I’d always assumed Satou was faking her fear in this scene, but realizing it may have been genuine kinda makes my heart hurt. Her eventual handling of Daichi later on can make it easy to forget just how horrifying this situation truly is. A teenage girl against a male adult predator in a dark alleyway at night.
Fascination? Curiosity? Sadness? Envy?
Her smile can almost be read as melancholic.
The question is why.
I just find Auntie’s reactions to Satou and Shio’s dynamic so interesting. She’s a mystery sometimes.
The chapters with all three of them are so bizarre and entertaining because we’re basically witnessing a multi-generational trauma troupe attempt to pull off an elaborate heist to escape the cycle of abuse.
(with mixed results obviously)
Share it in the comments so we have an excuse to bleach our eyes with a series rewatch ^^
Based on your choice, how do you think the story would play out differently?
Explain your reasoning in the comments!
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So much for getting to "decide stuff together" 😭
Maybe in the next life, Shio-chan 🥀
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Unfortunately for Satou, her purgatory comes with an awfully familiar parole angel
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Not in the hypersexual or masochistic sense, but in the parental one.
Let’s assume that Asahi becomes a single father in the future but due to his spiraling mental health issues he ends up taking his own life (sorry Asahi fans 🥀).
So now Asahi’s child ends up in Shio’s custody due to her being his only remaining family member and we arrive at the Auntie Shio timeline.
We can even make Shio a working adult in this situation.
The real question is this:
Does Auntie Shio have the capacity to love and care for a child properly?
Or does her Happy Sugar Life and exclusive love for Satou prevent that from happening?
I’d imagine she might be willing to tend to the child’s physical needs.
But emotionally? I’d be much less convinced.
Shio might become another caregiver too fixated on her own framework of love to meet the child’s emotional needs and unintentionally create another Satou Matsuzaka.
A version of Satou from before she met Shio.
The situation would be less dangerous presumably compared to Auntie but a lot would remain the same.
It would be difficult for a child to have their needs ignored and realize that their parental figure is too focused on loving a dead person. That the needs of someone long gone are prioritized over their own.
A lot of this is assuming that Shio would be unable or unwilling to change for the child, similar to Auntie.
Shio’s love and devotion towards Satou long after her passing is beautiful in a vacuum. Yet we must question whether the cycle of abuse was truly broken with Shio or if it just entered its newest phase.
as if you were describing the story and characters to a friend