acceptance in each other and the genuinely loving and supportive mother/daughter bond they have with each other.

The anime's version of this scene is also just easily one of its biggest highlights for me. The gorgeous colours, the overlapping of Sarina and Ruby's voices and the palpable affection Ruby and Ai have for each other... it's just so lovely and it makes me a little teary-eyed every time I watch it. The transformation of Sarina's sorrow into Ruby's joy and empowerment is such an important foundational part of Ruby's arc in the first part of the series and I'm so glad the anime really got it right.

[aihoshiino]

Ninos real name is revealed to be called fuyuko niino, there is abundant of symbolism in her name like her given name for example it has the kanji for winter this can note to how shes stuck in one point in time and refuses to move on always in a cold winter. 

the kanji for Ni means “new, change, reform�� I find that has irony in her character if you consider her character in the story and series. no has the same kanji as ai's no it means wild or wilderness can mean "of" in Japanese. what do you think her name means?

I don't think the 'Niino' part of her name is super meaningful - moreso that it was just extrapolated backwards from her stage name being 'Nino'.

I think the 'Fuyuko' part of her name is really interesting, though. Like you said, I think it signifies her being trapped in time, unable to move forward... but more specifically, it represents her being unable to move on from Ai's death, which is symbolically connected to winter in OnK - it snows three days after she dies, after all, and in Viewpoint B, Kyun draws the comparison more explicitly by saying that her memory of that day is tangled up with the idea of snowfall and that even though, logically, she knows that the snow didn't come until later, she has an emotional association between snowfall and the day Ai died.

In that sense, you could say that Nino is so defined by Ai's death that it even supersedes her own identity.

[aihoshiino]

I see you saying that there are no canon lovey dovey ships for Ai and I raise you: AI X KYUN, WHADDYA THINK?

anon i need you to know that the way you phrased this caused me to read this ask in the voice of patrick bateman and now i want to see an OnK ship discourse version of the business card scene. someone with photoshop skills PLEASE get on that.

ANYWAY... I actually do like the bones of Ai/Kyun a lot but it's one of those f/f dynamics I actually like way more as a really supportive Girl Friendship than I do as a romance. I think if they were gonna date, it would be one of those ships where they were friends for yeeeeears before romance ever entered the picture.

I mentioned this in a comment on @hexcodewisteria's excellent fic The Lyric Book (WHICH YOU SHOULD GO AND READ RIGHT NOW I AM NO LONGER ASKING) but the take I like on Ai/Kyun is one where there is a tenderness and intimacy that almost supersedes romance and makes it irrelevant in the face of the joy and relief of finding a person who understands and accepts you.

Without getting Too Personal, I'm a very romance disinclined person in real life to the point of being like 70% sure I'm somewhere on the aro spectrum and I also grew without the experience of having a close friend I could absolutely rely on until I was about 17 and my friendships with other girls and other queer people in particular were my salvation. So as much as I love it when The Girls Kiss, there's something really meaningful and powerful to me about intense and supportive female friendships in media too, because I see all the people who saved me in them.

[aihoshiino]

I haven't read the Spica novel since I don't know Japanese, so your latest ONK post had me wondering why you thought it was a bad novel?

So full disclosure: I have not read Spica in full yet in its original form but I have been working on a TL of the free preview which was posted by the publishers (which you can see here) and the rough TLs/summaries posted by folks in the fandom who bought the book - I, uh, feel slightly off about directly linking to those since they are reproducing content from a paid published release and I don't know exactly where that falls in terms of Piracy And OnK Leaks which I know Mengo especially feels really bad about, but you can easily find them by looking up the associated search terms on Pastebin (tho be aware, you apparently have to be logged in to search Pastebin's database??? TIL I guess)

If it wasn't for the free preview, I'd be more willing to put some of my issues with it down to just TL choices made by people who were quickly summarizing the novel for the fandom but like... between having access to the actual prose and how much the summary TLs are just straight up giving you chunks from the novel, there was enough consistency with the stuff that was not passing the smell check that I feel pretty confident in saying that Spica just flat out has issues. I actually did a bit of a ramble elsewhere talking about my issues with it way more concisely than my initial attempt here

(message from claire 40+ minutes after writing the above sentence: i'm sorry. i'm so sorry. i lied. the following passage is 900+ words long.)

Spica stands out pretty distinctly from Akasaka's short stories in that the Tanaka written parts of the novel are all in third person limited POV vs 45510 and Viewpoint B being in first person. Spica also has the issue of being EXTREMELY heavyhanded and hamfisted in terms of its emotional beats to the point where I felt it was straight up tacky and emotionally manipulative at multiple points, in ways that betrayed the spirit of the story it was trying to tell.

Like, as a point of contrast, in Viewpoint B, Ai casually mentions that she's on the verge of aging out of the children's home she was in and that her relatives who were supposed to adopt her backed out and dumped her after meeting her for the first time. The story does not linger on this beat, aside from Kyun's stunned reaction that something so shitty is happening to the invincible seeming Ai. The situation is just laid out in front of the reader and they are allowed to have their own emotions naturally arise from their own sense of empathy for Ai. In contrast, in the Ai-centric prologue to Spica, the story cannot go more than a few exchanges of dialogue without hammering in just how horrible everyone in Ai's life is to her and how tragic everything is. It is SO eager to do this that it trips into straight up contradicting how Akasaka has talked about these events and it's not the only time.

It's maybe a nitpicky complaint, but there are a lot of small moments in Spica that have timeline snarls or just contradictions in vibes and tone that make it feel like it was written by someone who just… didn't really know or care all that much about Oshi no Ko. For example, the first song Sarina makes Gorou listen to is implied to be Sign wa B and he quotes its opening line ("We're your idols, the sign is B!") while talking about it. The issue here is that Sign wa B wasn't released until after Ai came back from her hiatus following the twins' birth so its appearance here is at least four years out from it actually being created.

There are various other small timeline snarls like that and a few that are not necessarily textual contradictions but feel off from how things are portrayed in the manga — Gorou being totally ignorant of how bad Sarina's condition is in Spica vs the implication that he was well aware of it in the main manga. These sort of contradictions happen because the story is CONSTANTLY reaching for like… there's no kind way to describe this, but it is constantly grabbing at cheap emotional payoff by leaning excessively on references and calls forward to beats from the main story, hamfistedly setting them up and repeating them so clumsily that it almost feels like it cheapens them by comparison. To once again talk about Ai, because the Battle Royale collar around my neck will go off if I go more than 1000 words without doing so, the epilogue of Spica has this absolutely fucking excruciating conversation between Ai and Ichigo where they look up at the actual Spica star itself and Ichigo goes off on this random tangent about how it's a BINARY, TWIN STAR known for its AQUAMARINE SHINE and Ai (who is 12 at this point btw lol) has this whooooole speech about how it's so lovely that the star has a twin so it's never alone and she hopes that if SHE has a family that SHE has twins and WOOOOWWW WOULDN'T THAT BE CRAZYYYY… and basically the whole novel is like this. It's like the emotional equivalent of the fucking Superdictionary LMFAO

My other big issue with Spica is just that I absolutely despise how it chooses to characterize Sarina. While I can't necessarily say she's OOC just because there's so little Actual Sarina Herself pagetime in OnK, there's this really… honestly skeevy as fuck bent to the way she's written in Spica that actually really upsets me. Spica really leans into sexualizing her feelings for Gorou in a way that feels like pandering to people who have a thing for bratty, uppity loli characters perving on adult men. It 99.99999999999% almost absolutely definitely was not but those are the only words I can find to describe the vibes here.

The INSTANT she and Gorou meet, before they've ever had a full conversation or ever started idol fangirling together, Sarina immediately goes GOSH WHAT IF I WANTED TO BE UR GF ;) and makes a joke in her brain about Gorou being an S (Sadist) and not an M (Masochist). Later, after the two of them have spent time together and she's come to a bit of epiphany about her feelings for him, Sarina cries and laments his lack of interest in her, putting it down to the fact that she has "absolutely no charm as a woman" and like… I'm sorry but what the actual fuck is going on here!!! Sarina is twelve years old!! She is a prepubescent child!!!! NOTHING about Sarina's behaviour in OnK or her upbringing that we hear about elsewhere has the slightest indication that it should organically result in her articulating herself like that. There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a child developing a puppy love crush on a reliable adult like a doctor or a teacher because… that stuff happens in real life! You can write that stuff without it feeling creepy or objectifying but Spica absolutely indulges in both of those things.

I'm forcing myself to stop here because I genuinely thought this was going to be a quick response banged out before I had to start dinner prep and then I ended up in hell but the long and short of it is that I feel like the Spica-original portions of the novel just... betray the spirit of OnK in a way that I really don't enjoy. To put it in academic terms, it just lacks the sauce.

[aihoshiino]

who are your favorite OnK characters (apart from Ai)?

i love that you clarified 'apart from Ai' because my blorbo brainrot derangement so thoroughly speaks for itself <3

From the main cast, I'd say my faves are Kana, Aqua and Ruby in that order. Up to Tokyo Blade I'd say I like all of them about equally, but from TB onwards, it's more like Kana --> Aqua ----> Ruby. Not that I dislike Ruby or anything…? There's just some weird bumps in how she's characterized post Tokyo Blade and I especially just really don't like Black Hoshigan Ruby as presented in the manga so she's kind of a miss for me in that regard lol. I looooove her in the first 30-40 chapters of the manga though and especially the anime… Yurie Igoma's portrayal of her is so cute and sweet and earnest. It's fucking insane to me that Ruby is her first main role in a show?? I rly can't wait to see where her career goes from here because I really think she's gonna blow up.

ANYWAY… From the side cast… Melt my beloved <3 His arc in Tokyo Blade is so fucking good and tbh his interlude chapter was easily my favourite of his. Sooooo excited to see his glowup moments in season 2. I'm also really fond of Miyako for similar reasons! The anime especially does a ton to make her and Ai's relationship a lot warmer and closer and that combined with her relationship with the twins has me so fond of her. I like Ichigo a lot as well, though that's kind of mostly just in the context of his and Ai's relationship and the Strawberry Productions family dynamic in general and I'm not necessarily crazy invested in him as a character on his own.

I also ADORE Kyun and Nino. Viewpoint B is my favourite OnK sidestory and Kyun and her relationship with Ai are a big part of that. I'm also SOOOOOOO excited to see more of Nino in the main story… I was always so fascinated by the 45510 narrator and the mess of emotions that story lays out re: her relationship with Ai so it's been such a surprise and a delight to see her getting additional development and seeing her relationship with Ai being fleshed out even more. Huge w for gay people and evil women enjoyers everywhere.

This also might sound bonkers but uh, Ayumi Hoshino is also one of my favourite side characters?? Yeah, Ai's shitty mom! I am just so endlessly fascinated by her and am really sincerely in awe of how incredibly well realized and well characterized she is across the literal four pages of on-screen panel time she gets in the entire manga. Her abuse is so, so foundational to literally everything about Ai and her presence was this horrible black smear across Ai's past that we could never get a proper look at, so the absolute gutpunch that was the anticlimax of seeing her in person for the first time and realizing how sad and pathetic and normal she was……………. bro…………………. I may have a lot of issues with how Akasaka writes certain things in OnK but he writes toxic moms in such a raw and real way, I can't get enough of it