mizuki-foreshadowing

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

THIS GIRL

CAN FIT

SO MUCH DEPTH

IN THE

DOESN'T SHARE WITH ANYONE

not even the literal embodiments of you can tell me anything

Girl is literally alone right now, I love her

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I really love this game. First, we had one of Mafumom's themes play following Mafuyu's nightmare while she was telling Miku and Rin about it, and it was the starry-feeling theme that always felt to me like a character realizing just how well Mafumom can deny the truth for her own narrative,

But then we get this! Ever since reading the Raise Your Bow in a Snow White World event, with all the amazing little moments Shizuku says 'yuki' (雪) for "snow" but calling to mind Yuki as in Mafuyu, I've been on the lookout for stuff like that. I was telling one of my irl friends about the game and she was like, 'Shizuku is so fun for her name, it means 'silent'.' which isn't quite true but the association with 'shizuka' (静か) feels important.

BUT we get a new level to this! Mizuki here uses the word 'yuuki' (勇気) for "courage" really prominently here. This is the part of Mafuyu's story where she's being forced to redefine herself, not just being passively jostled around by all the conflicting forces in her life; she wants a relationship with her mom and that can't ever happen unless Mafuyu makes those steps forward herself. This wordplay may be intentional.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

Today in things I didn't know were a character trait until I tried to write the character breaking it: Mizuki can't be real with someone unless she's alone with them. Easily if it's talking about herself, but also in general. Even when it's about helping Mafuyu, all the heavy lifting is done in her internal monologue, and then it waits for her to be alone with her.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

On the one hand, good job Kanade, you left your middle school uniforms hanging up neat and clean for two years, on the other, holy shit Kanade seems to respect a part of her house? but of course, that's because of what she keeps there on the dresser.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

Mafumom, alledgedly, spilled something on Mafuyu's laptop and told her that's why it's gone now, when she was cracking down on Mafuyu's N25 activity. She "sent it away for repairs" and got away with it all.

But this exchange, it implies Mafuyu's dad knew that had been a lie, that the computer was hidden, never damaged, and I think some part of Mafuyu knows it too; she checked all her files to see if her mom deleted any.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I hear there's talk about she/her being used in the text for Mizuki and thought I'd throw my hat in the ring with the pinned post ^^

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

Mafudad walking in Comminuty-pizza-gif style to see Mafuyu exhibiting every sign of parental trauma imaginable, unable to taste and barely able to feel, Kanade trying desperately to use music of all things to save Mafuyu's life, and Mafumom saying 'that could be anything!' to Mafuyu telling her to her face multiple times that she wants to die, and being like... "Has nobody thought to get this girl therapy?"

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I fricking love this girl. This is the power of being neurotypical.

I like this scene, of Ena in her room reflecting on Honami's shocking artwork, a lot. It implies that the untenable artwork Ena makes in class, the pieces Yukihira dislikes and can find nothing nice to say about, do have that ephemeral quality he couldn't describe, "appeal," despite lacking any other good qualities.

Ena is changing her art now, and starting to receive compliments from Yukihira, but, like Ena in her room here reflecting on Honami's art, there's something missing now from the compromised, more technically-sound art.

Like Honami's art now, many more people can appreciate Ena's improved artwork, except it's lost something unique and strange. We're learning what Ena's style is, that trait her art has that Futaba mentioned admiring and trying to mimic once.

I kind of love this because, in Emu's room we watched Ena hating and ridiculing Honami's artwork, of being unable to salvage her technique and needing to replace it with something else, out of a sincere desire to help her. But now, Ena is looking at Honami's art but this time going out of her way to try and appreciate it for Honami's sake, and she's finding things she likes; it has appeal. Ena at Emu's house is Yukihira, but Ena in her room here, is Kanade.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

This event reads really cleanly as a metaphor for how Yukihira views Ena as his student, and to me, proves that Ena really is "bad at art."

Ena's story never really hit for me taking her at face value that her art is good, but things kept sticking out to me; the reality than nobody in N25's fanbase compliments the art in their comments (and that one who did admitted it's not why they follow N25), Ena's dad looking at her contest submission and doubling down that art isn't for her, Ena talking about relearning the fundamentals /relearning how to draw, that she's forgotten the basics and can't express what she tries to, her being so utterly floored by Futaba's work, which Futaba and Yukihira both describe as perhaps too plain, and, of course, Ena's illustrations account getting no activity.

It hit me that, at no point are we told Ena is good at art. We assume it because Ena loves art, commits herself to it, and is very passionate about it, and because she has reasons for why each of her critics [her dad, Yukihira, Mafuyu] don't like her art. But, the reality is she's spent more than a year with precisely one critic: Kanade, who isn't her critic, and that was after her art reached a point where two different professionals had given up on her after five years. She gained one in Mafuyu at the same time her dad discovered Ena isn't just drawing for fun after quitting her private class a year ago, in Insatiable Pale Color, and she started to spiral, but how was it that Kanade saved her? By telling her that her art may not be perfect but that it's perfect for N25. The way Ena experiences Kanade's music and visualizes it is something Kanade can't do and something that gives viewers a more complete impression of a song. Ena stops being able to do that, to express how she feels with her art, around Blank Canvas; it's why she refuses to accept that she doesn't need to get better.

This event, Paint What I Love - Rainbow Canvas, is silly and fun but, it goes out of its way to tell us that Yukihira isn't cruel, but that he's trying to help a sincerely far-gone student. Without the metaphor of Ena as Yukihira looking at Honami as Ena's art, it still opens with Yukihira, telling Ena her art lacks something ephemeral still in 'appeal', and we spend the event watching Ena unable to help Honami with something just as hard to describe, that seems so simple in Ena's own head.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I love this event. We get to see Ena from Yukihira's perspective; Honami genuinely wants to try hard and learn to draw but is wildly unable to reach that point. Ena can't see the worth in what Honami makes and uses Honami's stated intent [that she isn't interested in making abstract art] to narrow the directions she could guide her down to ones that she won't be able to reach. Ena is still very kind to Honami of course, but her internal monologue is ruthless, and we get to see if Ena voices it, lies, or finds some other way forward; we get to see if she would be cruel to herself or better than her own critics.

Also this exchange is intensely funny,

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

This scene set to the comic relief music is throwing me. This is where Ena decides if she ends the cycle of violence or perpetuates it.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I'm watching Paint What I Love - Rainbow Canvas! and I absolutely adore that we're getting to see Honami's anxiety a little more. It's something I kind of love about her. She tries, and generally succeeds, at being calm, composed, and mature, and that's in spite of her anxiety.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

And Now I Wear This Ribbon, Aftershow & Megurine Luka: Choosing to Wait

I watched the And Now I Wear This Ribbon aftershow and Megurine Luka: Choosing to Wait, and the most interesting thing I found, at least related to learning about Mizuki, is the stage background.

It's fun because it's the same stage from On This Blank Canvas I Paint, since this is an Ena event almost as much as it's a Mizuki event. But, it is first and foremost a Mizuki event. Ena gets the stage itself, but Mizuki gets this.

There's a big pink bow and that's very cleanly Mizuki, but there's also something else. Each of the singers get a window overlooking a bright and colorful nighttime cityscape, a window without any curtains. I was actually hoping it was specifically Mizuki's window, but it's not.

But Mizuki's room does have a large window with very iconic curtains, so I think it's still intentional paired with the big ribbon above it, that this is supposed to call to mind Mizuki's window but without the curtains hiding it. It may represent how, following the events of her sister leaving but herself joining N25, Mizuki can look out into the city now, and see hope and possibility. It's not a time to struggle with wanting to disappear, but a strange new world that opened up.

It is after those events, after all, over the course of that one year before the Main Story, that Mizuki chooses to embrace her cute style without having her sister to protect her, and gets a part-time job at an apparel shop that seems to sincerely let her be her authentic self there.

The Aftershow itself is Mizuki looking for Miku and Luka to show them that first music video she made with Ena, with the box and the ribbon, and everybody else finding their own way there, with Kanade mentioning offhand that she's in a slump. Mizuki is feeling emotional and asks to sing, and the lyrics of Kimi no Yoru wo Kure are about sleepless lonely nights in the city and feeling pitiful yet also being able to find hope for tomorrow too.

It's a song about the future but it's firmly rooted in the present, it's just a present that knows deep down that the future will be kind; it's very Mizuki. This ties into Luka's reflection about Mizuki at the end of Part 1 of her side story, that Luka was wrong about avoidance equalling complacency, but that Mizuki is making progress on her own terms.

In Megurine Luka: Choosing to Wait; Part 2, we see that Kanade is able to break through that creative slump after Mizuki invites everybody to a cafe to work on their parts in person together.

On the one hand, it's always been Mizuki who gets creative on ways to still involve Mafuyu in the wake of her mom cracking down on her, but on the other, it shows that Mizuki is changing. She's embracing feeling deeply connected with her groupmates.

In Part 2, Luka gets Rin to admit that N25 would never have worked on a song in person at a cafe at the point that Rin had joined the SEKAI, but in Part 1, Luka tells Miku that she's pretty sure Mizuki was lying when she said the reason she doesn't go to school is because it's boring. Miku asks why Luka hadn't asked Mizuki about it then, and Luka reflects to herself that she thinks Meiko may have been right about being delicate about Mizuki's situation, rather than simply being afraid of changing anything. Ena may no longer be making progress with Mizuki, but Mizuki is taking that initiative on her own.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

Everybody's speculating about what the new N25 Worldlink will be like. We saw Kanade in a Miya Girls uniform and friends with Mafuyu, so we know what the core AU is, but we also see this.

This is Mizuki, at the apparel shop she works at. So, that's not weird, right?

Where does Mizuki spend a significant portion of her time, that never, once, in any way, shape or form, features directly in any of her event stories or side stories? Where do we not even have a talk-background for? What do we know absolutely nothing about? I think that's on purpose. Mizuki's story skipping over her part-time job clearly represents something, and here, we see her card directly depict it. That's the shock of this AU regarding Mizuki, that's the mystery to me.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I watched the rest of Join the Stream with Friends: Wedding Live! and one small detail I kind of loved, was that out of her, Shiho, Honami, and Nene, Ena was the only one to take really naturally to being on a sudden streaming segment.

One of my own friends is an up-and-coming streamer, and I recognized that fun energy of always using your time to speak as a way to pass it back to the streamer in a way to help them shine. Ena's VA even had her speak a little different, Ena was in her 'I'm getting lost in enjoying myself' voice except of course she was doing it to help Minori. It was a fun side of her to see!

Not to mention how she thought to record Minori's guest appearance, and took a well-composed video. Ena has good fashion sense, took well to being live on-stream, takes sensational photos covertly enhanced by her artistic sense, and is even good at filming. It goes to show, she does art (which she's shown to and implied to really struggle with) not because that's her talent, but that it's her love and her passion.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

Ena: I Want to Make Something Good; Part 2

This is an And Now I Wear This Ribbon side story. Mizuki and Ena go shopping after another afterparty, and Mizuki checks in with Ena about her and Kanade's exercise following Let's Enjoy Spojoy Park Together. Mizuki convinces Ena to exercise again and Ena reflects on how far she's come, that she can support Kanade in ways unrelated to music.

This post just zooms in on how Mizuki tackles the situation of Ena and Kanade simply never exercising after that one time. The way Spojoy Park concluded, it did feel like Ena and Kanade would keep up with occasional workouts, and that seems to have been Mizuki's impression as well...

It seemed normal to Mizuki that Ena might be interested in being stylish for the occasional exercise, but really she just saw some cute sneakers and wasn't even thinking about it.

Mizuki is good with people and she knows Ena well, so she takes to the task of working her magic to getting Ena and Kanade to try and stay in shape, for their own sakes.

Finally, at long last, we learn for realsies that Mizuki had been lying during Secret Distance; she doesn't exercise, certainly not regularly, and that that had in fact been Mizuki covering her ass about having more energy than the rest of N25 for having a different physique than them. I tried to find evidence for this some months ago, but it's reassuring that it came from a card I only got recently.

But, Mizuki saying she exercises regularly had still been a lie she told to N25, one that Kanade and Ena took as true still during the Spojoy Park event. Mizuki is coming clean to Ena here that she actually doesn't exercise either, and using the gesture as an olive branch in asking for Ena to exercise again when she doesn't actually want to. In truth of course, Mizuki is almost certainly tagging along to make sure that the workout actually happens, but Ena doesn't need to know that.

Mizuki and Ena have their share of the next song already completed, as Mafuyu is the one behind schedule in this part of the story, and Mizuki gets Ena to agree.

Mizuki had initiated the Spojoy Park events out of being worried for Kanade though, so she wants to use this to get Kanade to exercise too. But, Ena still doesn't actually want to exercise, so Mizuki reassures Ena that she's helping Kanade too since it'll make Kanade want to join in and take care of herself as well.

Ena saw firsthand that, while Kanade had a good time with her friends, she was woefully unprepared for the physical activity, and tells Mizuki that Kanade probably won't want to go. Mizuki knows exactly what to say here.

Mizuki is, of course, doing this to support her own friend.

[mizuki-foreshadowing]

I've read almost all of her focus events by now, and the side stories for the cards I have so I think I know the answer, but, is Shizuku really not weird about food? Her figure was more important to her idol experience than Airi's, with all her modeling work, but it's only Airi and Haruka that have a relationship with food.

I'm writing her sitting down for dinner with Mafuyu and her mom, with Mafuyu having the observation skills of somebody quietly panicking, and it feels strange not to make any special notes about Shizuku and the food.