I've recently put out a new single (actually two songs), Your Sound / Dud Gold. It's from my upcoming yuri-inspired album Til Our Particles Scatter, and these two songs in particular are all about the ship that's easily made me the most insane over the last decade, Kumiko/Reina from Hibike Euphonium.
I poured my heart and a whole lot of pain and gay longing into them both, and I'm super proud to finally share them with the world!
Your Sound is the Kumiko perspective, an upbeat lesbian panic attack about the pains of separation anxiety and mixed messages, picking up where the anime left off.
Dud Gold is the Reina perspective, set during her university years, an explosive slow-burn about finally realizing what someone meant to you after it feels too late to do anything about it.
Your Sound also has a music video on YouTube!
Til Our Particles Scatter is arriving in early 2026.
(Spoilers: They get together at the end of Your Sound. I'm not a monster.)
Rewatched Madoka a few weeks ago and forgot to post this. (I didnt remember anything so it was basically a new show to me though, so idk if i can really say rewatched)
Otherside Picnic's "Pontaniak Hotel" chapter is one of the funnier chapters in the series, dealing with the absurd lengths Sorawo goes to so she can avoid a hard and awkward conversation about sex with Toriko. While it's mostly presented as a cringe comedy—inviting as many people as possible to third wheel a date, playing detective on her own blackout drunkeness with completely unrelated third parties—it lands an emotional punch from the pathos of mismatched expectations within a relationship. What interests me most about it is its setting in a Bali-themed love hotel, which serves as thematic foreshadowing for later volumes of the story.
Otherside Picnic grapples with the topic of allonormativity (the expectation that everyone experiences romantic and sexual attraction) and amatonormativity (the expectation that happiness is found in a romantic, sexual relationship). These ideas are central to the plot of "Pontaniak Hotel": Toriko wants to have sex with Sorawo, seeing it as the next step of their increasingly close relationship; Sorawo, having never felt sexual attraction, feels childish and a bit peevish about how others' openness with the topic. Toriko's gets pushy to force their relationship into the shape it's 'supposed' to take, and Sorawo's evasive discomfort with that lead her to wonder if she's anything more than a convenient exploration partner. That this all takes place in a Bali-themed love hotel allows Miyazawa to develop an analogy between community ritual and amatonormativity.
The themed love hotel is subtly shadowed in a chapter from the previous novel, "Pandora in the Next Room".
It was a homework assignment for Outline of Sociology II, summarizing how the “traditional” dances of Bali had been remade as performance arts for the tourism industry. I got distracted as I remembered the constant chak-chak-chak chanting in the kecak dance video we watched during the lecture.
This foreshadowing creates some symbolic connections that "Pontaniac Hotel" runs with. Traditional Balinese dances have a ritualistic aspect and serve a set of community functions that are implicitly understood by those participating. Tourist performance divorces those dances from that context—it has become a performance disconnected from its embedded meaning.
So, if traditional dances performed in Bali is an empty pleasure for tourists, then by analogy, sex in a Bali-themed love hotel is an empty pleasure for visitors. This analogy applies to Toriko's behavior in the relationship. To Toriko, embedded in amatonormativity, sex has an implicit meaning of closeness. To Sorawo, an outsider to amatonormativity, the meaning of sex simply doesn't parse. Toriko's attempt to have sex in the love hotel, then, is much like an insider performing for a tourist: it may be an act that carries meaning to her, but completely flies over the head of an outsider.
The vol 8 chapter "Accomplices No More" makes this more explicit.
Toriko shook her head, smiling. “No, I don’t think that was it. I had been pushing towards us becoming lovers without ever questioning it, and I was shocked to find that at some point that had stopped being what I wanted.”
[...]
“Anyway, for a moment there, I didn’t know what I wanted my relationship with you to be. It came back to me gradually, but in some corner of my heart there’s been a sense that something is off ever since then. So, when I say I want to go out, or that I want us to be lovers, it’s more…I’m trying to put it in a way that comes across easily, I guess?”
“You wanted to do that kind of stuff with me, right…?”
Though I’m sure she didn’t expect it to get that bizarre.
“Yeah,” Toriko said, hugging my head tight as she nodded repeatedly. “Yeah. It made me so...so happy.”
“Uh-huh.”
For Toriko, having sex was probably proof of something between us. I wasn’t that particular about it myself, but I was glad she seemed happy.
As a quick aside, traditional dance performed for tourists is also a transactional relationship. This resonates nicely with the connection to love hotels, since they have an association with sex work. So it's probably not a surprise that the Pontaniak appears here, since in several versions of the story she is the vengeful spirit of a murdered sex worker. The apparition appearing to Natsumi is interesting, but I'm not quite sure we have enough information to pull much on that thread.
However, the Pontaniak's appearance nicely leads into the next part with the Lion Dancer. The specific dance that occurs in this chapter is, as best I can tell, a variation on the Barong and Kris dance. Sorawo provides some helpful context in the following chapter, "Looking at the Past in the Diagonal Mirror".
That’s right—it occurred to me later, but the dance I was performing was probably the Barong dance. It’s a traditional dance from Bali, said to represent the eternal battle between good and evil. That meant the “lion dancer” who had barged in on us was the holy beast Barong, and as the one dancing with him, that made me the embodiment of evil—the witch named Rangda.
What the heck? How was I the embodiment of evil? How was traveling to check on my friend, who I was worried about because I couldn’t get in contact with her, anything other than an act of good? Give me a break, okay?
Rangda is associated with the story of Calon Arang, a powerful sorceress who embarked on a spree of destruction after rumors of her deeds prevented her daughter from finding a marriage partner. To do so, she summons destructive spirits, leyak, to raise the dead and spread plague to those who wronged her. She is eventually defeated and ritually purified of her karmic crimes by the holy man Mpu Bharada. This purification is interpreted as a transformative act, funneling her power for destruction into one of creation, which through future events may again be transformed to destructiveness.
The traditional performance of the Barong and Kris dance relies on Ranga's power to command leyak. Leyak are believed to inhabit members of the community, and their influence responsible for unfortunate events within a community. The dance uses gamelan to induce a trance state, at which point a person dressed as Rangda appears to taunt the leyak, demanding they reveal themselves. The trance state allows the leyak to emerge, and angered by the taunting, come forward to attack Rangda with kris swords. Frustrated by their inability to harm her, the leyak turn the kris on their bodies, only to find that they are unable to harm themselves either. Rangda departs, and Barong appears to banish the spirits that have revealed themselves.
In this sense, Rangda acts less as an embodiment of evil than the negative aspect of a balancing force*. Her presence is one that summons existing issues to the surface, after which they can be dealt with. And so, getting back to the established analogy to amatonormativity, Sorawo's performance can be interpreted as a form of release from the relationship pains that the visit to the love hotel dredges up—Toriko, her desire for a 'normal' relationship with Sorawo; Kozakura, her past with Satsuki; Natsumi, her inability to step outside of 'childhood friend'; Akari, her, uuhhhh I actually am not sure what her deal is but she might actually be an Otherside fanatic like Sorawo.
So, while the use of Balinese imagery in "Pontaniak Hotel" seems like an odd outlier in relation to the rest of the story, it is essentially a preview of the more anthropology-themed storytelling in later volumes. The accidental use of ritual here serves as both the inspiration and template for more intentional uses later on, and amatonormativity evolves into a central plot point. The introduction here is subtle, but does a fantastic job of laying the groundwork for all of that.
*I suspect Sorawo's understanding here is some really clever and subtle character work on Miyazawa's part given the more nuanced approach of her professor in vol 7; her knowledge is what you might expect from an entry-level sociology textbook.
[I also need to drop a citation here... I did a lot of digging around articles about Balinese dance but I think the most helpful one was Sarah Weiss's "Rangda and the Goddess Durga in Bali", which was printed in Fieldwork in Religion in 2017]
this video is genuinely incredible - the framing, the sunset, the single street light, the sound of traffic and cicadas in the background, the video of the sign capture imperfectly by (presumably) a phone camera. it’s a work of art and a perfect encapsulation of 21st century america
Temperature gradient take: I more or less hate representation discourse around stories. Representation, in the sense that marginalized storytellers are able to tell their stories, is undeniably a good thing. But "representation" as an outcome of a story - what stories constitute "good" and "bad" representation - is such a thoroughly surface-level way of engaging with fiction that I wish we, collectively, wouldn't.
"Good" and "bad" carries the implicit expectation that art is a reflection of a morality or ideology that ought to be. Representation is treated as an affirmation of personhood, "good representation" being a product that advertises an identity as morally/ideologically acceptable. As a result, a character repping an identity must be a paragon because if they are representative, so to are their character flaws. This leads around to incredibly sterile stories. Marginalized people are disincentivized from discussing issues they've grappled with (messy or problematic expressions of social affect, sexuality, mental health, etc.) because any creation will be treated as Representation.
Personally, I think it's part of a wider trend of collapsing complexity into neat categories. We cannot see people as having a diverse range of thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. Instead we characterize them as a tidy, self-consistent collection of descriptors that either can ("good") or cannot ("bad") mutually exist with "normal". A messy person doesn't neatly conform to the mental box for "normal" that we've drawn around ourselves and challenges us to think about why we've drawn that box the way have. Empathizing with a messy character carries the disconcerting possibility that we ourselves may not fully fit within the idea of normal. Rather than challenge the idea of normal we cling to it more tightly, lest we too be outsiders.
"Good" and "bad" representation is the selective enforcement of normality. It converges us back to discussing our own respectability, our acceptance on somebody else's terms, our ability to reject unreasonable standards on our own existence.
Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?
As today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s a great time to revisit Dinah from Devon’s memory of this historic event. And yes, still makes me laugh.
Can't recommend the Otherside Picnic novels enough as a Pride Month read. I could write paragraphs about how good the romance is, the humor of its narrator accidentally casting sanity damage on the people around her, its handling of family trauma and the downstream effects on relationships, or its brilliant use of ghost stories and cognitive science fiction to really take apart and understand queerness, but honestly it's best just experienced for yourself. It all comes together in the most beautiful and ethereal way, and I don't think you will regret the effort at all.
more of my post-canon headcanon nonsense (first part here). if reina was hoping for a more sympathetic reaction, she shouldn't have gone to yuuko first about it
(A TON OF RAMBLING BELOW THE CUT)
and to be fair, she didn't "JUST" realize it; it's something she's been thinking for a while, among other things. like how, she's no longer interested in taki-sensei. and maybe she never actually could see them being together? when she visits home and decides to confess to him, it's less of a confession and more confirming what she's started to think about. she has this feeling of wanting to get this out of the way before talking to anyone else, so she doesn't let anyone else know she's home except her parents who help her invite him over for dinner
it strikes her that this man she's put on a pedestal her entire life, this unreachable goal marker, is on first-name basis w her best friend. he and kumiko are coworkers, peers. equals. the shift seems to have happened so easily and so quickly. when did that even happen? while reina was away trying to become special enough for him, of course!
wait, "special enough"? that doesn't sound right. what was she doing this all for?
his firm and polite rejection when she asks if there would ever be a chance for the two of them to be anything doesn't hurt reina at all compared to the earthshaking feeling of her entire worldview coming undone
the next day: cue her dramatic haircut and her calling up her bestie yuuko. after catching up for a bit, yuuko invites reina to come w her to meet up w natsuki and the others for drinks (texts natsuki: "don't tell kumiko!! 😈")
and so, their next piece begins
BONUS:
i think kumirei still have a long way to go before getting together.
if you're at the end of this, thanks so much for reading. this was. MUCH more than i was expecting to write.
dailybridgerton
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
titsay
dededos
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
