#oh lord i was gona say something but i forgot OOPS

[todayisafridaynight]

GENUINELY so funny AraSawa occurred to you too for the hanahaki tags, but thinking about it, I appreciate both scenarios for different (but related?) reasons.

Because I've personally always found the base concept of hanahaki aesthetically immaculate, but impossible to relate to or take seriously. They don't love you back Specifically In A Romantic Sense so your options are either to DIE or have a surgeon come in and delete love.exe? Lol. Lmao even. Couldn't be me. Of course, to each their own, but sort of like what you were saying with Aoki and Yumeno, it's just not something I'm ever going to "get."

With MineDai, something I love about the canon dynamic is that I really don't get the impression Mine's even pressed about Daigo loving him back. Of course, there's a degree of "pining" as shown in his first character story, but it's also immediately subverted in that what Mine was pining for is a simple workplace friendship that would be more reflective of their status as oath brothers in his eyes. Like, fair enough, all things considered, right?

And in spite of the arguments that could be made here, I honestly do believe him overall when he says his love for Daigo is selfless and without ulterior motives. Even with his desire for friendship, it's super important to me that he resolved to never impose that upon Daigo unless it was what Daigo wanted. That's why Daigo had to be the one to initiate their friendship instead.

It's just refreshing, because often the execution of these types of concepts feel sort of adjacent to incel rhetoric in forcing two people together inorganically to lessen the "suffering" of one. Especially with the life-or-death nature of hanahaki played-straight pushing it to an extreme, and especially with the enormous backlog of fan-content where Mine is primarily only concerned with his own desires. But for Mine, because it doesn't cause him Suffering to not be loved back romantically (at least as far as he knows), "the problem of hanahaki" would not about The Pain of Unrequited Love, but a physical manifestation of extant problems.

It'd be about obliviousness, it'd be about miscommunication, it'd be about saying he's fine when he's not, it'd be about how the emotional barriers he puts up only serve to hurt him when his needs are unmet (kind of what we were talking about RE: Katase and past relationships; super excited to dig in and reply btw, I'm just rushing the Yokoyama clip for tomorrow), it'd be about workaholism and the need to overachieve in order to feel accomplished, loved, and wanted, and how all of that might intersect with physical illness.

That I can relate to and take seriously, because ignoring symptoms and keeping them to yourself so as to not inconvenience others really can kill you. Your crush not liking you back? Uh, not so much. But it's certainly not all gloom and doom either, because all of those things can be as comedic as they are tragic. So I think the Short, Sweet and Funny approach would be perfect.

And with AraSawa, it's kind of Just Works, right, precisely because it's another thing for Jo to endure in silence and make excuses for. "Just pretend it didn't happen. Brush it under the rug. That's what you do with secrets." It's so good as a representation of guilt and secrecy. And this is pretty much rehashing something my friend said (not about these two specifically) but if he just came clean, it might stop, but instead he continues to hurt both of them. The flavor.

In the case of Hanahaki for Mine and Jo, I do think and agree it would more be a matter not of their 'beloved' not liking them back, but just the fact they themselves either refuse to openly acknowledge the feeling, or don't try to confront the feeling and do something about it. It's more so an issue of themselves being so focused on being useful and overworking themselves that they give themselves sickness (that sickness spurring from that unspoken of love and the inability to express it because they don't know how to and whatnot)

Maybe it's just because I generally try to see things silly and funny, but yeah I dunno: letting your own overthinking or not wanting to be a disturbance just feels better than what's traditionally done with Hanahaki