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Venting about Ishimiko (Kaguya-sama)

You know, I was writing this as a reply in reddit then I realized that they don't want to read this. I don't think anyone wants to read this (sorry for using the tag, but I also don't want to be yelling at an empty abyss either). As I was writing the reddit reply, I realized I finally put into words how I feel about Ishimiko in the Kaguya-sama love is war manga. And I literally have nowhere to share it, so I recreated my tumblr account.

Warning because there are massive Kaguya-sama spoilers and this is also not going to be a positive post at all. So if you read it and don't like it, you have only yourself to blame for reading it. -- I don't know.

If there's something I've learned from the short story and the new werewolf game novel, it's that I don't really want more Ishimiko. I don't want to see more explanations of what they think. I don't want to learn more about them. Frankly, I know more than enough. Sometimes I wonder if I know more about it than Aka.

I seriously just wanted them to close lips. Heck, hold hands or something. I just want some damn closure. He had a chance to do something like that with the time skip. Instead he wasted that flash forward in 276 by making the most incredibly ambiguous and frustrating flash forward chapter on existence.

And that's the greatest problem right now. 276 and 278. The Light Novel couldn't solve anything about Ishimiko , because it happens before 278, meaning that no matter what, 278 is going to Thanos snap whatever 'progress' was made during it. And 276 causes a similar problem, cause If he made a college Ishimiko continuation, it would have to be after 276. Because otherwise we still still ahve 276 smearing itself all over whatever we see from college Ishimiko before that point.

But on the other side of the coin. Having the interesting parts of the Ishimiko romance happen after college Ishimiko after 276 has the slight problem that it would be incredibly depressing. It's kinda funny and cute to see these characters wasting time for a couple of years. But 6+ years (high school + all the pre-276 college) would be so sad and honestly, really mean with the characters? Not even the rent a girlfriend guy is going to wait 6 whole years like that.

I guess my biases are showing here though. Because nowadays I am really feeling like I don't actually like College Ishimiko? I know it's fun in theory. But it's not really what I signed for. Maybe I would feel different if I going through 276 was worth it and it led to some form of closure. But nah, of course not. Because it would have been so hard for Aka Akasaka to give us even one speck of breadcrumb so near the end of the manga. I can't read Aka's mind so I don't know what he was thinking when writing 276, but I get such the vibe that it was just mean-spirited*.

And I think that's the problem I have overall. After 137, the manga + Short Story are so full of stuff that makes the ship more annoying and/or painful but there's never a reward that makes all those annoyances and pain worth it. I mean oh, how cool Ishigami almost killed himself and Miko broke her arm, but it's all worth it cause 226 chapters and a short story later we get to learn that Ishigami is transphobic. yay.

And the question is, after all of that, do I really want more of it? Probably not. This is probably why, the second I heard about that new light novel I automatically got defensive about it. I can only go through the annoyance -> pain -> no real reward cycle so many times before it's just tiresome. That's the best word I would use to describe Akasaka's writing overall. Tiresome.

*I know people really love 276. Specially HayaFuji shippers. But I think this chapter is the one that really broke me. And as a HayaFuji shipper, I can't help but notice that even the big win that 276 is supposed to be, Fuji looks like she's hating every single moment of it. And surely, that's not what's really going on. But it's an example of just how Aka forced himself to be as ambiguous and annoying and honestly cruel as possible in this chapter. The least-ambiguous thing about it is the Wedding rings, but it had to be so covert and stealthy that most people don't even notice. I've seen plenty of people tell others to go read Oshi No Ko chapter 90.1 for confirmation that Guya got married, because for some reason Aka couldn't be clear-enough about Kaguprez' status in their own manga. Again, it's just tiresome.

"Show don't tell" has its limits. Sometimes you really just have to show something. Anything at all. Unless exhausting your audience is part of your goals, I guess.