I really love that Mizuki's chapter brought back the question of her agency from path of thorn/wounded hands from the angle of being open and unwavering about her desires. It's selfish to expect others to remain friends with her when being around her can lead to them getting hurt because of the kind of abuse she's consistently subjected to, it's selfish to want the boy she knew in middle school to value her as much as his troupe who were able to save him and change him for the better when her relationship with him was all about providing each other with company amid their misery, helplessness and suicide ideation and it's selfish to expect everyone in her group to stay together their whole life because she doesn't want to be alone again or say goodbye.
She's always struggled with feeling like anything she wants is too much because she's never been allowed to want much and even the bare minimum like basic respect and being treated like a person were treated as such, but this chapter is about how her feelings of wanting to remain a part of her loved ones' lives are born from a genuine desire to be connected with them and this selfishness is not a negative thing. It's a beautiful thing that she should embrace and express because it's part of her heart. It's about her decision to be uncompromising in attaining what she wants, even if it all falls apart in the end. Very important when her most recent focus is about her feeling like she needs to pick between her relationship with Niigo and her dream, with her first instinct being to compromise on her dream because she's scared of her relationships being lost (Kokuhaku literally being a song about her interfacing with the sense of inherent ephemerality to her existence and the inevitablity of her relationships coming to an end). This is definitely setting up Mizuki to be really proactive in bringing Niigo back on the same page amidst their worries about having to walk different paths in the near future and not being able to maintain what they have right now.
I think this was the most perfect WL3 chapter she could've had after the path of thorns/wounded hands -> blue bird mixed run since it's all about Mizuki's agency‚ autonomy and desires and it also moves the needle in terms of addressing the fact that Mizuki has always regarded her relationship with Rui as an imitation of the “real” camaraderie he enjoys with the clowns, because it's Rui who's encouraging her to not just feel but voice‚ reenact and reclaim through the lead role he wrote with her in mind everything about wounded hands as her narrative where she gets to call all the shots by being the one to make a plea for Himari (who's mainly an Ena stand-in but there's a little bit of Rui there) to continue being a part of her life, while also being Mizuki and Rui's means of unspoken communication‚ resolution of anxieties they've had towards each other for a long time (Rui has clearly been thinking about their conversation about selfishness during path of thorns and he wanted to make things right after being put in a situation where he had to choose between leaving Mizuki be to isolate and possibly commit suicide or open up to Ena about what she used to be like during middle school and risking making the situation an even more dire one but he also finds Mizuki's most honest and vulnerable feelings dazzling and wants to bear witness to them) and explicit affirmation of their relationship as just as valuable and lifesaving as what they currently have with their units. It's Rui officially making Mizuki one of his clowns and her taking him up on it and responding in kind by trusting him as her director.
Her T100 title is Leaning because she's finally allowing herself to lean on others and trust her relationships and voicing this via the play was an immene leap of faith that required her to lean on Rui and trust that he understood her...
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