©pom・JOYNET/LINE Digital Frontier・”Senior is a Man” Production Committee
I shouldn’t be the one to write a review of this episode. This is all that is running through my mind as I sit here, trying to put words onto metaphorical paper, but I also know that I have to try. I can’t take Nick’s place, but I’ll try my best and always hope I don’t have to.
This is probably not that different from what Makoto’s mother was thinking for most of the episode. It turns out that no real Either reason she embraces the gender binary so firmly, although if pressed, she might say it’s because she was so disgusted by her father’s cross-dressing in her youth. But the problem is almost certainly not that simple. We see that she had an aversion to cross-dressing men long before she saw her father in one, and it seemed to stem more from simple vanity: she’s cute, so she deserves cute things. They weren’t, so they didn’t, and by trying to use something that never fit them, they were essentially stealing from her. And for her own father to interfere in her domain was just a bridge too far. She acts not out of fear but out of disgust, entirely due to her own beliefs about who “deserves” what.
Her rejection of Makoto’s love for so-called “girly” things comes from this anger. It seemed to her that her father had betrayed her in some way, and she was unable to realize that it actually had nothing to do with her. Her father was just doing what he wanted to do, presumably with the knowledge of his wife. Makoto prefers cute colors and looks and doesn’t reject his mother’s beliefs. He just stayed true to himself. The only one who made a fuss about this matter, the only one who took it personally, was her─and this was the real tampering with other people’s fields.
Did this all settle a little too neatly? I think so, yes. But the important thing is that she forced herself to try to meet Cheng halfway. Her child is reaching out to her in a way she never did with her own father, and the biggest sign of her own growing up is the way she resists her own knee-jerk reactions. This time she didn’t cut off all her hair. She didn’t tell Makoto that she never wanted to see him again. On the contrary, she try. The painting shows this in her scared, hunched pose as they enter the mall. This contrasts with Makoto’s confident posture, where he holds his head high even when the child points out that he is tall. I think the real first step was taken when she realized pink was just a color.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the series is getting a movie sequel, which does make the lack of determination a little easier to deal with. Saki’s plot feels like it’s dropped a bit, we don’t know what caused her mother to leave and abandon her daughter, nor does Saki fully come to terms with her own lack of romantic and/or sexual attraction to others. But I think it’s still okay to end with Saki running to her friends. Ryuuji and Makoto fully accept her for who she is, even if she hasn’t figured it out yet. It’s wonderful that Saki has the room to grow that Makoto has discovered.
At the end of his final comments, Nick said he wasn’t entirely sure the ending would betray his trust. I admit, it’s not perfect, but I think it does its best to maintain our interest in franchise. As Jane Austen writes in ” mansfield parkwhich allows “everyone, even without too much fault, to live in reasonable comfort.” Even though she doesn’t mean that, the old-fashioned spelling of “everyone” (separating the two parts) is very useful here. important. Makoto, Ryuji, and Saki are all moving to a place where they feel comfortable with who they are and their bodies. I’m so excited that we get to go on this journey with them, and I wish Nick could be here with us on this journey.
grade:
Senior is a man Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
