Interviewer: With Haruka and Rin being around each other all the time and throwing their feelings for swimming at each other, it seems like they’re each other’s other half; how do you feel?
Utsumi: Haruka and Rin as halves…no, I don’t think so. In my mind, Haruka’s half is Makoto. For…
Eeeeerrr… Haru’s other half is Makoto? I guess Utsumi and I comprehend the concept of ‘the other half’ very differently o_O Because I think the other half is not the person who understands you best but the one who makes you better, makes you fuller, opens you up and completes you. And Makoto does none of that to Haru. Nor does Sosuke do anything like that to Rin either.
So yeah, what I mean to say is that two persons can be complete opposite and be as a whole together. Like yin and yan, you know.
I suppose we have different ideas as well, because I completely agree with her and have gone into great detail about how her reading of Haru and Makoto’s relationship, Sousuke’s and Rin’s, and Haru and Rin’s relationships is spot-on.
Haru and Makoto have something within them that the other lacks. Together, they make a half-decent human being–which is what she’s saying. The word is literally half of a body. This isn’t some existential idea of ~soul matesor anything. If anything, she reserves descriptions like “makes them a better person” for Haru and Rin, saying that they build each other up and push each other forward.
But Haru and Makoto are and always have been presented as people who work so well together because they both have something the other lacks, so it’s like puzzle pieces fitting together. That’s closer to yin and yang as I see it.
Makoto and Haru are like -1 and +1 coming together for balance. Haru and Rin are a chemical reaction that explodes into something greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s no need to disparage Haru and Makoto’s relationship in order to give greater meaning to Haru and Rin’s.
She also never said Sousuke was Rin’s other half; he’s as he always has been: canonically referred to as Rin’s “other self”. So I’m not sure why you brought up Sousuke and Rin…
This is an interesting idea.
Revisiting some of the Free stuff makes me nostalgic. So I'll just put this off my mind.
For a lot of people, including myself, it's hard to think of this "half" concept differently, seeing as we're too familiarised with the more romantic concept.
As for me, the distinction I see between what Utsumi seemed to be implying and the usual concept we see is that this kind of "half" rather than complements you, it instead fills in the holes you have in your personality to essentially make you a complete, functioning human. At least, that's how I see it between my own childhood friend and myself, as we have pretty similar dynamic to what Haru and Makoto have.
This is the kind of half that may not necessarily make you better versions of yourselves, as Rin and Haru do, but rather it's the one you'd entrust to do things you either can't or refuse to. I have no idea how make arguments so I leave pitches to my childhood friend; she can't deal with soft politics so I do the networking. Similarly, Haru prefers action so Makoto will do the talking; Makoto is not so good at defending himself so Haru will be the more steely one. That's how it is. We do things well because we fill in where the other couldn't.
This is the kind of "halves" I think Makoto and Haru are.
One thing to note about this is that this is not yin and yang. At least not in my opinion. Because for this to work, we need to share similar fundamentals in our personality and outlooks. In this sense, we're not so much opposites, but rather same base but different expressions. Haru and Makoto share quite some similarities in terms of their personality, for example they both prefer stability rather than turbulence, they're both compassionate people but Makoto is more likely to express it outwardly. And hence in this way that's not so much yin and yang but rather two sides of the same coins.
