Keeping up with the feel-good, fairy tale vibes of Akebi Komichi’s environment, Hiro straight-up summarized a Clannad Afterstory fix-it in a single chapter. It’s like Chapter 20 (and the anime Episode 12) and its YLIA references.
Komichi venturing out on her own in the snow is reminiscent of what Nagisa did when she was younger. Fortunately, Komi is much more healthy. Not to mention, the circumstances of Yuwa’s pregnancy and Kao’s birth echoes that of Nagisa and Ushio.
So, dad is our MC’s first crush. Reading into the subtext, Erika is confirmed to be her second/current crush. Interesting.
I can’t wait to get the rest of the manga chapters adapted to anime. It’s just so peak.
Wow. That was amazing.
This whole chapter was a flashback. If this manga wasn’t so well done, I think it would be easy to complain about the very slow pace of the main story. I was not expecting such a tense story like this chapter to come from this series, but it was excellent, so no complaints here.
I suspect that Hiro to some notable degree just follows his whims. There have been a few fairly linear arcs (like the Tokyo trip), but mostly he just focuses on one particular incident or interaction per chapter, and jumps around a lot. Even when there’s an obvious arc going on (like the festival one), it still tends to be sort of episodic, and doesn’t even necessarily follow a recognizable timeline.
Like currently, there’s this play coming up, but I don’t think we’ve actually seen anything about it for three or four chapters at least, and what we have seen of it so far has jumped around - a bit about Komichi and Erika here, a bit about Mai and Oshizu there…
But that’s fine. It’s odd and sort of confusing sometimes, but it means that we get things like this chapter, which was absolutely wonderful - so touching and heartfelt and compelling and masterfully done, even if it did seem to just come out of nowhere.
And next month we’ll get… something else.
