If you caught the Aoi Hana anime a few seasons back, you may remember that sense of separation between characters and backgrounds, which lent the whole thing a stage-like feel. This character/background contrast isn’t really present in the manga; quite often Shimura draws panels without much in the way of backgrounds at all. In fact, while the anime gave the impression of a transparent, stage-like fourth wall, the manga opaques our view into the world of its characters. Characters’ thoughts are often presented in otherwise empty panels; without visual context, it can be difficult to determine which thoughts belong to whom. The end result isn’t so much disorienting (oh, we’ll talk about Octave later) as…simply frustrating, maybe, but not in a bad way. Our thwarted attempts to figure the characters out lend a sense of suspense to the thing. And if we have trouble orienting ourselves relative to Aoi Hana’s setting, so do the characters.

The plays-and-books-within-an-anime/manga remain intact — or, I should say that they survived the transition from manga to anime — but they’re probably a bit more prevalent throughout the manga, if only because there’s more plot in the manga than would fit in eleven animated episodes. On one occasion, even Fumi attempts the drama thing — while in the anime that simply would have seemed appropriate, as Fumi’s attempt to seize agency as the main character in the play of her own life, in the manga it comes across as an attempt (incidental or otherwise) to find a background to inhabit in the first place, a potential means of escape from solid white and black panels. But, as you can see above, even stage backdrops are often omitted. Readers and characters are left adrift in uncertainty — or perhaps they’re meant to face the stark, utter certainty of convention, the pervasive foe of alternative sexuality.

The chapter titles, too, are rather literary, often evoking lesbian novelists and poets. There seems to be something of a tradition of those in Japan. And that strikes me as odd not because it’s odd in itself, but because attempts to (re)construct a gay literary tradition in English literature seem to be arduous and uncertain affairs. Most of us know about the gay modernists — Wilde, Woolf, and so on — and about certain isolated “deviants” such as Whitman, and that’s about it, at least prior to the era during which overt homosexuality would no longer result in prompt banning of the offending literature. We talk about potentially gay historical authors in hushed, bemused tones, as if we were their contemporaries trying to incubate a scandal. I’m sure there’s something to be said for the tradition that produces yuri manga versus western traditions of GLBT narratives, but, whatever it is, I don’t suppose I’m properly equipped to say it.

I seem to have digressed a bit (as I’m wont to do). But that’s alright; I’m running out of things to say anyhow. You’ll probably hear more from me on Aoi Hana when I get to Hourou Musuko, which isn’t yuri, exactly, but should fit into the present project quite well regardless.

How about those sketchy, pastel, storybook-looking backgrounds? They began to stand out to me during the ninth episode, but seeing a traffic light illustrated in that manner toward the beginning of the tenth and most recent episode really brought the backgrounds to bear in my viewing experience.

How surreal is that? Perhaps not as surreal to you as it strikes me, but I, for one, am not accustomed to seeing technology treated like this visually. The backgrounds invoke in me a sense of fantasy and romance; consider another recent show with a storybook aesthetic, Kemono no Souja Erin. Given that feel, I wouldn’t have expected there to be a closeup of an electric machine at all. There are cars, of course, but not much is made of them; they’re simply present (and I believe that, like the cell phones, they’re illustrated more like the characters than the background).

But what strikes me is not the emphasis on the stoplight, it’s how the stoplight seems an extension of the natural world. It fits neatly into the space that surrounds the characters — a space into which they themselves don’t seem to fit neatly.

It looks very much as if they’re standing in front of a painted stage backdrop (funny how, toward the middle of the series, we actually see stage productions in this stage-like world). Perhaps this imbues the show with a sense of order, deliberateness, and even dramatic freedom from some of the constraints of reality, but it must be said that Aoi Hana doesn’t exactly beat around the bush in its depiction of relationships. The obvious sexuality variance aside, I’d say it handles the many faces of rejection and the dreaded friend zone in a wonderfully familiar way.

Perhaps the visual duality reflects the dualism (or multiplicity) of certain characters’ love lives. Kyouko and Sugimoto are involved in some way with both a man and at least one girl; Okudaira doesn’t seem to care much at all about gender; we learn in the tenth episode that Kagami has (or had) not two, but three admirers within the Sugimoto family. In most cases, things don’t come together neatly for these people. Fumi seems to be the surprising exception; she was used for a rebound relationship, but she has since made it quite clear that she has no use at all for Sugimoto’s childishness. We might say that Fumi has learned how to better navigate the disjointed world, and though I’ve seen some concern expressed around the sphere as to how the show will manage to wrap up satisfyingly with one episode to go, Fumi’s success is climax enough for me. The rest can be an epilogue, for all I care.

We might also note that being estranged from one’s surroundings is relevant to being a teenager. With that in mind, I’m intrigued by the variety of characters drawn into the show’s tangled relationship webs and shown against many of the stylized backdrops (as opposed to, say, the parents, who are with few exceptions fixtures of their homes). Can we assume that Shinobu, Kou, and even Kagami still have growing up to do? Probably so. I’m reminded of the question raised indirectly in Genshiken: does growing up ever really end?