Twilight Out of Focus

Episode 11

I'll admit it: as a manga reader, I was curious how Twilight Out of Focus was going to handle its last two episodes because as of episode ten, it had run through the basic romance plots of the main story and the two side story volumes. As it turns out, the answer is that it plans to go back and cover some of the Mao and Hisashi material skipped during their allotted episodes. It's an interesting choice because we've already seen some of the music video filming they're hired to do at the end of this week; Yoshino was chosen over his roommate Kirito to work on it in previous weeks. To go back and cover that storyline means deliberately telling the story out of order.

The thinking behind that does make a certain amount of sense. With three couples, all with their own storylines, adaptation becomes a balancing act. Yes, the anime could have stuck with just Hisashi and Mao, inarguably the main couple in the source material, but that would have risked upsetting fans of the other two pairings, including me, who is much more fond of Ichikawa and Jin than the other two couples. All three bring something different to the table, choosing to go with an anthology series feels solid. But Hisashi being asked to star in a music video that the rest of the second-year team puts together is an important step in Hisashi and Mao's story, as we see when Mao is trying to wrap his head around his relationship and what the future may hold for them.

Mao tries to brush his worries off as being due to Hisashi's role as his first boyfriend, but the truth is probably a little more in-depth than that. Yes, it's fair for him to wonder if maybe he shouldn't try being the more proactive partner sometimes, but not all of that comes down to never having been in a relationship before. A lot of his concerns would be similar if he was just worried about graduating and leaving his best friend – Mao has found a relationship that he cares about and wants to maintain, but the fact that they're getting close to (if not starting) their third and final year of high school looms over all. He knows that they don't have similar career paths in mind, which may be part of the reason he held off on turning in his career form; once he does that, it all becomes real. Mao loves film and creating it from behind the camera, but there's no guarantee he'll be able to keep doing so with Hisashi, who might not even opt to study acting. A terrible uncertainty hangs over him and manifests as fear and jealousy. When Mao starts thinking about how the drama club has taken Hisashi away from him, he doesn't recognize that this is also him trying to cope with the fact that after they graduate, things will change, and someone something might take Hisashi from him for good.

Choosing to end with the music video storyline makes sense when seen in this light. It's an outside project, not something the film club is doing on its own, and it speaks to both the desirability of Hisashi as an actor and to the expanding world all of the boys are facing. Jin and Ichikawa are already looking that world in the face now that Ichikawa has moved back home, and Yoshino and Rei are too new to think about that. But the future comes for everyone and Mao will have to figure it out, no matter how anxious it makes him.

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Twilight Out of Focus is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.