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redge · 6 months ago

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Oshi no Ko Chapter 154

I need an outlet for this chapter so instead of posting a thread on Twitter (X), I'll just post my thoughts here.

Rereading this chapter while listening to this song on repeat. 💔

I despise Airi Himekawa. I don't know what horrible things has happened to her but no one, not even Hikaru Kamiki, deserved what happened to him as a child. Airi molesting this child is what started this all and I hate her.

For him to actually tell Ai "let's get married!" like that's the most normal thing going forward like "Taiki's my son I don't know what to do about it but with you, I will take responsibilty so let's get married" oh gosh just by typing this and knowing what are on the next pages is crushing me 😭

Also, Ai 😭 Would she know better? They're both so young that time but Ai left him because she wanted to take responsibility and lift the burden off Kamiki when they could have... 😭

And the way Kamiki just accepted it as it is even when he was so broken because he also believes he's undeserving of Ai or anyone's love 😭

But broken people do crazy shits and one of the craziest thing young broken Kamiki did was to tell her address to Ryosuke. But oh to read this line:

"The despair I felt when the girl I loved so much... That I was willing to sacrifice my life for... told me she couldn't love me." 💔😭

"We were just forcing our fantasies on Ai." He understood the lie she built as an idol but not the most important lie she told him I am heartbroken and I am typing this hearing the lyrics "it's torturous, tonight is gonna be the loneliest" SEND HELP 😭

The DVD oh my god 😭 Imagine how Hikaru might have felt after hearing Ai's voice for the first time in a long time, talking about him, how she understood how he was crushed by the entertainment industry, how she knows he's depending on him.

"The truth is, I really wanted to be with him forever. I wanted to carry the burden he carried and raise our children together. I wanted to live my future with him. After all, he's the first person I've ever wanted to love. Even though I don't really understand love."

"The first person I've ever wanted to love" From this line, you can't help but think, maybe when she was stabbed and said "I love you" to her children then the sigh of relief "I finally said it" maybe it was because on the first time, she wasn't able to say it properly to Kamiki, knowing in her heart that he was the first person she wanted to love. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 Tears. Just tears. The Entertainment Industry-idols and artists- give happiness to their audience but at what cost?! Both of them were willing to take the risk and thinking of a future together but it's too late now because Ai is gone and whose fault? 😭😭😭

If Aqua's revenge is to crush his father mentally, make him live or die in regret, than good job Aqua because as a reader, I don't feel anything but regret reading through these panels. 😭

And then that last panel with Ruby. Makes me think that maybe she actually know who Kamiki was in chapter 146. Maybe she was not seeking answer from god, but she was trying to get an answer from her father because she knew all along that the man with umbrella was her father, because everytime she visits Ai's grave, she see's him visiting too. What a plot twist it would be if it was actually Ruby who's the first one who knew that Hikaru Kamiki was their father.

Ah. The story of Ai and Kamiki is so heartbreaking it resonates with this lyrics from The Loneliest by Maneskin:

You'll be the saddest part of me

A part of me that will never be mine

It's obvious

Tonight is gonna be the loneliest

Akakasa-sensei, I respect you and your writing. What a chapter.

#oshi no ko #onk #onk chapter 154 #hikaru kamiki #kamiki hikaru #ai hoshino #hoshino ai #aqua hoshino #hoshino aqua #ruby hoshino #hoshino ruby #just go to hell you idiot aqua #this chapter was really heartbreaking all the what could have beens regrets ugh

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skania · 6 months ago

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Oshi no Ko Chapter 154 Thoughts - Or the many many parallels between Ai/Kamiki and Akane/Aqua

In my post about last chapter, I listed a number of parallels showing that the way Kamiki felt about Ai is very reminiscent of the way Aqua felt about Akane.

I also said:

if Aka pulls that, then that would confirm that all of these parallels are very much intentional.

And what did Aka pull this chapter?

To top it off, now it isn't only Kamiki's feelings that parallel Aqua's. Ai's feelings are very much like Akane's, to the point that she nearly quotes her word for word at times 😭

I'll start chronologically because the amount of parallels is just insane. To keep this short, I won't bring up the Kamiki/Aqua parallels since I already went over those here. I'll just focus on Ai!

Ai didn't want to break up with Kamiki, but she did it because she feared that she and her children would be burdens to him, who was almost on the verge of breaking due to the weight of life.

Does that ring any bells?

Akane didn't want to break up with Aqua, but she was willing to do so because she feared that she and their fake relationship were burdening him by worsening the weight of his guilt.

Ai wanted to stay with Kamiki forever, just like Akane with Aqua.

Ai wanted to carry Kamiki's burden and walk into the future with him, just like Akane with Aqua.

Ai didn't know what loving someone felt like, but Kamiki was the first time she felt she wanted to love someone that way. Akane didn't know what loving someone that way felt like, either. Aqua was her first.

Most importantly:

Ai wanted to save Kamiki, just like Akane wants to save Aqua. While it was translated as "help" in English, in Japanese Ai uses the exact same verb as Akane when she says that she wants to "save" Aqua.

Even their expressions when thinking about their wish are similar 😭

And the thing is that — technically, logically — none of this can be a coincidence, because this is a fictional story and Aka is nearly using copy-pasting to stablish these parallels. But since this is Aka we're talking about, whether this will lead anywhere or turn out to be just bait remains to be seen lol

I feel like Ai isn't only paralleling Akane this chapter though, it's also possible to establish parallels between her and Aqua. Namely, Aqua also broke up with Akane to protect her, Aqua didn't understand what love was and he showed that he wanted to love Akane despite it.

Plus, when Aqua broke up with Akane to protect her, he did so in a way that would deliberately paint him in a bad light — just like Ai with Kamiki.

I'd also like to point out that in this chapter, Ai's feelings are described as, well, "Ai" 愛. In Japan, "Ai" 愛 is the strongest form of love, which can be either platonic or romantic. This is very relevant, because by making Ai's feelings for Kamiki so strikingly similar to Akane's for Aqua, Aka has essentially confirmed strongly implied that the kind of love Akane feels for Aqua is "Ai" 愛, too.

And Ai's "Ai" 愛 was romantic.

For those who aren't familiar with the concept of "Ai" in Japan, I feel like this post explains it very well:

愛 (Ai): sacrificial, unconditional, love for the other person's sake (often parallels the Greek agape, but can extend into philos as sawa mentions) 恋 (Koi): selfish, conditional, love for one's own sake (often parallels the Greek eros) While both can be used for romantic love, you cannot simply swap out one for the other. The contrast between the two shows up clearly in the したい forms of 愛する and 恋をする: 愛(Ai)したい I want to love [someone in a deep, unconditional way] 恋(Koi)がしたい I want to [fall in] love [with someone and experience the "high" of being in love]

If you ask me, the contrast between those two types of love perfectly exemplifies the difference with the way Akane's and Kana's feelings are being written. Coincidentally, Kana herself described her feelings as 恋 (Koi) in Chapter 150 lol

So considering all of this, I'm having the hardest time not seeing Kamiki and Ai as a sort of "failed" Aqua and Akane. Kamiki and Ai were too broken, and neither could handle their relationship in a healthy way despite their best intentions and how much they loved each other. Kamiki was too dependant on her, Ai broke up with him in the clumsiest way possible and Kamiki lashed out in a selfish, tragic way.

I'd argue that despite their mishaps, Aqua and Akane have already shown that they're healthier than Kamiki and Ai were. Even when he was at his lowest, Aqua was self-aware and did his best to not depend on Akane too much. When he faltered, Akane reminded him that it's important that they remain independent so they can have a healthy relationship.

Which takes me to something I think is very important:

Ai thought that Kamiki would be fine without her, but she was wrong. If she had been right, then maybe she would be alive today and she and Kamiki would've gotten back together later down the line.

I'm sure that Akane, too, thinks that Aqua will be fine without her. Aqua most definitely thinks the same thing about Akane.

And for them to be able to have a healthy relationship, it's important for them to be right. They need to be able to be fine without the other, and as of now, it seems like Aqua is finally making progress in that regard.

But what about being happier? Akane was at her happiest when she was with Aqua, and according to Aqua himself, it was the same for him. If we forget all the recent fiascos for a second and entertain the thought of Akane and Aqua once again, I feel like this should be the biggest factor into whether or not they get back together.

After all, if they get back together it shouldn't be because Aqua can't function without Akane. It should be because he wants to be with her (and she with him). So if Aka were to be a good writer allow them to find their way back to each other, this time spent apart could be crucial to let them restart on a healthy base.

But I digress! 😂 Instead of getting ahead of myself, I just want to enjoy the fact that these parallels are right there for everyone to see. At least no matter what happens, we now pretty much have confirmation that the way Aka wrote Aqua and Akane was both, romantic and the strongest form of love.

As for the plot, the fact that Ai's wish was this clear kind of opens an entire can of worms questions-wise. Moreover, I feel like if telling Kamiki that Ai loved him was Aqua's revenge plan all along, things like these would make very little sense in retrospective:

So for the sake of logic, I'm inclined to believe that Aqua, who didn't know what love was and who held a grudge against Kamiki, may have wanted to believe that Ai truly couldn't love Kamiki. He may have desperately wanted to believe that Ai was saying the truth, because otherwise taking revenge against Kamiki would mean going against Ai's wishes.

I feel like Aqua originally misinterpreting Ai's words is supported by the fact that even during the movie recording, Aqua was shown to not understand Ai.

So, what changed his mind? What made him finally realize that Ruby's portrayal was right and that Ai truly did love Kamiki?

Plus, Aqua has had that DVD for years now, which means that nothing was stopping him from realizing that Akane herself was echoing Ai's feelings for Kamiki throughout their relationship.

But I better stop myself right here, because if I start theorizing about this there will be no end to it. The possibilities are endless, so I'd rather just wait and let Aka either pleasantly surprise like he did this chapter me or continue to disappoint me as he is prone to do 😂

edit;

I just realized there are even more parallels when you get down to it. I mentioned before in my Chapter 97 post that during the phone-call that ultimately leads to their break-up, Aqua and Akane are like two ships in the night. They both want the same thing (to stay together), but in her haste to help him, Akane makes a choice that leads to their separation.

The same thing happens with Ai and Kamiki. They both want the same thing (to stay together), but in her haste to not burden him, Ai chooses to walk away from him.

Ai doesn't understand her own love and is thus unable to understand the extent of Kamiki's. She makes the mistake of thinking that the best way to save Kamiki is to not impose more burdens on him, when all he wanted was to stay with her. I'd argue something very similar happened with Akane. She made the mistake of thinking that the best way to help Aqua was to carry out his revenge for him, when all Aqua wanted from her was to remain by her side.

#akane kurokawa #aqua hoshino #aquaka #aquakane #oshi no ko spoilers #fandom: onk #my aquakane meta #aaaaand break again #if aqua had that dvd all along he could've shown it to akane at any point so that she'd translate ai for him #but boy was too busy dating her for that lmaaao #Akane getting the Vol 15 cover after all is such a let down though #even more so because she couldn't even get it all to herself #Aka giveth and Mengo taketh away I guess 😭

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aihoshiino · 6 months ago

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chapter 154 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 11

Aqua Hoshigan Status: (Still) white

man

This is one of those chapters where, technically speaking, I should probably be tearing it to bits (AND I DEFINITELY WILL) - it represents a pretty substantial break in or retcon to the series continuity as it's been presented to us thus far and the actions of certain characters in the lead up to this event don't quite make sense if they've had access to some of the information that's seemingly been in their hands for a while but… would you guys forgive me if I said I didn't really care LOL. As I've said before, I'm the sort of reader who can excuse a lot of raw Plot Bullshit so long as I feel like the hearts of the characters are intact and for all its fumbles, this is a chapter I think is unerringly dedicated to the hearts of its characters. I've made no secret of the fact that Ai is and always has been my main avenue of investment in Oshi no Ko as a series and in this chapter, we uncover the final secret in her heart in particular after having the entire series thus far dedicated to laying it bare to us.

We pick up exactly where we left off last chapter with the reveal that the HKAI breakup was indeed founded on Ai's pregnancy, as a lot of us had predicted.

This, uh, does not quite line up with previous events!

From what we'd previously been told, in terms of placement in the timeline, the death of Airi and her husband happened after the twins were born and sometime in the leadup to the Dome concert, which would put it in the ballpark of Ai's 18th to 20th birthday depending on how long it was in the works for. But based on how this flashback section is structured, it seems to place their deaths before Ai even knew she was pregnant, let alone giving birth. If it was just clashing with 15YL's retelling then I could dismiss that as an element of the movie's fictionalization that we've seen and Kamiki alludes to but this also clashes with where this event was placed temporally by Ichigo, when remembering a real life event. So… What gives!!!!

Like, at the end of the day, the exact placement of Uehara's death only matters inasmuch as it needs to be before Ai gets her new apartment, since the point Ichigo is really making is that Aqua is pinning his hopes on a dead man who was dead before he could have ever contributed to Ai's murder. But placing it that far back in the timeline - before the twins were even born! - just makes Aqua's willful ignorance in relation to it come off as a lot sillier and more difficult to swallow than if it happened closer to Ai's actual date of death.

I'm also a little disappointed that we really quickly breeze past Ai revealing she's pregnant - it's not the point of the scene overall and it would be weird to go really deep into her POV in the middle of a Kamiki flashback but one of my big issues with the Movie Arc was that it ripped past anything and everything to do with Ai's pregnancy, including how she herself felt about being pregnant. Like I said in my 145 review, skipping over the parts of it we've seen makes sense but I think there's still a bunch of really fascinating potential in exploring how Ai felt when she realized she was pregnant - how did she hide it for long enough that she was almost halfway through her pregnancy and getting fucking enormous before her first checkup? How did Ichigo and Miyako react when they first got the news? There's so much juicy character and relationship work you could mine out of that but the story fails to do so. We sort of get a crumb of this in the DVD but her feelings there are all centered on the pregnancy in relation to Hikaru and even then she breezes past it so fast it's clearly not meant to be the focus of any of what she's saying and idk. For a character whose entire hook is her struggles with motherhood, familial love and all the rest of it, that's a little disappointing.

THAT SAID!!! All that makes me sound like I didn't like what went on with Ai this chapter but I actually loved it. It's so painfully in line with everything we've been told and shown about her thus far in the manga and in this chapter, we see all her strengths, weaknesses and human contradictions laid bare in a way I find incredibly rewarding and compelling.

The HKAI breakup especially is just soooooo deliciously cringe inducing. It's an echo of the argument with Nino that 15YL portrays, where Ai's good intentions, avoidant tendencies and absolute absence of tact all snowball and end up ruining one of her most important relationships. Like… I can't believe I'm about to say this about a conversation in which Ai is one of the people talking, but she really is the reasonable one here! She's right to identify that their relationship is not working, that adding babies and marriage to the mix will only make things worse - her intentions, as they always are, are good and she's making her decisions with Kamiki in mind… her delivery is just absolutely dogshit!!! GIRL, PLEASE, YOUR WORDS!!!! USE YOUR WORDS!!!!!

For all my issues with Akasaka's writing lately, I think he portrays these kinds of two sided failures of communication so well, where you can see exactly where both characters are coming from and why they are failing to get their feelings across to each other. From an outsider's POV it's clear as day that Ai views herself and her children as the burden, one she doesn't want to put on Kamiki for the sake of a girl who doesn't even know if she can love him… but is it any wonder why Kamiki took it the way he did and why his guts were so utterly wrenched out as a result?

Kamiki's attempted proposal and Ai's immediate rejection of it are really interesting with the context of 45510 in particular. Extrapolating from her talk of marriage there, she brushed him off so quickly because she simply didn't believe he was serious… and yeah, he's pretty clearly not fully cognizant of the weight of what he's trying to propose, never mind that he's meeting "let's break up" with "LET'S GET MARRIED" lol.

Also interesting to extrapolate from both 45510 and other material surrounding Ai is that, at that point in her life, she simply didn't understand what the point of marriage was. On top of her being Literally Sixteen And A Child right now, Ai is said to have come from a deeply dysfunctional home where her mother engaged in a number of equally dysfunctional relationships, at least one of whom was with a man who was creeping on Ai even as he was working up to marry her mom. It's no wonder she doesn't really take the idea of marriage seriously, but it still hurts so see her reject Kamiki so bluntly - even more bluntly in the Japanese text somehow, simply chirping 無理! (Muri!) in response, i.e, not just "no way" but telling Kamiki to his face it's impossible.

Honestly this whole breakup scene is so darkly hilarious just in terms of how bad Ai is completely beefing it. Congrats babygirl that's the worst anyone's ever done it!!!

And we finally get the "I can't love you" drop after just shy of 25 chapters of buildup…….. And honestly, it feels a little hollow.

I talked about this a little before so forgive me for repeating myself but that line - or rather, Aqua and Ruby's implied misunderstanding of it - from Ai to Hikaru was given a huge amount of weight in the story when it was first introduced. It was implied to be the lynchpin in which everything else about the HKAI romance rested only for the story to go UH WELL ACTUALLY IT'S ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT AI FORGIVES HER KILLER which is like… fine, it just feels very jarring on a reread or when trying to sew together a plot thread like this. It especially feels strange because the emphasis is placed on them not getting it right or at least that Gotanda disagrees with their interpretation, only for the manga to whip back around and not only return this line to its previous heightened importantance but also to largely not line up with what was established about this line and its place in the narrative when it was first introduced. It's just more evidence that Akasaka's plans for the Movie Arc and its resolution changed in some way during serialisation because these inconsistencies are pretty glaring.

Not just that, but like… it's hard to feel impacted by this line when we didn't even see it in the Movie Arc. In general, it's so fucking weird that so much about the main emotional resolutions going on right now revolve around Ruby's performance in the movie when most of the big emotional moments people are reacting to are happening entirely offscreen. This would already be bad even if it wasn't taking place in a manga like OnK with its increasingly frustrating habit of offscreening more and more bits of the story that are extremely important for the characters. Before this chapter I would've said that maybe we'd see some of it after the movie released but given that Kamiki's arc and the revenge play as a whole is pretty clearly wrapping here, what would even be the point of it?

Idk. It's just increasingly obvious (and just as frustrating) to me just how much of the Movie Arc was wasted time and how much of the setup that needed to happen to make what follows really land just… didn't. This chapter's resolution for Ai and Hikaru, both separately and as a couple, is still excellent, but it could have been a lot better if its foundations weren't so meager.

We also finally get concrete proof from the horse's mouth that Kamiki was the one who deliberately leaked Ai's address and……. honestly this is kind of a wet fart too lol. OnK has previously very strongly implied that "Kamiki is Ai's killer" was a red herring or that we should at least be slightly skeptical of Aqua's assertions and conclusions but… nope, he was right all along, I guess?? Alright………………………… I certainly don't believe his insistence that gosh he totes didn't think Ryosuke would go THAT far and I'm still wondering wtf the two of them were doing at the hospital the night the twins were born but like. Honestly at this point, I don't really think it matters and I care much more about emotional resolutions than I do granular plot details - and boy do we get one hell of an emotional resolution.

I haven't shouted her out yet because I was saving it for this section but fuck, man, Mengo's expression work told chapter is killer as usual but this final stretch of pages is just gutwrenching. Ai's gentle, rueful smile on the DVD contrasted with the look of shocked, dawning understanding on Kamiki's….. Jesus Christ.

And at last, we uncover the final secret hidden at the bottom of Ai's heart. The entire manga thus far has been a process of stripping away the viewer's willful ignorance with regards to Ai's humanity but the DVDs had been an oddly ominous mystery box floating around, containing some implied dark secret that would change the entire trajectory of Ai's character as we knew it… but of course, the person who tells us that is Ai herself, a girl who hates herself, thinks of herself as dirty and impure, irresponsible and incapable of love.

So is it really any surprise that her darkest secret, the thing she can only confess with her eyes shining with black stars is simply that she's a fallible human? That she was a lonely young girl, confused and hurt in her own ways and that she hurt someone she dearly cared for and wanted to take it back?

Is it a little convenient that she put all this in the DVD? Yes, absolutely, and I'll be the first to say that the DVDs existing at all are a pretty clear retcon in service of getting info onto Aqua's hands. But it's also perfectly in line with Ai's timid, avoidant methods of reaching out. It parallels both Viewpoint B and 45510 (moreso the latter) where she pours her heart out in words, waiting for others to read and understand her. In 45510 in particular, her leaving the blog post is an extremely clear and strong parallel to the DVD - love letters put into bottles and thrown to the ocean in desperate hope the person they're addressed to might find and understand them.

As Akane says, Ai is torn between secrecy and a desire to have her true self exposed, so she attempts to craft scenarios in which this must happen, even if her avoidance can only allow her to do so with indirect methods. With the blog and moreso the DVDs & their method of delivery, Ai attempts to create situations where the initiation confrontation and disclosure is out of her hands and she has no choice but to tell the truth.

Ai's entire speech here is just heartbreaking. If the start of the chapter didn't make it explicit enough, we see her here put her good intentions into words to better understand how they were misinterpreted.

This adds SUCH a fascinating additional layer to her death that has me gnashing my fucking teeth. One of the things I've talked about a lot in my Ai meta is that Ryosuke is essentially an agent or even an embodiment of the entertainment industry and the way it has exploited her - the misogyny, entitlement, purity culture and abuse that ruled her life went on to end it. With this additional detail, though, Ryosuke becomes an agent not just of the things that plagued Ai of B-Komachi, but Ai as a human, too. All her life, Ai is willfully misunderstood and mischaracterized by the people around her, assigned narratives and roles without her consent and punished for both living up to and failing to live up to them. Ai's death is the end result of a lifelong cascade of failure on the part of every system and individual that has had the opportunity and responsibility to care for her - and, as Aqua throws in his father's face, that includes Hikaru.

Hikaru's supposed understanding of Ai is not one based in empathy or love but projection and possessiveness - understanding in this context is ownership, exclusivity and frankly, arrogance. A claim to a piece of Ai that no one else knows. But as Aqua forces him to realize… Hikaru never understood Ai, even as she did her best to make herself understood. For all his arrogance of understanding Ai and the nature of their relationship, Kamiki is ultimately just the same as every other person who idolized and objectified her then discarded her when the image they'd created in their mind didn't match reality. Ai wasn't his pure and perfect soulbonded saviour - she was a lonely, broken kid like him, still struggling to understand love after a lifetime spent starved of it.

Once, Kamiki begged Ai to save him. And here, the bitter truth is laid out for all of us: the salvation Kamiki had wished for was waiting for him, reaching out with open arms and he not only desecrated it but irrevocably destroyed any path back towards it. In killing Ai, Hikaru Kamiki killed himself.

The imagery of this moment is so fucking gorgeous. The visual of Kamiki and Ai reaching out to each other, in mutual understanding at last but separated by time and death… the "what if" happy Hoshino family… Ai's words being framed as a 'love letter' that transcended time to reach Kamiki and Aqua's eyes blazing with white as tears pour down his face… Jesus fucking Christ Mengo I'm already dead!!!!!

Like I said up top, I make zero secret of the fact that I am primarily invested in Ai above everything else in the manga and the way her importance has been seemingly downplayed since the late 130s mark chapter wise has really bugged me. As such, this chapter was INSANELY cathartic for me. Not only do we get a really beautiful cap to Ai's post death arc (hopefully finally killing those dumbfuck Secretly Evil Ai theories for good) but it's done in a way that once again recenters her love and her wishes as the heart of everything. Even Aqua's revenge play is completely redefined in this context - no longer the childish, selfish and self destructive lashing out we've seen before but as a quest to both honor Ai and to punish the person arrogantly assuming ownership of her heart even as he so catastrophically misunderstands her.

This is a really fantastic end to Aqua's arc too… on paper, that is. I know for a fact that a certain genre of OnK readers are going to bitch and moan that Aqua didn't run his dad over with a 2003 Honda Civic but I really can't imagine Aqua's revenge quest going any other way unless OnK was intended to be a pure tragedy. Over and over, we have seen that Aqua's revenge is at odds with not just his happiness but with Ai's wish for him to live a full life with a bright future. It is self destructive, hurtful to the people around him and antithetical to any of them moving on and reclaiming what their futures. With the emphasis the story places on moving towards a happy future, in selfishly reclaiming your happiness even in the face of systems that seek to crush you and on honouring Ai's wishes and legacy, it would be flatly thematically incoherent for Aqua to choose killing.

The issue is not with this as Aqua's end point but with the path we've taken to get here. As was the issue with Ruby during the Movie Arc, we don't actually see any of the internal work that happened in service of this arc, just the big emotional end points of offscreen development. But it stings especially bad with Aqua when such a huge chunk of the last few arcs locked us out of his head, sharply contrasting the start of the story that lived and breathed his interiority - AND when this is more or less the capstone to his series long struggle to choose love or revenge. It's not that I dislike this as an emotional payoff for Aqua's revenge - this is more or less beat for beat what I'd expected - but that it lacks proper support from the rest of the story. In general, this chapter falls flatter than it should because all this heightened, dramatic emotion rests on arcs and setup that simply have not been shown to the reader, save for Ai.

Speaking of Ai, the info in the DVD here potentially represents a pretty major break in the continuity of Aqua's behaviour based on when we're told he had access to it but I'm willing to bite my tongue and see if that gets filled in, if only because this chapter review is already so fucking long. Let's just say that I Noticed and I sure hope Aka or his editors did too.

And finally… Oh, hey there, Ruby! Aren't you an interesting little snarl to this chapter. Or maybe "snarl" isn't quite right, but her presence here is potentially interesting either way. I'm not quite sure how to read both her expression and her presence - the expression on her face looks VERY displeased and it looks to me like she's outside the room, so is she maybe eavesdropping and not happy with what she hears? Or is she in on Aqua's talk with Kamiki here and just struggling with her emotions with regards to it all? I'm quiety hoping it's the latter, because it would confirm that Ruby DID recognize her dad in 147 and Akasaka wasn't expecting me to believe he was hitting her with the stupid stick quite that hard lol.

In either case, I'm actually excited to see what Ruby takes away from this. In the ways that AQRB has echoed the HKAI dynamic, Ruby has always been in Kamiki's shoes - the one desperate to be saved, clinging to her oshi and relying on him as her sole bastion of light in the world. So what will she think now after being faced with the logical endpoint of this wished-for codependence? When she sees how destructive and self destructive it can potentially be? Just as she saw Ai reflected in herself, will Ruby see her father in her own reflection - and if so, what will she do about it?

Break next week! So we'll be sitting pretty for two weeks to find out. Not that I actually mind this time because with a chapter like this on top of season 2 of the anime coming back today, a week without a break might have actually killed me… please, akamengo, i'm just a little guy!!!!

#oshi no ko #oshi no posting #chapter reviews #onk spoilers #ai hoshino #hikaru kamiki #kamiai #hikaai

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oshinohoshi · 2 months ago

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Oshi no Ko - yet another rant about the ending & Aqua's self-sacrifice

Today I woke up sad and mad about Aqua's death so I'm going to rant about it. We're probably all sick of talking about how bad this ending was but I gotta get it out.

I mean... Damn. Akasaka really made Aqua die for Ruby's career. What the hell.

Aqua, did you forget chapter 134??

Akasaka wants us to forget that chapter 134 exists but I remember it. It was not a fever dream! Or at least, it was a fever dream the fandom collectively had.

There's a lot of focus in ch 134 on the kiss but I like that Aqua and Ruby finally had a heart to heart.

Ruby idolized Aqua in this chapter and treated him as Gorou, which was surely a problem for their relationship, but she also told him that she accepted him for who he was and saw his suffering, his vulnerability, his kindness, and his persistence. She expressed in no uncertain terms that she loved him and was happy just because he existed.

And Aqua STILL killed himself for the sake of Ruby's career.

Akasaka said in this interview that what he wanted to express through Oshi no Ko was miscommunication - something I'll probably do a separate post on - and admittedly Aqua's death portrays that extremely well. But it does it too well.

It's in character for Aqua, but as a reader what does it say for a character who finally started to look towards the future to decide that the one thing his sister needed above all else was to be an idol? What was the point of any of this? Why is being an idol so glorified in the end?

There's another important thing Aqua said in ch 134 and that's that he felt guilty for being alive.

My first thought was that the ending would have been less rage inducing if this thread had been followed through with. If Aqua had died because he was still focused on revenge and mired in guilt about Ai's death rather than swapping his revenge for self-sacrifice at the last second.

It would remove the somewhat icky feeling of his suicide to some extent accomplishing his goal (albeit with critical damage to Ruby), it would resolve the frustration of knowing there were a myriad of other ways he could have taken out Hikaru, and it would tie in with how the road to revenge leads to destruction. It would also have kept Ai as a focal point in the story.

But then I remembered that I really love ch 154 when the twins get their revenge with Ai's DVD. It was a moving chapter and an elegant revenge that was worse than death for Hikaru.

So I need to get Aqua to die for a reason other than making his sister's career more important than his life while keeping 154 in tact.

I think that could have been accomplished if Aqua confronted Hikaru and died in a scuffle. Or Ruby could have shown up and he flung himself in front of her to protect her. That would have been self-sacrificial but it would not have been pre-meditated.

I would still have hated that the story wasn't about moving on with your life while carrying the weight of your past, but it might have felt just a little better.

I don't know... I really don't. But Aqua dying so Ruby can play at Dome is so not it.

#oshi no ko #in which I complain bitterly #oshi no ko spoilers #aqua hoshino

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tenebriskukris · 1 month ago

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An Exhumation Of Hikaru Kamiki's Character Act III Act I: Two Idiots Walk Into A Room To Talk About A Movie

Spoilers for the entirety of Oshi No Ko below.

It is here where everything falls apart faster than a sandcastle being torn apart by the unrelenting waves of the sea.

Enter Chapter 152. It’s Aqua’s interview, the one we see in Chapter 9. And the interviewer…is Hikaru.

From the beginning of this whole conversation there are a host of questions that must be answered that the narrative simply refuses to give time to. Hikaru is the one interviewing Aqua. Is he the one who performed all of the interviews? Why did he do this in the first place? What was Aqua’s reaction to all of this? What about Ruby’s reaction? Why the hell wasn’t this confrontation given more space to feel organic?

None of these questions are answered. None of them are given a second thought by the narrative and the readers are unceremoniously forced to swallow it. The narrative does not care any longer about unnecessary things such as setup and we are instead thrown head first into their confrontation without the sufficient context required to first understand how we got to this point after the timeskip.

Let’s just get on with it, then. 153 continues this plot thread. Aqua seems unsurprised by Hikaru’s appearance here—implying that this entire meeting was going to happen. The lack of setup once again rears its ugly head.

We now get an answer for just why Hikaru’s been letting this entire movie go forward despite the numerous strings he could’ve pulled: Because he’s been under the assumption that this was Ai’s wish. It’s very telling that he still cares so much about her despite the fact that he killed her, but as he says, he killed her out of spite. Whether or not that’s actually true, it’s clear from the fact that he still cares deeply about Ai, even after everything, since he believed that this movie was Ai’s final piece of revenge on him.

Hikaru does note some aspects of the movie that I’ll lightly touch on—namely that it’s accurate—but yet soon after he declares that the movie was fiction, that events were fabricated, exaggerated, and the aspects that were inconvenient were concealed. Setting aside the fact that he might be lying during this entire conversation and his own memory might be foggy considering the events that happened years ago, that’s one final nail in the coffin for the plausibility of the movie being what actually happened. Maybe on the surface it’s accurate, but the readers will never quite know for sure just what’s fiction and what’s true. The narrative doesn’t care about this, of course, because the truthfulness of the movie wasn’t anything important towards this confrontation. Note the sarcasm there, please.

Aqua counters Hikaru’s dismissal of the movie as fiction by declaring that the movie is not fiction—despite nothing shown within Ai’s tape to the twins neither showing or actually telling the reader why this is so. The narrative dismisses any sort of logical explanation as to why Aqua can even have the basis to say that in the first place and we’re already stuck for the ride so there’s nothing more but to keep going.

Immediately after that revelation we are thrown into a flashback that involves Hikaru. Considering the timing of this entire flashback I’m willing to believe that these events actually happened—not to mention that the series has never lied about the contents of a flashback in the first place.

Hikaru’s breakdown after Seijuro and Airi’s deaths link quite cleanly with the missing pieces of the movie arc. It proves a decent, if rather prompt scene of Hikaru’s reaction after those two died as well as a further descent into emotional instability. It’s also a nice callback to Chapter 109, where he says that he can feel the weight of his life.

It’s at the end of this 153 and the start of 154 that brings us the real meat of Hikaru’s backstory. The reason why Hikaru and Ai broke up. Ai was pregnant with the twins and that’s why she broke up with Hikaru. She even dragged salt in the wound by noting the fact that Taiki is also Hikaru’s son with Airi, basically the woman who sexually abused him. It’s a callous act that the Ai shown in the tape even notes probably wasn’t even the best choice—which is why she tasks Aqua and Ruby to try and help him.

As an aside, there’s also something to be said about whether or not anything that the Ai on the tape was actually true. I’d noted this in my own analysis on the chapter, but if trying to save Hikaru was so important to Ai that she’d delegate this task to her children, then why couldn’t she do it herself? She made these tapes when both Aqua and Ruby were still infants, years before Hikaru sent Ryosuke to kill her. Why hadn’t she tried to help Hikaru in that interval? Note this fact for later, it’ll be important for my reasoning for some of my further thoughts about his chapter.

Putting aside whether or not Ai was telling the truth in the tapes or not, Hikaru seems to believe Ai. Having the woman he loved say that she actually loved him after all this time and the “regret” she had after leaving him would certainly hurt a person emotionally, especially after he’d been the reason she’d died in the first place.

This reveal that Hikaru sent Ryosuke towards Ai in order to, in his words, “scare her a little” is well— a bit much. Even discounting the reveals that happened in future chapters, this is just irresponsible. Hikaru would’ve needed to be close enough to Ryosuke to sniff out his instability in the first place and only then made the decision to leak Ai’s address towards him. This doesn’t really cast a good light on him but we already knew he was a murderer in the first place.

There’s one more thing that I want to call out in Hikaru’s monologue in the chapter. His belief that Ai didn’t love him.

From Hikaru’s perspective, his view that Ai didn’t love him is completely justified given how callously she ripped him apart during their breakup. It doesn’t matter if Ai regretted it ex post facto after the breakup when Hikaru suffered for it either way and that she herself didn’t lift a finger to try and help Hikaru for herself during the interval between they broke up and her death—not to mention the fact that she tasked her children to try and help him alongside her. Again, if this was so important to her that it’s the entire reason she made these tapes in the first place, why doesn’t she reach out to Hikaru herself before she was killed? Whether or not this is a plot hole or another case of the writing rotting away in front of the readers is irrelevant because the narrative just handwaves any discussion about the veracity of Ai’s words despite the evidence to the contrary!

We see a little more from Hikaru in 155 where he says that, “he’ll do what he can for Ai.” It’s a little line that doesn’t really do anything for Hikaru’s character and has no more payoff for his character so we can proceed to digesting this confrontation as a whole.

That is where this chapter ends for Hikaru and possibly for the last vestiges of good writing for the series at large.

All in all, there are a whole host of things I can say about this set of chapters as a whole so I’ll start with the obvious: These chapters are instantly undercut by the lack of setup that was used to propel them to the spotlight. It’s a critique I say over and over and over by now but it still holds true. If the payoff to all the setup used for a character simply falls flat on its head then the reverse also applies. It doesn’t matter if the payoff to all these plot threads is objectively good when your setup is so half baked that it doesn’t even feel good to bite into this payoff in the first place!

Yes, this is a confrontation that has been building up since the start of the series. Yes, Aqua and Hikaru would have had to butt heads eventually. Yes, there’s nothing that obviously went against Hikaru being the interviewer for the cast in the movie in the first place but that has implications for so many other events throughout the series that the narrative simply does not care to address that are relevant to the story at large!

Then there’s the issue that by immediately throwing us into this confrontation—and via a time skip of all things—simply does not feel very good on an emotional and an objective level. The last chapter before the confrontation between them was a completely useless Kana-centric chapter that did nothing for the story and so having the chapter immediately after that which threw us into this confrontation blunts the tone and atmosphere the manga’s trying to accomplish. There was no transition between what is essentially filler for the chapters before this confrontation and getting thrown head first back into plot!

And now there’s the reveal that Ai loved Hikaru all along. This is a reveal that falls very much flat and doesn’t pack the emotional punch that it should. As with many things in the manga, this is primarily because of the way that the reveal was handled as well as the context surrounding the reveal in the first place. Chapter 128 teased this reveal early on, when the line “I can’t love you.” was given some level of focus, but by doing so, the narrative already revealed its intentions with what they wanted to do with it. There were only two real possibilities when they mentioned the relevancy of the whole “I can’t love you” line. Either Ai actually did love him, despite their breakup, or she actually didn’t love him at all. One or the other.

The reason why this reveal falls flat is quite simply because this is a question that was never posed to the viewer in any great detail in the first place. There was no lingering doubt on whether or not Ai loved Hikaru that the narrative proposed in the first place, no consideration for either possibility to be true before the manga unveiled the truth for the readers. It simply wasn’t a question that demanded relevancy in the minds of the characters and thus the readers. The author didn’t care to foreshadow it beyond a few lines in the beginning of the arc and so why should readers care about a poorly set up reveal that doesn’t even do anything for the narrative beyond tie up a couple of loose ends?

I’m not saying that this reveal shouldn’t have happened. This question of whether or not Ai actually loved Hikaru is one that has importance to the story as it relates to the twins’ and Ai’s motivations, sure, but it was not given the proper time to actually ferment within the story itself in-universe. Perhaps have that question linger throughout the movie arc in particular and have Ai’s feelings on Hikaru hidden until this confrontation comes to light. As it is now—it’s rather more of a confirmation of fact than this big reveal that the narrative is trying to dress it up as. It isn’t a sad moment as the authors want the readers to feel it is because it was a question that was posed and answered within the span of two chapters.

And now there’s Hikaru’s characterization within this batch of chapters. It’s a harsh departure from the aloof man who spoke cryptically with Ruby in Chapter 147 and seemed to have his own mysterious agenda. Now that he’s in the spotlight completely he doesn’t have the gravitas that good villains have now that they’re in focus. He has a sad backstory and he’s a murderer that kills stars. You could distill his entire personality into that single sentence without compromising the integrity of his character. He is, dare I say it, boring. Kind of pathetic even, which arguably isn’t the way that one wants to handle the first confrontation between a protagonist and an antagonist. Villains often need to be lifted up high in order to demonstrate their capabilities and threat level within the narrative and only after that establishment are they allowed to fall and be vanquished by the protagonist. This…simply isn’t it. There wasn’t enough time for Hikaru to shine in the spotlight before they cast him down emotionally.

The manga selling to us that the major antagonist—the person that the series has been building up to for all this time—has just been dealt with in the span of less than five chapters. Hikaru accepts whatever Ai’s last wish was, whether that was revenge against him or not. Aqua and Ruby can be free from taking revenge and Hikaru is more or less defused after these reveals. On the other hand, there are still a handful of issues to tackle. Hikaru is still a murderer and we don’t know his motivations for killing Yura and other stars. More questions that could’ve been wrapped up nearly if the manga took time to deal with them appropriately, but right now it’s just not a very convincing or satisfying picture.

But forget all that! Now the narrative wants us to believe in this new antagonist. Nino. Let’s get straight ripping her to bits, shall we?

>ACT II ==> >INTERMISSION ==>

#oshi no ko #onk #onk meta #oshi no ko meta #oshi no ko analysis #onk analysis #onk spoilers #oshi no ko spoilers #hikaru kamiki #long post

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lielove · 6 months ago

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oshi no ko chapter 154 spoilers under the cut but hey i'm in fucking ANGUISH !!!!!!!!!!

SHE WANTED TO LOVE HIM SOOOOOO FUCKING BAD I'M CRYING !!!!!!!!!!!!

#【♥】 𝒐𝒐𝒄 ; i'm just a little guy.

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sunsetsmakemesad · 6 months ago

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Guys did you know that this movie is a timeless loveletter from ai to you, aswell as our revenge for not understanding her

#oshi no ko #oshi no ko chapter 154

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solarapplejuice · 6 months ago

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what the fuck is going on in oshi no ko bruh ;n; (part 1)

155 spoilers / spoilers for all of the oshi no ko manga akasaka is scaring me maybe i just have too many rose-tinted memories of love is war but it feels so much more tightly written than whatever is going on in onk right now. the most recent chapter and really the entire 15 year lie arc feels like a bit of a letdown compared to what was being built up by this entire story.

my fuckin thesis is this: the final arc of this story reeks of akasaka not liking the story or the characters and wanting to get things over with. he insists on ending almost EVERY chapter with a cliffhanger instead of letting the story progress naturally, concluding core and fundamental parts of the story's plot in one to two chapters which denies them of further growth and speculation, the worst thing you can do to your fucking mystery novel. admittedly this is a pretty biased opinion but i will explain!

the recent chapter is the most emblematic of this because it's the perfect embodiment of why oshi no ko is so frustrating, because if i were to describe the narrative up until this point it sounds like it makes sense, but the way it was handled and the sheer SPEED at which it came out is what makes it bad. specifically in 154 and 155 we learn that kamiki just didn't think that ai actually loved him, but turns out she did and now he regrets killing her! and it turns out NINO also had involvement in ai's death and is maybe the actual villain.

none of this is necessarily bad and i actually really like the idea of nino being the true antagonist at the end of the tunnel. nino is just more compelling; she's ai's coworker and peer but can never be an equal to her because she wont let herself, because she wont let ai in, because she both looks up to ai as an idol to be loved and despises her as an entertainer to compete with. if we are to believe that 45510 is from her perspective, it makes this turn of events all the more tragic.

kamiki never playing a big part is also kind of expected. queer manga fan moment but i never thought the idea of ex bf being the killer was super compelling esp since you can see the "she never really loved me" coming from a mile away, so it's good to see it being played straight for AI's development. turns out that ai "lies are love" hoshino was just trying to protect him from the inevitable backlash of the world's top idol having a boyfriend and thought she was doing the best for her first relationship as a teenager who was forced to grow up too fast.

all of this is really cool, too bad it doesnt land like that in the story because it all gets resolved in one chapter! just because kamiki was the red herring doesn't mean that he should have been wasted like that, it would have been nice to see more conflict between him and the hoshino siblings, perhaps threatening other characters the way he has other idols. lets not forget that this dude is a serial killer who likes targeting women! we were waiting for him to try and pull something on say, kana or akane (i have FEELINGS about them and ill get to that). meanwhile all that would have been done to set nino up as the true villain in murder-mystery fashion is to just include 45510 as a part of the manga before the 15 year lie arc. it would be a one-off look into the horrors of the ways in which ai hoshino's would-be peers rejected her as an equal, later re-contextualized as the hiding-in-plain-sight motive and backstory for the villain and the entire plot as a whole.

we don't get any of that, instead we get aqua and ruby moving past kamiki so quickly that you almost get the sense that they knew more than the audience. which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but feels almost insulting considering how important he and the conspirators of ai hoshino's death have been so far. nino being reintroduced again is jarring since the setup with her intervening in kana's attempts to emulate her is not enough of a setup, and instead feels like they wanted to hamfist her in as an 11th hour threat.

and the problem is, pretty much every major narrative plot point in oshi no ko has been resolved like this and its a pattern that seems to not stop. it started when goro and sarina finally found each other, a moment that is so important and we've been waiting for a while, and it spiraled from there. aqua and ruby's incest will-they-wont-they was pretty much handwaved, the very fucking important and good conflict of ruby and kana's competition for success mirroring ai and nino was denied any sort of growth or possibility in the like three chapters they spent on it. it's just like, theres so many things that while they have been alluded to before, that's just it: theyve been ALLUDED to. the reasons for these conflicts to happen are there, but the conflicts never really got the chance to happen, instead it's just a character initiating the fight and the other character shutting them down a chapter later by being the bigger person or whatever, something that is jarring for a cast of characters defined by not simply bad communication but the BELIEF and CORE THEME that LYING IS LOVE! the very thesis that we're supposed to be constantly contending with, if it's true or not, and the reason that these conflicts drag out; because the characters lie, and sometimes those lies can make relationships worse instead of better for some illusion of stability. why are these characters all of a sudden excellent communicators when they historically haven't been, in a MYSTERY story where incomplete information and unresolved threads should be common place? the story ending soon is not an excuse for this to be happening! it doesn't feel like we're earning these conclusions, more like aka is forcefully shutting the lid on pandora's box and letting it blow up in our faces.

ill be making a second part of my thoughts since this is already so long but i also gotta talk about how akasaka did my girls kana and akane dirty.

#oshi no ko #oshi no ko 155 #oshi no ko spoilers #oshi no ko manga spoilers

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