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Wrote half an essay after seeing the discourse on the different interpretations of the classroom scene and ‘Hikaru’ and Hikaru in general

Sometimes I see people on twt make posts about tshd that make me unreasonably angry (and then I take a deep breath and stop myself from picking a fight with a stranger on the internet about the fictional characters we both enjoy lol)

But I think one of the main things that makes The Summer Hikaru Died so interesting to analyze is that the story is told on two levels at once and sometimes the two contradict each other in what you want to happen

On the one hand you have the actual events of the story as they happen, a closeted Highschool boy realizes that his best friend and crush is dead and has been replaced by a mysterious creature and both of them build a deep relationship (while Yoshiki comes to terms with the loss of his friend and his feelings about this new ‘Hikaru’ and ‘Hikaru’ develops his own identity and relationships) and try to figure out what is happening in their town

On the other hand you have the whole story (both as a story and through individual scenes) being a metaphor for the experience of growing up closeted in a small traditional rural community and working through the external hurdles and internalized homophobia that comes with it, with the general goal of self discovery and existing as the truest happiest version of yourself

What you sometimes get is that because the themes of the metaphor also exist in the literal face value version of the story, people try to assert one aspect of the story over the other, something that is pretty common for every story where an outsider or minority analogy is drawn with the help of a non human creature (especially in a horror context)

The classroom scene from episode 3/chapter 6-7 was something a lot of manga readers were worried would be misinterpreted by new viewers and it is a perfect example of these two narratives playing out at the same time

On the first level you have the events themselves:

Yoshiki is warned by Kurebayashi that getting too close to the entity that came down from the mountain is dangerous for himself and the village, so he tries to distance himself from ‘Hikaru’.

‘Hikaru’, not realizing this is happening and not wanting to lose the first person he’s made a meaningful connection to, both as himself and through og Hikaru’s memories (who is also arguably the reason he got the chance to live this new life), goes looking for him and finds him while Yoshiki is deep in thought about his conflicting emotions. Yoshiki lashes out, because he’s scared, grieving, growing attached to the ‘Hikaru’ he’s spent the last 6 months with and feeling guilty for that last emotion, saying something true but hurtful to ‘Hikaru’ and pushing him away.

‘Hikaru’, confused by human emotion and the blurred line between his own emotions and the remnants of Hikaru’s, and hurt by being pushed away loses control, has an outburst and instinctually (partially because he’s the person who hurt him with his words, partially because as we see in 37-3 and 23/24 it’s what comes naturally to him when weakened, partially probably cause he did tell Yoshiki he would kill him if he told on him) tries to consume Yoshiki, giving him a short insight into his memories of the Indou ancestor and hichi-san, before stopping himself in horror at his own actions, stating that he can’t consume Yoshiki (and kill him) because he cares about him and begging him not to hate him

On the second level you have the scene as a metaphor for internalized homophobia and awakening sexuality:

The closeted teen is inundated in a conservative environment telling him that homosexuality is dangerous and unnatural, so he represses his emotions. He has an encounter with a different queer person he’s friends with (or who he might have had a previous romantic encounter with) who is further along in accepting their own sexuality and does not have his emotional hangups. He lashes out at them because of his own internalized homophobia, calling them a creep and pushing them away because they remind him of things he is trying to repress

The openly queer person tries to initiate (conversation or a more romantic encounter) (not necessarily in the same interaction like they do in the actual scene) and the closeted person is initially scared and disgusted because of the homophobia they’ve internalized from their environment but finds himself enjoying the experience

Those are the two general levels of the narrative, with some fluidity in the second level cause it’s not only strictly applicable to one specific situation

The core conflicts that happen when you try to condense the two are these:

‘Hikaru’ is a potentially dangerous creature, who, while not malicious, has already killed one person that we know of in the story. This is a conflict that happens every time you use a supernatural creature that is removed from humanity to represent aspects of a minority group, especially in a horror setting. While homophobes have no real excuse to be touting their homophobic bs, the concerns Kurebayashi raises are reasonable with the little knowledge they have, and while it later turns out that ‘Hikaru’ is not causing the incidents, in his disembodied state in chapter 37-3 he would have taken Yoshiki’s soul so that instinct is there. There is a perceived danger in overcoming prejudice and changing but that stems from an unreasonable fear or change, not from actual danger (and from fear of being judged but analyzing internalized homophobia in its entirety is too much for one tumblr post lol)

Yoshiki is also still coming to terms with the literal death of his lifelong friend and secret first love. While this can be translated to the grief for a past self, or grief for a past relationship before moving into a new one, both of those feelings are a more ‘healing’ kind of grief than having actually lost a loved one before their time

The last conflict, which is what a lot of people were worried about is that the metaphor doesn’t necessarily apply to the story in a straightforward linear fashion. People were worried that first time watchers would take the classroom scene as metaphorical sexual assault because of the way ‘Hikaru’ loses control of himself and attacks Yoshiki, an interpretation that would perpetuate the harmful “gay men are predators” stereotype.

But that interpretation only happens if you link the two narrative levels too closely together, keeping the timing of the literal scene while you interpret the “mixing” as a direct parallel to a sexual encounter. But discovering your own sexuality and coming to terms with it is a slow process, that takes a lot of people a long time and multiple interactions with other people to figure out. A metaphor doesn’t have to cling to all of the literal aspects of the text to do its job well and Yoshiki needs a legitimate reason to be scared in the actual text for the more unreasonable metaphorical fear of change element to be brought up.

In a more general sense, some people like to interpret ‘Hikaru’ as a representation of freely expressed queerness, while og Hikaru and the village represent Yoshiki’s closeted status quo and outside pressures, something which works on a lot of levels but isn’t flawless (especially in the case of og Hikaru, who we know very little about but whose memory affects the story to this day, with Yoshiki having a traumatic flashback to finding his body in the latest chapter)

‘Hikaru’ is also done a disservice if he is only viewed as a metaphor for freely expressed queerness in relation to Yoshiki because his experience forming his own character&relationships and figuring out what he is and what he wants to be, while at the same time being taught human morals (something which the characters themselves debate) also represents then quintessentially experience of coming of age in general. He is also a lovely and complex character in his own right whose journey I care for deeply

In short, in a supernatural horror story, you have to raise the stakes compared to the intimate personal stakes of figuring out your sexuality and identity, something which Mokumokuren does very well

Of course, no story can be fully interpreted until it is complete, and depending on how Yoshiki and Hikaru’s story ends, we might draw some slightly different conclusions at the end

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Rie Kurebayashi taking Yoshiki to the american style diner and getting them both parfaits, assuming Yoshiki would have a sweet tooth vs Tanaka taking Asako to a place where he can get a soft serve… mother-son behavior, i will die on that hill till proven otherwise, that’s Kurebayashi Iori with bleached hair

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something about all the sunflower imagery in episode 3 and the fact that Hikaru’s name means light… can’t cook up a good concrete interpretation right now but there’s something there

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OHOOOOOO CHAPTER 37-3

he’s gonna eat that little girl isn’t he

it’s either that or yoshiki is gonna use other half of his insides to bring him over somehow (which might help prove he’s not a monster to the company) but for horror purposes i think we’re due ‘Hikaru’ doing something monstrous and Yoshiki reinforcing that he really does love him even when he isn’t acting by human rules

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started the summer hikaru died (and then immediately devoured the manga and pilot one shot)

i know that original Hikaru’s feeling for Yoshiki are a bit controversial in the fandom (plus, he’s dead) but with the combination of the one shot and what we’ve seen from him in the manga the conclusion i reached is that he had repressed romantic feelings for Yoshiki

he might have been bisexual (since he seems to like boobs lol) but he is a highschool boy from a small traditional village (where homophobia canonically exists, based on how that one family talked about their son)

we know they never confessed to each other and both repressed their emotions to some degree

we also know that between Hikaru and Yoshiki, Hikaru was the better liar/the one who was better at hiding his feelings

the fandom has talked about Hikaru’s dying wish and how it was changed between the one shot and the series before, as well as the “you’re not gonna be able to bring a girlfriend home cause i’ll be there” conversation at length, but what strikes me as very interesting is the connection between the indou family curse and hikaru’s last moments

in the one shot, ‘hikaru’ openly says that one of the reasons Hikaru didn’t confess his feelings to Yoshiki was that the he was worried about Yoshiki getting taken by Unuki-sama if he acknowledged his feelings, because Yoshiki is the person he loves the most

in the manga the superstition is explained like this

when Hikaru is dying in the forest, he thinks of his parents and the “family duties” (the apology/ritual) and then he thinks of Yoshiki and how he doesn’t want to leave him alone… and then he asks Unuki-sama to take his place and stay by Yoshiki’s side, specifically his, not just to take his place in general so that no one (his mother, his other friends) is sad about his death

it’s clear that Yoshiki is the person he cherishes most, but the way his father explained the rules to him, the people in danger of being taken away are just the lovers of the Indou family, not family members or friends they don’t have romantic feelings for

what i’m getting at is that in addition to all the normal “teenage boy growing up in a small conservative village” reasons that Hikaru and Yoshiki have to repress their emotions, Hikaru has two additional reasons because he was born into the Indou family

1) if Hikaru accepts the reality that he’s in love with Yoshiki, Yoshiki might be in danger, especially if the two of them were to enter a defined romantic relationship. In addition to that, the ‘protection through marriage’ option wouldn’t be open to them because of the reality of the status of same sex marriage in Japan (in the one shot it is explicitly said that this was a concern, as well as that it was done in the family once before with a happy ending but hikaru was still hesitant)

2) less relevant/well founded second argument: Hikaru was someone who lived with the idea in his mind that he had a family duty to uphold, which is what ultimately caused him to go up into the mountains and die. He seems to have taken that to heart. It’s not a huge stretch to assume that part of that duty was to make sure that there is always an Indou family member in the village to complete the ritual. This implies two things:

2a) that Hikaru would have to stay in the village (or close enough to ‘fulfill his responsibilities’ till someone could take his place) This could also add extra context to the scene where he tells Yoshiki that he will probably just take care of the family mushroom farm (granted, not an unusual life path for a village boy)

2b) that Hikaru would eventually have children to carry on the family duty since afawk he’s an only child (Especially cause the subject of a “family heir” is touched on in that same conversation about the other gay boy in the village in chapter 9)

now this second argument (especially 2b) makes quite a few assumptions but it could point towards Hikaru having more reasons than most in similar positions to repress his feelings and force himself into an existence that complies with heteronormative society

considering how much of this story is using ‘hikaru’ as a queer allegory, as well as how much it emphasizes the ‘horror’ of living in a small rural village where everyone is in everyone’s business and the kids are expected to act in certain ways through Yoshiki (and to an extent Yoshiki’s whole family), it wouldn’t surprise me if these aspects were reflected in the original Hikaru’s feelings as well

I love our boy ‘Hikaru’ but i had to give Hikaru some love

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zoro refusing to fight women seriously contradicts the whole point of the most important character to his backstory and motivations and is just a convenient way for Oda to not have any of the male strawhats fight women one on one (who aren’t big mom) and i will die on this hill

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Dr. Heart Stealer 💛

I created this artwork for the One Piece stamp rally @ DoKomi 2025.

It will decorate a pouch bag which will be one of the main rewards. If you want to get your hands on it check out my Instagram.

There are 10 rewards in total that you get if you complete the rally. 🫶

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newest issue of first years fashion just dropped

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some merlaw for mermay 🧜‍♂️ i couldn't pick a tail style so have two!!

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next thing you know Adi Shanker is gonna tell us he only went to the trump inauguration for research purposes

but yeah the political criticism you see here is what happens when a centrist with no political awareness tries to do political criticism with a franchise whose whole premise isn’t suited for that specific angle (using demons to represent an unjustly demonized community fails because the demons are actual demons from another dimension, most of whom are actually evil, and not real people just trying to live their lives)

criticisms as a long term fan of the original aside, it’s just not compelling to see a worse version of a political message that’s been told by way better writers before

at the rate they’re going Vergil is gonna end up being more likable than Dante

white savior White Rabbit, the american christian right fighting a “holy war”, basically Cop Lady, Morally Gray Arkham, possibly alive Sparda who never met his kids, Dante who doesn’t know his origins, doesn’t have Ebony and ivory and probably never met Nell…, Non mind controlled Nelo Angelo

oh this show is a mess, even as a stand alone

nostalgia for the games and og anime is the only thing that got me to watch it in the first place and even viewing it as a new thing doesn’t help since the new things it’s doing don’t appeal to me at all

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white savior White Rabbit, the american christian right fighting a “holy war”, basically Cop Lady, Morally Gray Arkham, possibly alive Sparda who never met his kids, Dante who doesn’t know his origins, doesn’t have Ebony and ivory and probably never met Nell…, Non mind controlled Nelo Angelo

oh this show is a mess, even as a stand alone

nostalgia for the games and og anime is the only thing that got me to watch it in the first place and even viewing it as a new thing doesn’t help since the new things it’s doing don’t appeal to me at all

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inhaling 💐

What do you think Law smells like?

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this is not me hating on Kid (i love him and his whole punk crew) but it’s crazy how much more Oda has done to tie Law into the lore of the one piece world compared to Kid considering they are kind of treated as equals the last time we see them

like yes obviously Law is basically a honorary straw hat for multiple arcs but i’m not even talking about that, i’m talking about the Big Lore of the one piece world.

Law is a D

Law’s devil fruit was likely how Imu became immortal

Law had a personal connection to multiple (former) celestial dragons and the former fleet admiral (by proxy)

Law has a mysterious secret name (Water) that could have something to do with what we learned in Chapter 1138

with Law’s cut off “for generations my family secretly…” line could very well somehow lead us to that connection

much to think about

but yeah that’s probably the reason why Kid’s defeat looked a lot less optimistic (as far as his and his crew’s survival goes) than Law’s, cause Law has to stick around with how tied into the lore he is

(Yes also before anyone says that Oda came up with law’s character pretty spontaneously together with the other supernovas, that doesn’t mean that Oda can’t have decided to turn him into a character who is fundamental to the lore somewhere along the way (like how miss Wednesday turned into Vivi who is ALSO a core part of the Lore)

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rewatching marineford and words can not describe how much i hate the fact that Blackbeard has WhiteBeard’s devil fruit now (as in, in our current point in the story in the manga)

horrible for our heroes (already saw the start of it with the Heart Pirates)

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i have faith that the Ozawa epilogue would have been called the Yuji epilogue if it was about the two of them getting together (to appeal to the fans, yuji’s name would get more people hyped up), so i’m choosing to believe that it’s about her living a normal life (which has me wondering who wanted to see that since gege had to be asked by editors to even write her og scene but i digress)

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here’s how the panda epilogue can still win: a panel of panda standing at Yaga’s grave, we zoom out and next to it we see grave stones for Gojo Geto and Nanami

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i was rewatching season 2 (and saw a fan-comic of haibara greeting geto in the airport) and the whole body-soul conversation after Geto’s body tried to choke Kenjaku does make you wonder… was he dead in the afterlife/airport for the full year? was he dead with his soul locked in his corpse until Yuta chopped Kenjaku’s head off? Everything (especially Gege’s line about the choking being like the twitches of a dead dragonfly) points to Geto having been in the afterlife all along but who knows really…