pinkpastelsushiroll

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

GUYS, I'm beeing serious... I NEED another chapter! I hate WAITING, I'm going crazy😭

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

Graphic vibes

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

Me still waiting for Fairy Tail 100 Years Quest To Be Animated:

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

NOOOO GAJEEL YOU'RE GOING TO BE AN AWESOME DAD WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT 😭😭😭😭 ?

MEANWHILE LEVY IS JUST SCARED HE'S GOING TO FEED THEM IRON LMAO-

And Lily just wants to buy a kiwi awwww 🥺🥺.

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

BREAKING NEWS: REPORTS SHOW THAT LOCAL EMO BOY HAS UNGODLY AMOUNTS OF RIZZ, CROWD GOES WILD OVER HIS ROMANTIC MOVES.

LATER ON: LOCAL OLDER SISTER UNKNOWINGLY BEST WINGMAN TO EVER EXIST. STILL SINGLE FOR SOME FUCKING REASON.

MORE NEWS AFTER THE COMMERCIALS

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

All the people who haven’t watched The Dangers in My Heart and wonder why Yamada would like Ishikawa should skip straight to today’s episode—you’ll see why he’s a special protagonist.

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

im literally him (a loser) 

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

He’s tiny and I like him

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

IVE HAD THIS IDEA IN MY HEAD EVER SINCE THAT SCENE SHIMA WAS DOIN KARAOKE WITH CHRIS AND STUFF BUT I’VE BEEN INSPIRED TO DRAW IT NOW CAUSE I RECENTLY WATCHED THE ANIMEEEE!!!! Uwah,,, so good,,, im so happy that i finally got to see mitsumi singing LOL

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

shima’s development and character core // skip to loafer spoilers

if you’ve been following me, you know i like to pay a closer attention to shima’s growth and development, specially related to his relationship with mitsumi. that being said, i want to talk more about how much he changed after the breakup.

since chapter 46, i’ve seen a lot of changes in shima’s reaction, focusing way more on him double questioning himself and his feelings related to the way he treats mitsumi.

it’s painful. mitsumi was his first female friend and the first time he ever felt like taking a step further in his own, not accepting what it was given to him. and he lost that. and he thinks he lost it because of his own mind and insecurities, blaming himself for everything.

mitsumi, the person he loves the most (platonic or not), is distant from him. and this creates a whole new book of feelings: jealously, guilt, self hatred and impulsiveness. and that can be seen when he stands up for people he love, something he would once just not and smile.

but does he really has the right to do so?? is it honest for him to correct someone when he was the one who was once “using” with mitsumi without knowing his feelings first? is it fair for him to feel like this? is it fair that he be heard?

yes, he is hurt. it’s clear in his eyes, specially his last scene on chapter 50. he’s hurt but not by the things people did to him: he’s now the one who inflicted pain and doesn’t know how to get back what he lost. that’s because he doesn’t KNOW or even ALLOW himself to it.

what does it mean to love someone romantically when he never once felt jealous? what does it mean to care so much for someone when he was never cared to? what does it mean to give up of someone you love so dearly if he can’t even let it all go? how does one stop making excuses?

shima is a character written beautifully, specially because of his slowly but steady growth. he’s learning, finally having a life away from his trauma and away from people who chained him. he’s finally allowing himself to feel pain, now he needs to finally allow himself to be loved and to be heard. to build one’s confidence is hard and tricky, specially for a boy who never had a life of his own. to build a castle with only sand, one needs to be open to have it all crumble. he just needs to learn how to build it again.

what i love the most is how he never blamed mitsumi, not even once. i know there’s nothing to blame mitsumi for, but i’ve seen over and over again romantic stories blaming the girl for the male insecurities. but no. not right now.

his battle is his own, so his soldiers are the ones going to war, not mitsumi’s. he’s not the one to be pitied, nor is she, nor anyone. blame isn’t something to be shoved at someone, specially not to the girl who has nothing to do with HIS traumas.

i like and admire this about takamatsu-senpai’s writing. she doesn’t shift the blame or even makes shima the “good guy”. mitsumi isn’t a monster for standing up for herself - in fact, she should be celebrated.

shima is his traumas. shima is his mom’s expectations. shima is the empty house he comes back to everyday. shima is the boy who’s trying his best to finally understand his feelings and go after the girl he loves the most.

🌟 thread originally posted on twitter!

🌟 this is a flux of conscience! please forgive my gramatical mistakes

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐋𝐨𝐚𝐟𝐞𝐫

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ★ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ⭒

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

skip and loafer ch. 53

shima seems to see romantic love as a combination of different attraction factors, where liking someone as a person (for their personality) can be compensated for other things, therefore your standarts are lower when you're romantically attracted to someone. the way he sees it, the highest form of steem you can have for someone is to like them as a person, where these other factors don't matter and what you truly value is solely their personality.

i think it's interesting how mukai introduces this conversation by building a hierarchy of feelings, where romantic love stands on top of the feelings of friendship and of liking someone as a person, because that's one concept i've been personally focusing on deconstructing in my life. it's precisely by differenciating these types of feelings and putting them on a hierarchy that so many people end up in romantic relationships with people they don't really like, or why so many people drift away from their friendships when they start dating someone.

through everyone else's eyes, shima's feelings are romantic, and he doesn't feel like they are, because romance to him means something else. the lines between liking someone as a person, as a friend and as a lover are blurred. and listen, that's how they're supposed be. to love someone as a lover is supposed to mean you love them as a friend and as a person as well. a friend and a lover shouldn't be too different, and liking them as a person is supposed to be the core of both feelings.

i don't think shima is being innocent, like i've seen so many people saying on twt since the chapter came out. i think he's touching something very deep about relationships in our society that so many stories that focus on romance fail to address. in most of these stories, romance is the final goal. that's where most of them end. that's not the case here. i was already surprised when mitsumi and shima started dating, and even more surprised when they went back to being friends. that's not the usual narrative for this kind of story. because here, it doesn't seem like this hierarchy matters. and i think it's beautiful and i think it's HUGE how both shima and mitsumi value their friendship above everything else. not only them, because friendship is one of the main themes of this story. both as a dynamic and as a type of love as well.

but people have different perspectives on love and how love feels for them. it's different for mitsumi, for shima, for mika, for fumi. the way you're taught about love in your family or as a child in general has a big role on shaping that. we saw the matter of mitsumi having received lots of love in her family and childhood friends being brought up before as an explanation for her confidence. then, on the other hand, that's why we see shima acklowledging this on the next panels:

we know a few things about shima's family and their complicated relationships. shima never realized his little brother liked him because he saw his behavior as coldness or indifference, when he was actually being considerate of the distance shima was putting between them himself. he felt the need to please his mother by acting in order for her to love him, or for him to be worthy of her love, because their relationship was too anchored on exploitation. his father was having an affair, which not only made shima watch the failure of his parents marriage but also perceive romantic love as something superficial (as in "people break up and move on to the next person") and possibily as something that pushes people away. then shima's first girlfriend only liked him because of his looks, and so many others confessed to him without barely even knowing him. how could shima trust his own feelings after all of that? if he spent most of his formative years in an environment of appearences where love was tied to selfishness, interest, volatility, coldness, pain? shima learned to supress all his feelings and be a people pleaser as a survival mechanism. don't get too attached, live up to others expectations, keep your distance, smile and wave, bottle it all up. he is a kid that doesn't know a single thing about love and is scared as hell of it. love feels as if something is about to break.

that's why liking someone as a person feels more important to him. and that's not only the highest feeling he can have for someone else, i think this is the highest form of feeling he thinks someone could have for him too. it's the kind of feeling he thinks his own mother couldn't have, because acting was more important to her than who he actually was. it's the feeling he unconciously doesn't allow others to feel for him, because he never shows people who he truly is. so shima understands mitsumi's words as a love confession back in chapter 41. she didn't say "i love you", she said "that's what i love about you". and he asks her out, not only because he already knows mitsumi is different, so it seems more reasonable to give it a try, but also because he thinks this is how it's supposed to go. this is what he thinks it's expected to give her in return.

when society puts romance on the top of the relationships/feelings hierarchy, it builds an insane amount of expectations around it. i think it's crazy how friendships feel so free while romantic relationships feel so enclosured. they have too many rules. you're supposed to do this, and that, and behave in certain ways. if you start dating a friend then suddenly your friendship dynamic changes. a boyfriend or a girlfriend have responsibilities that friends don't have. it's a weight. i can't imagine a person like shima feeling any other way about a romantic relationship. for him, this is a big, big weight. that's why he puts an emphasis when he says "i thought that i could be a 'boyfriend' too". a boyfriend is a social role. when he phrases it like that, he's using the word "boyfriend" as an outside concept: he doesn't know what it means to him, he only knows what it means for everyone else. and that's not something he can do.

mukai is absolutely right when he tells shima he shouldn't be going out with anyone. shima isn't ready to be that close to anyone, not even his closest friends. i can't even describe how sad i felt when mukai said this to him:

shima is just so, so lonely...

but this doesn't mean that shima's supposed to become ready to be a "boyfriend" on those terms. i just think he's still trying to figure out what all of these things mean to him. and the good thing is that mitsumi is also trying to figure out these things too. the difference between them is that mitsumi is a few steps ahead, because she already understands what friendship love feels like. and when it comes to that, she gave us one of the most special love confessions i've ever seen.

so many people talked about this scene already, but now, in the light of chapter 53, her saying "i really like this person" has a whole new meaning. this is the most honest love shima has ever received from anyone. no romantic confession could top that. no romantic feeling could heal his wounds the way these words from mitsumi can. this is a treasure shima can't afford to lose.

we're taught that romantic love will save us. that it will make us the happiest, that it completes us. we grow up believing that we can't survive without it. what we really can't survive without are our friends... skip and loafer is putting friendship above everything else, but more than that, it is questioning how romantic love is supposed to feel. some people feel it, some people don't. i think most of us don't really know what it is. we think we do because we read enough, we saw enough movies, we listened to enough love songs. i think i felt it a few number of times in my life but everytime i felt it for someone new i asked myself, was it really love before? what is it, really? if i never read those books or saw thoses movies or listened to those songs. would i recognize it? would i know it better? would it even exist?

aren't shima's feelings for mitsumi already valuable enough? big enough, true enough? would they change if he called them romantic? mitsumi has SO much to teach him about love, about himself, about others. their encounter is so beautiful and so rich. we see how much he's changing, how many new things he's finally starting to understand about himself, how many important steps he's taken since they met. is finding romance at the end really the most important thing for their story?

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

mitsumi and shima’s little dance ヾ(｡･ω･)ｼ

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

[pinkpastelsushiroll]

Reunion time! 😄💕