- Sep 27, 2020
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I'm not intending to say her reaction was not justifiable from her perspective. Nor do I think that Yumi had no part to play. I'm just honestly more interested in the portrayal of Yumi's mental/emotional state in this game as it in some ways hits strangely close to home at times. So I was mostly focused on that.
I guess I should clarify what I mean by Yumi blaming herself, because I Think I kind of left that point floating in my last post. As she obviously does hold some blame for what happened (I still think she holds a lesser portion of the blame, but whatever I'm not that interested in that).
What I mean is, she will blame her emotions, blame herself for opening up to Akira, blame herself for allowing herself to start making an emotional connection with someone. When what she really should blame herself for is the opposite of that, i.e. not trying hard enough to open up to Chika about everything that happened (the forced kiss, the Nodoka situation, her feelings, etc.) I think that will be part of the direction her character goes. Or maybe I'm just wrong and it never even goes down that route.
If I was to speculate on alternate paths they could have taken to avoid this I would come to something along these lines:
Chika's perspective was based on a delusional understanding of what her relationship with Akira was. And her reaction was formed through that lens. Yumi never had the strength of will to break that lens. That was probably her biggest failing as Chika's friend. Yumi should have hurt her far earlier, told her everything that happened, everything she knew about Akira. Actually tried to break her delusion. But she could not bring herself to hurt Chika deliberately the way that she needed to. That's assuming Chika would even listen as its not like Yumi had any proof of anything. And I'm not really sure If either of them had the capacity to have that conversation with each other in the past anyway and I still think they don't. They will eventually though, after a few more lessons in love, and that will be what resolves this conflict.
But I guess none of that really matters anyway. Someone wrote them to end up here after all. And I'm actually quite interested in where it will go for them. So I don't necessarily agree that Selebus dropped the ball with the Chika event. Those 1000 affection points are a sure indication of an impending tragedy and there are a lot of directions it could go in. But if nothing happens for another year then I probably do agree with you about her event.
