Sasaki and Miyano

Episode 6

Emotions can be a real pain in the ass. We all have 'em, and we all have to deal with them to live our lives, but those little starbursts of chemical reactions and electrical currents don't always translate well into actual language. Just figuring out how you feel inside your own head can be a herculean labor in its own right, but trying to turn a vague jumble of associations and ideas into words that another person can make sense of might feel downright impossible. And I say that as an adult with reasonably developed social skills and emotional awareness – trying to manage all of that while you're a dumb high schooler experiencing new things for the first time in your life, it's a miracle nobody's brain melts out of their ears.

Thus we spend another episode trapped inside the fluffy, frenzied, sometimes contradictory headspace of Miyano, who's now seriously grappling with how to respond to Sasaki's confession. It took basically all of last episode for Miyano to accept that his senpai's being serious, and he's just as slow at coming to even a temporary decision on how to respond. That's not a complaint though – not only is Miyano trying to untangle his own feelings for Sasaki, he's having to reevaluate his own relationship to his favorite hobby, consider his own sexuality with only fictional media as his guide, and all while studying for exams. That's an entire greyhound bus of baggage to unpack, so I don't bemoan the boy for taking his time, even if he won't give himself that much grace. His friends certainly aren't any help, with Tashiro's brain being coated in candy and Kuresawa promising to be a future wife guy. This kid's on his own here.

Then we get to his actual response, and true to form it's less an answer and more Miyano puking out his emotions because he's convinced he has to answer right now or the sky will fall. It's mostly stuff we already know, just now he's saying it out loud so both our leads can deal with all his hangups, but there's one interesting bit with Sasaki at the beginning. Miyano asks if he's always been into guys, to which Sasaki says no, this is the first time he's ever been attracted to another man, much the same as Miyano.

There's a few different ways to read that, and I'm not sure where, if anywhere, the show's going with it. It certainly wouldn't be the first BL story to lean on the idea that these two are only gay “for each other” rather than in general, and I'm sure there are some folks who read it that way. But personally I think there's a little more going on there, specifically with how Miyano focuses on the disparity between the attraction he's experiencing and how it's portrayed in BL manga. Fiction often has to simplify things for the sake of narrative, and a lot of nuance can be lost in the process. So while manga may have had a part in helping both boys explore the idea of queer romance, it isn't necessarily going to perfectly represent how love feels in real life. But when fiction is your only exposure to queerness as a concept, you kind of have to use it as a foundation in lieu of personal experience.

All that's to say that, while this could just be the story performing a perfunctory bit of “only kinda homo” lip service, there's also room here to explore the all-too-real contrast between simplified fiction and nuanced reality. The show's managed to do that in some gentle ways before, so I'm willing to give it some time and see if it capitalizes. And ultimately what matters is how these characters feel in the moment, so I don't particularly care where either lad would land on the Kinsey Scale.

Rating:

Sasaki and Miyano is currently streaming on Funimation.