#msm tch

[huapaiqingyuan]

throughout the different stages of growing up, i swung wildly from identifying with arata and taichi even suo  a lot of their experiences and relationships mirror our own, making them characters that we can empathise with and understand easily

someone else brought this up and i agreed. this page did strike me as odd: is it a retcon as some suggest? or is arata looking back at his friendship with taichi through rose-tinted glasses? 

i touched a little upon how the anime and manga differed here but i don’t think this was a point where the anime and manga actually diverged, unlike what this tweet suggests. 

because taichi does notice that chihaya’s attention slips away from him, which is why the conversation shifted towards being about arata. 

(i’m just going to dub this the and the ensuing parts before they become karuta buddies the Chihaya Incident™ for clearer reference)

we then see that the class has a negative attitude towards him. 

that’s not to say the tweet is entirely wrong though. the anime did take the above page out. perhaps because it was too mean or explicit? regardless, the reality is that both manga and anime followed the same formula of chihaya notices arata → taichi is mean towards arata

now let’s examine the page again. why would arata then think taichi would have approached him first if not for chihaya? it’s clear that his classmates seems to be bullying him even prior to these few panels. 

if we find arata’s thinking to be odd, it’s because we assume that taichi was an active participant in his bullying prior to the Chihaya Incident™ but there is not textual evidence to actually suggest that. and there definitely would not have been an escalation in the ostracism that arata faced if not for the Chihaya Incident™ either. 

putting that aside, perhaps we assumed falsely and that taichi hadn’t been actively bullying arata. it does still seem like a huge leap for taichi to go from bystander to pro-actively befriending the class outcast.

except, maybe not really. because we don’t actually have much to work with here. so i don’t think it’s fair to say that this page was a retcon. there is no actual in-text contradiction occuring. upon reflection, this dissonance relies on a lot of our assumptions of these characters and how they behave outside of karuta and the Chihaya Incident™. we weren’t really privy to such info because they didn’t serve any purpose. if anything, this page was arata’s own retrospection that reflected more on his perceptions of taichi’s character than on taichi’s actual behavior. whether we believe taichi would have became besties with arata is one thing, it’s a completely separate matter if arata himself does. and at the end of the day, that is what actually matters.