Even though sometimes I get frustrated, I actually get why some people feel unsatisfied with Given. Since I felt that way at first too.
“Mafuyu moved on too fast.”
“Why would someone commit suicide so easily, and why are we expected to care?”
Those were the parts that initially felt underdeveloped, almost half-cooked.
But Given is one of those stories where your first reading really really really isn’t enough. It takes time to understand what it’s actually doing, and to adjust your expectations accordingly. Once it clicks, Istg, you realize it’s a very tightly written, character-driven narrative. If you only approach it as literature rather than just a BL romance, or only as romance, tbch.
Because the focus was never really Yuki and Mafuyu’s love story. Yuki Yoshida is the prelude to Mafuyu's journey. The story is about Mafuyu learning to live with grief after losing someone deeply important to him.
And importantly, as the story progresses, we begin to understand that Yuki’s suicide isn’t reducible to that one argument. There are deeper, underlying issues at play, but they’re never fully spelled out. And that lack of clarity is intentional. Because most of the time, especially with teenage suicide, there isn’t a single clean, explainable reason. It’s messy, layered, and often incomprehensible to the people left behind.
That ambiguity is part of Mafuyu’s grief.
And that’s exactly why Mafuyu “falling in love quickly” with Ritsuka Uenoyama is something we’re supposed to *examine*, not dismiss.
Mafuyu doesn’t just “move on.” He’s grieving all the way through Umi e. His guilt, his panic when it finally hits him that Yuki is truly gone, his relief at ultimately learning to let go, those moments are very deliberately written.
At the same time, what he feels for Ritsuka begins almost immediately and runs parallel to that grief, attraction, emotional pull, dependence, and a kind of quiet reverence.
And this is where the distinction matters.
What Mafuyu feels for Ritsuka is clearly romantic in nature, it involves vulnerability, longing, and a willingness to open himself up again. What he had with Yuki, on the other hand, reads very differently. It’s closer to familial attachment at its core, shaped by proximity, history, and emotional reliance, paired with a codependent dynamic that included a sexual component. Which is why Yuki is never positioned in Mafuyu’s mind as a “romantic rival” to Ritsuka.
Because the two relationships don’t occupy the same emotional category.
Yuki represents, familiarity, entanglement, a past kid Mafuyu didn’t fully understand until it was gone.
Ritsuka represents, conscious choice, emotional risk, vulnerability, need to surrender self, and a new kind of love that requires adolescent Mafuyu to actively engage with his own feelings. And that’s the core of Given.
Not a love triangle. Not a competition.
But a story about how someone learns to differentiate, process, and rebuild their capacity to love after loss.
And if you read it that way, a lot of things people call “too fast” or “underdeveloped” start to make structural sense.
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