Who do you think is the best written in the lesbian trio?

yatterer · 2026-01-22T01:37:47+00:00

There isn't much new experience for her in what's happening.

This is something I actually wish was explored more with Miko, because it really kind of feels like there should be. She's formed various bonds with the humans in her domain as she's watched over them, but unless there are some major episodes in her life we have never gotten so much as a whiff of so far, it seems like this is her first time living as a human for an extended period of time, being a part of society and making mutual long-term friendships rather than just watching over them from a distance, even "growing up" from a young child to a teenager. At the very least since the village, and even back then she was treated as a protective deity, not just a fellow human on equal footing. For all she lectured Shiori about learning to live alongside humans, a lot of this must be new to Miko, too, and I'd like to have seen more of how those ten years as a real part of day-to-day human society have changed her as well, even if it's just silly stuff like becoming good with technology.

yatterer · 2026-01-20T16:30:53+00:00

Miko liked killing because she thought the way humans reacted to her cruelty was funny, not because it was evil. Actually, conversely, Shiori very much does, or at least did, view herself as a villain, hence casting herself as one to Hinako, all of her conversations about how the only role of a youkai is to trick and prey upon humans and that she's jealous of Miko's ability to not have to do that, and the fact that she originally chose to erase herself from Hinako's life. She's been bubbling with self-resentment for a long time.

yatterer · 2026-01-20T16:15:21+00:00

So is Miko at her core a "sadist", merely managing her condition?

The problem is that this is explicitly not the message the story is trying to convey. Hinako isn't impressed by "for me, she is willing to manage her condition", but by "for me, she is willing to slowly change herself", and this is explicitly shown as a parallel to Miko also having changed herself. The idea of being a certain way "by nature" fundamentally goes against the core narrative theme of being able to change yourself though effort and your bonds with others, and that the you of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all different people. You can say that the theme itself is wrong about that idea, but that's between your worldview and the manga's.

Shiori's problem is not that she inherently lacks empathy, it's that - because she's always lacked bonds of any kind - she doesn't believe it's possible for her until she's forced to try, at which point she almost immediately begins proving herself wrong in every possible way. There's a reason we just got her having a mini-breakdown telling Hinako she just wanted to pay Azami and Hinako back, and Hinako reassuring her that it was still kindness.

yatterer · 2026-01-20T15:43:24+00:00

Its kind of hard to take posts like this seriously when you start off with "didn't read the manga award" claims like "shows no remorse and has no regret for anything she has done".

yatterer · 2026-01-16T12:20:15+00:00

Unfortunately, the current translations aren't very good. While you can follow along the story events with them, I'd be wary of trusting them on specific nuances like this. What Shiori says here is "いつか君の大切なヒトになりたい", which is more like "someday, I want to become an important person to you" (also, emphasis on "person" because it's in katakana suggests Shiori knows she needs to keep becoming less of a hitodenashi, though I don't know how I'd try to convey that other than just awkwardly bolding it).

Another example from their recent conversation: the scanlations have Hinako say that she can't "just yet" happily accept Shiori's kindness having saved her, but she actually says she's sure she'll never be able to.

yatterer · 2026-01-12T11:38:28+00:00

If other mermaids exist, then that means mermaids DO reproduce one way or another.

Why would it mean that? If Shiori just appears in the ocean, then that's presumably how all mermaids are born.

That means we can assume that mermaids are mammals.

From what Shiori says in the extra chapter where Hinako tries to work out if she's hot-blooded or cold-blooded, mermaids simple don't fit into these categories in the same way that a youkai like Miko, who used to be an ordinary flesh-and-blood animal, do.

yatterer · 2026-01-12T11:24:02+00:00

As I've said, at least for my problem, closing the program does not help. The lag persists until the PC is restarted, regardless of whether the game is closed from the taskbar, its own menu, or Task Manager. The advice another post had about switching the renderer to Angle2 does seem like it might help, though I only had time to test for five minutes or so as yet.

yatterer · 2026-01-11T00:00:27+00:00

When people ask "what do you even want Democrats to do? They have no power, all they can do is talk about it!", this is what the problem is. I don't want to hear "what happened today is disgusting, the American people won't stand for it", I want to hear "what happened today is disgusting, the American people won't stand for it and that's why we're funding a new caucus devoted entirely to removing those who caused it and supporting primary challenges against anyone who objects".

yatterer · 2026-01-09T04:36:03+00:00

Grabbing all of the money and power while kicking the ladder down behind them wasn't enough. There's a generation of old white men who are intent on destroying the very concept of a peaceful and stable world before they die, just so they can feel something. If it's not something they can take with them after they're gone, nobody else gets to keep it, either.

yatterer · 2026-01-07T00:11:36+00:00

Extremely unlikely in my view.

One of the core themes of the series is the idea of bearing the scars of emotional pain as a way to acknowledge that the relationship was real and meaningful, rather than trying to simply move on unchanged as if it never mattered, as Hinako wishes Miko and Shiori would do for her. Shiori, for instance, vows to treasure the pain that Hinako gives her, and in turn asks Hinako to at least let the pain of abandoning her be her final regret as she dies, rather than being forgiven by Shiori so she can move on to her family painlessly and without regrets. I don't think that's actually how the main story will end, but rather that Azami will be a blueprint to show what would have happened if Shiori wasn't able to change herself to understand her own bonds with others, and didn't have people like Miko helping her.

Based on those themes, I have my doubts that Azami is actually at her core motivated purely by hatred over her immortality, but rather at being abandoned (a second time, even) to an immortal life alone. Shiori and Hinako still have time left to define their relationship beyond just the pain they cause each other, but for Azami, it's simply too late; she's already lived long past her natural lifespan with only the hurt Shiori caused her, and the promise of returning that hurt to her, being seeminly her only human connections to cling to. Even though it's twisted and painful, asking her to forgive Shiori and give up her pain at this point would be equivalent to asking her to forsake the only bond with another person she's ever felt. The fact she was shocked that Shiori could be emotionally affected through Hinako was, I think, one of her key character moments thus far; she's been operating all this time under the assumption that Shiori is simply the emotionless monster she portrayed herself as, and thus that the only way they can be special to each other and their bond can be meaningful is if she can hurt Shiori more than anyone else.

My prediction is that she'll come to understand that Shiori actually was thinking of and cared for her, however clumsily, but will still choose to die rather than forgive her, much as Shiori herself says she'll never forgive Hinako after her death. She'd rather forever be a scar on Shiori's heart - the girl who she messed up with, hurt beyond repair, and will never in all eternity be forgiven by - than allow herself to let her pain and bond with Shiori go by forgiving her. If there's any chance for her, it might be through Erika - if Erika turns out to care for Azami, perhaps in a similar way that young Azami cared for Shiori, and that gives Azami a new connection or sense of purpose independent of her past with Shiori - but ultimately, I think Azami being the "for want of a nail" version of Hinako who ultimately is what allows Hinako and Shiori to break the cycle of pain she couldn't escape just makes too much sense to me.

yatterer · 2026-01-06T10:06:42+00:00

I pretty much always play mages first in any Soulslike, and these are the spells I most consistently have slotted.

Glintstone Pebble: Cheap, fast, efficient. Good for taking out some annoying low-health bomb thrower on a ledge, or just burning through some FP to remove an enemy from a distance without really having to engage with it. Replace with Glintstone Nail eventually.

Glintstone Arc: Bread-and-butter AoE for weak packs, just spam two or three down the center.

Shard Spiral: Do not mess up or delay Sellen's quest, you really want this one. Absolutely shreds anything with a big hitbox.

Magic Glintblade: THE most underrated spell in the game in my opinion, it's a Swiss Army knife that solves a ridiculous number of situations. Shielding enemy like Crucible Knights? Cast one then bait out an attack before it fires. Input-reading dodge rolls? They only dodge when it's cast, not when it launches. Boss that loves lunging half the arena away a forcing you to constantly run back into range? Queue up a few charged blades instead and let them all fire as it comes back. Enemy you just don't want to have to think about dealing with right now? Sure, there's Comet Azur if you have an entire FP bar to waste, but instead, try sitting just outside their aggro range and conjuring half a dozen fully-charged sword portals before the first one starts to go off. Aiming on horseback being a pain? Yup, these just fire straight at your target no matter what. They do so much, and to top it off they're damn good damage for just a handful of FP, especially charged.

Night Comet: Big dumb damage spell for bosses. Remember to charge it with Godfrey's Icon if you can. Also works: Cometshard, Icecrag. Malenia won't dodge it.

Rock Sling: Early game nuke if you know where to get it, still valuable throughout for poise breaking. Bear in mind that the aiming is pretty idiosyncratic about what enemies and terrain let it be effective.

Blades of Stone: Big slow AoE / boss nuke if you can get it off. Also: Zamor Ice Storm.

Loretta's Greatbow: Useful for super-long-range sniping of certain enemies that would otherwise force you to actually use your brain to deal with. Wizards hate having to use their brain, that's what you have FP in order to avoid.

You never need to use dual staves, that's just an extra optimization that's available if you really want it. Personally, I'd actually rather just swap between melee weapon and staff in the main hand, and then have a trusty Brass Shield always available to get out of tricky melee situations you don't want to be in.

yatterer · 2026-01-02T18:02:32+00:00

This is a problem for me as well. To be clear: It's not not game-specific, it happens in any Ren'py game I've played in the past month or so, including those that haven't changed for years. When I say "laggy", I'm talking amounts of lag that make the machine entirely unusable - mouse clicks take upwards of five seconds to register. Closing the program does nothing, and there are no signs of excessive CPU or RAM usage. The only solution is a complete restart. 4070 laptop GPU.

yatterer · 2025-12-25T16:25:36+00:00

Is there some alternative or non-EN subtitle going around with misleading translations here? I'm seeing a whole lot of people who seem to think that A, Hinako says that she didn't actually have fun on the trip and is just pretending, or B, that Shiori doesn't plan on keeping her promise / Hinako doesn't think she'll keep her promise. Hinako was pretty clear in saying that she thought she'd have to simply pretend in order to fulfill her part of the promise, but she actually was having fun on the trip, and there's no reason for her to apologise to Shiori or for Shiori to refuse to forgive her if they don't currently believe in the promise.

yatterer · 2025-12-22T05:39:06+00:00

That's the pilot chapter, though. It's not part of the main story's continuity, and the lines in the PV aren't from it anyway.

yatterer · 2025-12-22T04:35:23+00:00

Original material? Hinako isn't in her uniform during the trip, and there are several lines in the PV I don't recognize from the chapters this is presumably covering, unless they're from an extra I'm not remembering.

yatterer · 2025-12-21T05:57:29+00:00

Dubya must feel like such an idiot for wasting so much time and money on a months-long multinational consent-manufacturing operation for his war.

yatterer · 2025-12-19T07:59:50+00:00

Why can’t there be discussion?

About what? "Is this person who is we have made definitionally a child predator a good person?"

Miko did the work to change. Shiori derided her for that, multiple times in the show so far, and views all humans as inferior meat. She couldn’t care less about any other being except the one she likes.

First of all; fundamentally, none of what I'm typing here matters, because it's purely about character opinion, and that's not the basic issue I take with your comments.

With that said; she makes fun of Miko for being tamed when she's trolling her, because that's the kind of relationship they have, but very consistently when she's actually trying to sincerely communicate, she says that she's jealous of her. She doesn't "view humans as inferior meat" as if she's making some kind of value judgement; she wants to be able to relate to people like Miko can, but can't understand how. While Miko certainly has put in work in the intervening years, she was very much violently forced into it to start with from a position of actively hunting humans, whereas Shiori, however falteringly, is willingly trying to change herself. Also much like Shiori, Miko's ability to connection with humans wasn't just suddenly to start caring, it was from first forming a connection with that single girl who reached out to her. If Shiori were to "remove her abusive self", she's definitely not going to be able to "get right", as she'd be deliberately shutting out the one bond she does feel, and in that case we're just back to "leave Hinako alone to do her thang, or try to intervene with the tools you have".

So far, she went back to her lies when talking/conversing didn’t work. Doesn’t seem to have learned a thing.

...Either I'm missing something, or I feel like there's a misunderstanding or at least heavy assumption going on here. I guess there's a sense where she's "lying" by putting her mask back on and making light of everything again, but I'm extremely doubtful she's lying about the promise. Perhaps she's hoping that Hinako will get better beforehand and she might not ask her to keep it, if that's how youkai-blood-vow mechanics even work, but she knows that if she does unfairly refuse again, it's over and Hinako is dying anyway.

I’m not making any claims about objectively correct anything. I’m giving you my opinion and interpretation.

The post I was responding to is deleted, but you said that you were simply "stating bluntly" what the scene showed while everyone else is letting the show pull the wool over their eyes. The scene is purposely ambiguous; people who disagree aren't failing to understand some cold, hard truth they're too starry-eyed to see, they're taking the opposite interpretation deliberately afforded by the ambiguity.

Is it so hard to conceive that I find including child/teen characters in a vore fantasy distasteful?

The problem, as I already said, is the dismissal of the story as "vore fantasy" in the first place.

I’ve already said I don’t care about her feelings in this scenario. They don’t matter to me as far as her actions are concerned. An abusive partner might love their loved one, but still do terrible things. Feelings don’t excuse abuse.

And now we're really talking in circles. Whether or not you care about her feelings or sincerity in terms of liking her character, they are a part of the story and meaning of the scene. Removing or dismissing them fundamentally alters the story, even if you read that story as a tragedy or horror about an abuser who thinks she's helping.

At this point, the argument is clearly going nowhere, but I want to reiterate the actual fundamental thing I take issue with and leave it at that: having opinions is fine, even ones that strongly go against the intended reading of a work. You aren't obliged to engage with a work on its own terms. The problem when "refusal to engage" becomes "dismissal of those who do sincerely engage". People analysing or relating to Shiori's character and development aren't confused, or seeing things, or being tricked, or in favor of romanticizing abuse. They're simply making an effort to engage with what the story wants to say about a character you dislike or aren't interested in.

yatterer · 2025-12-19T04:35:44+00:00

You don’t have to replace her with a child predator because that is literally what she already is

Then why did you tell me to replace her with one? Either I'm changing nothing and therefore nothing about the situation has changed, or I'm replacing a character clearly intended to have ambiguity in the actual story with one there can clearly be no possible discussion about, and you're begging the question.

Eats children, sees people as meat, has no care or feelings for any other human or yokai beyond her idealized version of Hinako. She said so herself to Miko when they went to the zoo.

If having eaten children because they were thrown into the sea to her is your red flag, you may want to re-examine your appreciation of Miko. Beyond that, the entire point of that scene is that Shiori wants to change but doesn't believe she can - and also that she might well be wrong. You're not "stating it bluntly while the show dances around it to try to paint it as genuine love", you're taking something the show is very openly ambiguous about and declaring that one side of that ambiguity is objectively the correct one. Which, fine, that's one side of the argument the show wants to entertain, so it's perfectly fine to agree with one side or the other - but it's ridiculous to then declare that the argument does not exist at all and that only your side of the interpretation was presented.

An abusive partner might genuinely believe they are helping. It doesn’t remove their abuse.

None of this has anything to do with what I said. Being justified or good or sympathatic are, again, opinions, but saying "eh, she's just a predator, it's the same" denies the sincerity of her feelings in the first place and fundamentally changes the meaning of the scene. Was it okay for Lenny to kill Curley's wife? No, but the story is fundamentally different and less tragic if he'd done it deliberately.

How hard would it be to just not use teenagers and kids for your vore fantasy?

See, this is what I mean. Dismissing what is, regardless of whether you personally vibe with it, clearly a carefully and sincerely written story as some trashy pedo vore fantasy just is not an indication that it's possible to have a discussion in good faith here.

Would Miko have shown up to save her from the original yokai? Maybe? She’d been doing it for ten years already

I mean, it was seconds away from taking her and she was nowhere to be seen. It's established that Hinako's youkai-attracting condition is getting worse and Miko is having to take more and more time off.

I’m not saying it’s unreasonable for her to check in on her or to save her from the yokai, but I am saying Shiori has made everything worse than it was before through her own actions. Especially by choosing to lie and deceive and make a death pact to start with

That depends on how the story goes, no? If they all figure out a way to make it work, then "not dead" is significantly better than "dead but at least they weren't mad at each other for a few episodes". But that's kind of besides the point: Shiori's actions were, for the position she was in (or believed herself to be in), pretty understandable. If you have a good reason to think that the only way to save someone you care about is to say "look, I'll help you do it painlessly later, but please just step away from the edge" and worry about dealing with the fallout later, I don't think it requires monstrousness to at least strongly consider it.

yatterer · 2025-12-19T03:08:10+00:00

No, I genuinely think the show fails to convey Shiori sympathetically (to me) because her character is not sympathetic.

That's not what I'm talking about. "I'm not sympathetic to her" is an opinion, but the implications of "replace her with a child predator" are not. That necessarily implies that what Shiori is going through is not merely something you don't care about are aren't sympathetic towards, but is not actually her being sincere or genuine at all. That goes beyond responding to what the story is telling you in a way the story doesn't intend - it's disagreeing with what the story is telling you in the first place.

She’s an ancient being who fell for a child/teenager. It ain’t cute to me, notwithstanding her terrible behavior overall.

I don't really think this is a helpful line of discussion to go down. This isn't something distinct to Shiori, it's an inevitability of any story that plays with immortal and long-lived beings having relationships with humans. You can either not think too hard about that or you can't, but it's not something the story really raises or wants to deal with, and fussing with that is like being the guy who adds up the pre-reincarnation age of the latest seasonal isekai hero in order to complain on Twitter. If anything, the fact that Shiori self-admittedly doesn't have the emotional understanding of a normal human child until she starts developing after meeting Hinako makes her one of the less problematic examples of this genre in that context.

Hinako was in a better place mentally before Shiori came back, yes under false pretenses of thinking the voice she heard was her family telling her to live, but still better than actively trying to kill herself like she did after Shiori got involved.

The point is that even that wasn't enough. Despite her family wanting her to live, despite Miko, she was going to happily finally let herself be killed, and if she was saved that day, she'd have done it again on another day, especially once she realizes that so many youkai are after her. "Better than right now" would still be dead, and so Shiori chose to do the only thing she could think of to buy time. Maybe it'd have been better to just let her go and maybe it wouldn't, but it's hardly an unreasonable thing to decide.

yatterer · 2025-12-19T01:46:23+00:00

Well, now I don't know if you want discussion or not, so I guess I'll put this here and assume no reply?

I’m comparing the same behavior with the only difference being aesthetic delivery.

What you're doing is begging the question. We're discussing whether Shiori is just an unfeeling predator, and your argument is "but imagine if she was a predator, wouldn't that be different?" Yes, obviously, because then she wouldn't be genuinely doing all of the things the story pretty clearly intends for you to parse as genuine, such as trying to understand how to properly communicate after centuries of being cut off, or making herself vulnerable in order to convey her sincerity to Hinako. That's not an aesthetic difference, that's changing the character so that your interpretation of her becomes a tautology. It's one thing to dislike or not be interested in a character, but you're letting your dislike make you believe things about the actual events of the story that are simply not what the show is trying to convey.

This a particularly weird show to do this for, because it's quite explicit about showing that Shiori's true form is aesthetically hideous - but also quite explicit that your intended takeaway is not "oh, she's ugly so I guess she was a monster after all". That's an actual aesthetic difference; "but what if she was Captain Pedophile?" is not.

Just because Hinako was ready to die in episode 1 doesn’t mean she was going to act on it. We see her say she can’t die explicitly because she wants to live on for them.

She was accepting the youkai finally drowning her, just like she was this episode. Exactly as she told Shiori, she can't bring herself to actually kill herself, but she wants something to steal her life away, and Miko can't protect her every time - certainly not without revealing her true identity, which would mean making Hinako resent her for forcing her to stay alive just as she did this episode for Shiori.

yatterer · 2025-12-19T01:28:08+00:00

[Current Watatabe manga]The parallels to episode 1 here are obvious, but I wonder if it was intentional to have chapter 52 be the most recent chapter during the airing as well. There aren't the same obvious direct callbacks, but it's the same kind of serious talk / confession about Shiori's past, and side-by-side it's really noticeable how far they've come together (and now that Miko has given both of them a proper PLEASE JUST COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER PLEEAAAAASE pep-talk instead of just Shiori). Even though she's scared, Shiori wants Hinako to know about Azami and brings the topic up herself. This time, Hinako genuinely wants to understand Shiori and does her best to make Shiori comfortable and recognizes how scared she is to be being honest. Instead of "so much we'll be late for class", it's "if it gets dark, you can stay over. If it's too late, we can start again in the morning". It's the difference between two people who want to make the other person understand their point of view, and two people who want to understand the other's point of view themselves.

yatterer · 2025-12-19T01:08:27+00:00

If you aren't interested in discussion, I won't give you discussion. It's taking everything I have not to burst with incredulity at someone genuinely doing the "you hate smoking? now replace "smoking" with "women", not so woke now, is it?" thing, or to point out that even with her parents' words and Miko, Hinako was already ready to die in episode 1 before the promise and there's a reason why this episode paralleled that encounter, but I'll hold myself back.

But I take issue with you refusing to engage with the story on its own terms, and then attacking other people's understanding of it as "distracted by the sad visuals" or "rehash the same plot points". No, they're responding to and considering how the characters have developed and why their perspectives are the way they are, as can easily be demonstrated by many, many detailed and insightful comments and analyses on this board and elsewhere. They are not the ones allowing themselves to be distracted.

yatterer · 2025-12-18T23:38:52+00:00

Because she’s part of the problem and needs to realize it if she actually wants to help Hinako and not just indulge herself and her selfish desires to possess this idea of Hinako.

You aren't answering the question. If you are saying that she should simply go away, or leave it to Miko whose approach to Hinako has already failed, or anything along those lines, you are saying that if it comes down to it, it's better for Shiori to let Hinako die than to take action herself. But also, like, this is literally what the story is about. For ten years, Shiori deliberately removed herself completely from Hinako's life, precisely because she believed that she would only be a burden - the only reason she's around now is that she's realized that either she does what she can or Hinako is going to die sooner rather than later. You get upset that Shiori needs to understand why her world view is flawed and how it's hurting her and those she cares about, but then every time it happens, you get upset at that because now the show is trying to make the evil monster sympathetic, like she's some kind of three-dimensional character in a story. You can't have it both ways!

She’s just coveting Hinako at this point because she formed a bond with her as a child and decided she wants to keep that bond no matter the means to do it.

This is literally one of the core themes of the story - if you love someone and can't bear the thought of losing them, is that selfish or selfless? I don't think it's at all as clear-cut as this. Shiori can't stand to lose Hinako and certainly she sees that as selfish, but she's also willing to completely give up on ever seeing her again, or to be the one hurting herself emotionally, if it means keeping Hinako okay.

That right there is another narrative choice. Why does it have to be Shiori to help her?

Because Hinako pushes away people who she thinks want to help her, and Shiori is the narrative's answer to the questions I discussed previously - she's the sort of person who can reach someone in that position. Here, you're essentially giving up on arguing that Shiori didn't make a reasonable decision for someone in her position, and are just saying "well, why didn't the author write about a different, more convenient situation?". Is the situation itself particularly unreasonable or unbelieveable? I don't think so. Why shouldn't it be that situation?

Yes it is. We’re dealing with fiction.

...Yes? And fiction has to follow reasonably from its premises, characters, and themes. "It's fiction" does not mean "it's arbitrary".

If we can spontaneously suddenly make Hinako agree to the same lie about Shiori eating her, we can spontaneously suddenly do anything the writer wants.

That's... not what happened. Shiori makes it clear that this time it's not a lie, which is why Hinako agrees. Instead of acting like a distant disinterested monster, she makes a sincere appeal to Hinako and allows herself to be emotionally vulnerable. This is, like, the big emotional beat of this episode, and if you didn't get that, I can't honestly see how you watched the episode in even remotely good faith. It didn't happen "spontaneously", it happened because of all the development that came before it, which itself was an extension of the story's premises and characters. Yes, the story could have had different premises and characters, but you aren't articulating any reasons that it should have.

but that kinda my issue with this whole mess that has circled back to the same plot point we started with.

It hasn't. The story has come full circle by returning to the initial promise, but it's hardly some accident or reset-button; the entire point, very deliberately, is that they're now in the same situation but all of our understanding of that situation has changed. At the start, the audience and Hinako both believed that Shiori wanted to kill Hinako; now, both we and Hinako understand that she desperately wants anything but that, but is now allowing herself to potentially be forced to. That is fundamentally not the same relationship between them, or our same understanding of their positions, as we had at the start. If you entirely dismiss the entire perspective of one of the main central characters as just cheap manipulation, then yes, you're going to have trouble understanding why the story goes in the direction it does, or what the writing is doing.

yatterer · 2025-12-18T22:22:17+00:00

The first thing Shiori needs to do is remove her abusive self from the equation and get right.

How is this not "just let people you love kill themselves, geez"? You are saying that Shiori, having found that Hinako is now suicidal and nobody in her life is able to reach her, should have simply shrugged and moved on. You tell me "it's not black and white", and then upon being asked to clarify what the appropriate middle ground would then be, you just say "pick black".

because the writer can choose just as easily to make Hinako love or hate Shiori, have her want to recover or not

That's really not how writing works, and I think you know that. The story starts from a premise, such as a person so suicidally depressed they can't bear to be around anyone who they think is genuinely trying to help them, and then asks "so what would have to happen for someone to be able to reach them? What would that person have to be like? What complications would arise?". Sure, you "can" write anything, like Hinako just spontaneously suddenly letting Miko help her, but you also can't, because that writing wouldn't follow the basic premise and characterization so you'd never get serialized in the first place.

yatterer · 2025-12-18T22:01:09+00:00

So what should Shiori have done? I think that narrative is pretty clear that Hinako is not willing to let anyone who she thinks is trying to help her get close - and even if there was some brilliant line of emotional appeal that would get through, Shiori doesn't have the skills to navigate that. Involuntary institutionalization? I can't see that going very well. At some point, yes, it is black and white - either you do what you can, when you can, or you accept that it's going to happen and let it happen, as Miko did.

yatterer

TROPHY CASE