I’ve always been a believer that Aqua has always liked Kana more than he was willing to admit
They went on dates
That time they played baseball, and the karaoke
He asked her to join his and Ruby’s agency
He calls her panda
He was so conscious about Kana being an idol and so worried that she would be in danger if people saw them together (not helped by the Ai flashbacks) that Aqua didn’t talk to Kana for a good while
And yet, he disguised himself as Piyeon just to help her
Not to mention he revealed his family’s biggest secret to save her from a potential scandal. To Aqua, Kana was worth revealing that secret
It was a dick move on his part and should’ve talked to Ruby before that, but that’s just how much Kana means to Aqua
I’m not going to pretend that Oshi no Ko, and especially Aqua and Kana’s relationship has the nuance that Kaguya and Miyuki’s relationship has, because it doesn’t. I think it’s going to take a while for Aka to outdo himself with Kaguya and Miyuki, if he ever does anyway
But to me, Aqua and Kana have always been endgame. Every chapter that strayed away from that, only to give me hope again and crush it again, I felt like I was going insane. This chapter really validated everything I was feeling and thinking
I love Akane (I do think Aqua loves her as a friend) but I’ve always been team Kana. I know this is just a red flag for her, (especially because we’re not done with the twins’ dad) but let me have this pls
Glad to be back in the nightmare hell scape! Fun Tokyo Blade vibes.
Bro is so BORED of the horrors. He looks at his sleep paralysis demon and goes “augh you again??”
The most obvious answer to 123 that we’ve all been waiting for for like a year.
Seriously though, on one hand it’s a bit annoying that we’re matter of facting this conclusion after a whole volume worth of playing the ‘What is Aqua thinking?’ game during the aqrb section of filming, it feels disproportionate to the buildup (a very common criticism for subplot resolutions lately)
On the other hand, they’re finally saying what everyone with reading comprehension has been thinking! Aqua doesn’t want this stupid badly written ship to happen, and neither does fucking Gorou!
But Gorou changing the subject from the big revenge life dream to “so what girls do you like” after he just admitted he was like, fading away is a little jarring to me. Maybe it’d read better with voice acting but right now it’s just a little tonally weird.
“You don’t need to act anymore” goes hard though, all things considered. Tbh, I don’t even really dislike the conversation, it just feels a little fast to me. It’s a dream sequence though so I’m being nit picky.
You and the girl who’s telling you not to worry about
Akane aggressively playing matchmaker is a pretty funny role for her, it utilizes her knowledge of people and Aqua adjacent manipulation skills while keeping her motives as well meaning yet overbearing as I’d expect from her.
The current dynamic of her Kana and Aqua has a very Kaguya feel, which I mean positively. It’s refreshing and reminds me why I like this cast and their interactions in the first place. Again, it’s a pretty stark contrast to the rest of this volume which has been steering into horror territory, but I’m suspecting this is probably to set us up for another tone shift later.
The dual flashbacks of their building crushes and feelings is very cute, I think their ship still walks the line of healthy and toxic, but it’s still built on a strongly established foundation. That said, there’s no way they get out right now and it works out. Not without at least one more solid complication first.
So happy for you to admit that, babe. Not gonna go well for you though.
Aqua is really healing! He has friends, a crush, Sarina is alive and she's his little sister. His life is too good now to waste it on revenge and he finally realizes this!
Now Kana on the other hand is seriously surrounding herself with some death flags. That could throw everything Aqua has accomplished down the drain.
Well, this chapter was certainly a trip. I have plenty of thoughts about it, but I’ll dig into all of that in a moment. As always, spoilers for Oshi No Ko Ch150 below.
We start of this chapter with an interesting sequence. Aqua in that bloodied hallway again and an apparition of Goro alongside him. This is different from how we’ve seen this happen during Tokyo Blade—which was a flashback to that scene when Aqua was conscious, and spoilers for later in the chapter, when he’s dreaming.
There might not be much distinction, but the fact that Aqua has gone into this state without anything re-igniting his trauma is also a good sign. Every time he’s been haunted by his past and that bloody hallway he’s always had some trigger to bring him there, but it’s made very clear within this dream sequence itself that now that he knows that Sarina’s alive and smiling happily that that is the reason why he was able to have this amiable conversation with the embodiment of his own trauma, more or less.
I think it would be prudent for me to note here before we go forward that this dream sequence absolutely does not mean that Hoshino Aqua is fundamentally a different entity from Amamiya Goro. We see it quite well throughout the narration during the earlier chapters that the person who is Hoshino Aqua is a continuation of the life and experiences that Amamiya Goro had lived before his soul moved to Aqua’s body. Goro is dead, yes, but to say that they’re separate and completely unrelated entities is a bit of a stretch and goes against what we fundamentally see both here and in all the previous chapters.
What Aqua is currently experiencing—this disconnect between his past and current self—is quite obviously a trauma response stemming from this dissociation due to the effects of Ai’s death. Aqua hasn’t been dealing with his emotions in a healthy way since Ai’s death, and while on the surface he appears to be relatively stable, the reader knows that that’s further from the truth with his behaviors and actions. Healing hasn’t been on his list of priorities even during that time where he thought Hikaru was already dead.
But back to the chapter. The apparition Goro says that it won’t be long until he disappears—which is a good sign. With Aqua’s revenge plot via the movie starting to wrap up it seems possible for him to heal from his trauma in a healthy way—I say that as if Hikaru isn’t still walking around. We don’t actually Know how the specifics on how this movie is going to take revenge against Hikaru, especially since as I’ve already stated previously, the majority of the public is fickle and will move to the next interesting topic as soon as it rears its ugly head. If Aqua is counting on the public to unmask Hikaru on its own, he’s going to be in for a rough awakening.
I also find it curious that the apparition says that it’s Aqua’s choice whether or not to kill Hikaru or “enjoy your youth with the girl you like”. The way that this entire conversation is portrayed in the succeeding panels is quite suspicious. That dissociation that Aqua experiences when he says that Ruby only likes Goro instead of Aqua is a really bad case of it. He’s delegating all of the happiness that Ruby’s accrued by being close to him to his past self and accepting none of it for his present identity. Get some therapy!
It’s also interesting that the apparition pushes Aqua toward Kana when Aqua himself “denies” that the person that Ruby likes is Goro and not Aqua himself. That’s a whole lot of baggage implied in just a few panels. If this Goro-projection wants Aqua to become happy, then pushing him towards Kana makes some degree of sense here—but it isn’t the whole story, not by a long shot, not when we’re already see how much Ruby meant to Aqua.
The entire conversation ends with the Goro projection giving Aqua a choice is one that I plainly dislike for a majority of reasons. How is Aqua going to use this knife? Personally I really dislike this knife metaphor they’re using because it’s so ham-fisted. It’s thematic, yes, but they really couldn’t have done it with more subtlety? We’ve already known that Aqua was hesitating with his whole revenge scheme for 20 chapters or so but just letting us end with that question in mind for this scene after this entire spiral and not going deeper into Aqua’s psyche is frustrating. His narration and thought process has been sorely missing for almost an entire arc now with little substance to justify Why that is.
And now we’re back with Kana. Her reaction to all of this is quite funny because she’s basically being played like a fiddle by Akane as a proxy for “fixing” Aqua. And now we’re finally getting Kana’s thoughts on Aqua throughout the series. It took 3/4ths of the entire series for her to make a move and the only reason she did so is because of Akane’s machinations! She’s had these feelings this whole time and literally only acted on them because of the narrative literally pushing on her to do so! Come the fuck on, girl. You didn’t even have the decency to stand up and fight for him for a good chunk of the manga. This entire bit where she’s being manipulated to be pushed towards Aqua doesn’t make me think more of Kana as a character, personally. It’s actually kind of sad, but Kana isn’t a character that makes me feel anything but pointed annoyance and disdain for awhile now. She’s a romcom character insulated from the majority of the genre and only lifted up to relevance by the narrative itself.
There really isn’t anything more to say about Kana’s part of the chapter, really. Kana asking Aqua if he’s free on a Saturday is—well. During the movie arc we apparently didn’t have time for these small, character-defining moments in exchange for plot—which it did horribly in many aspects, really, and the second it ends we’re back to things being more character focused??? The plot has been stewing in a stagnant lake for literal months out of universe by now. A digression like this is already a slog.
What a completely ass chapter. Ironically enough it’s not for the reasons that a lot of people have been screaming about online. While I dislike the content of may parts of the chapter on an individual level, I have to grudgingly admit that, IF we’re going back to the love triangle plotline then focusing back on Kana’s feelings for Aqua is a necessary move.
The issue is that going back to this love triangle plotline when a) the movie arc’s pacing was complete ass, b) we didn’t get enough insight into Ai and Hikaru in said movie arc, c) Kana’s feelings were already resolved because she said to Aqua that, and I quote, “I don’t see you as a love interest and I never will.” thereby capping out her aspirations for Aqua directly to his face with an extreme amount of difficulty walking it back, d) the fact that both the progression of the story and the revenge plot itself has been stuck in stasis since the movie arc and going back to this love triangle stuff is only going to delay it further.
In any case, while I don’t particularly want to go in depth about the shipping side of things, since we are unfortunately now back to this love triangle bullshit, there's no longer any choice since the revenge plot has now been intertwined with the romance plot. Don’t blame the player, blame the manga. If Oshi No Ko could just get a better handle on its genres, then I wouldn’t have to rub too many braincells together on why romance is supposed to be just as relevant if not moreso to this “revenge” manga.
This is not going to end well for Kana. While this chapter may be pointing in the opposite direction, it ignores all the chapters that came before it for a simple short term victory for Kana’s sake. It ignores all the context that was given in the past chapters, ignores Kana’s character and the actual main characters around her, and ignores the fact that we already know that they likely don’t actually get together.
How do we know that? Because of the flashforwards that were handed to us in the first ten or so chapters. I have my own qualms with those interviews that I won’t reiterate here, but the relevant one is the interview that Aqua gave during Chapter 9. We see in said chapter that Aqua gives an interview on how he acts and that, in his words, he doesn’t love anyone. I was wondering about this interview for so long because it essentially takes a sledgehammer to Akane’s chances at the Aquabowl since he’d have little reason to lie to the reporter if he was hitched up with Akane during the time of the interviews.
The main thing to be gleaned here—and what this interview is trying to hammer in—is the fact that, if we take Aqua’s words at face value(and I’ll get to the idea that he’s lying out of his teeth here later), he’s pretty much Done with romance as of this interview. Now, why would the writers decide to add in this interview so early in the Oshi No Ko’s serialization? What are they trying to convey beyond adding things to look forward to during the manga’s runtime? If we believe Aqua here, then he’s still single at the time of the interviews, and any attempts to get in his pants in the meantime are already doomed with failure. Not exactly the best look for Kana’s chances with getting together with Aqua when we’re presented with these interviews.
Of course, if Aqua and Kana do get together, there’s an interpretation to be made that he’s just saying all this as a lie because it’s a public interview and whatnot, but that doesn’t make sense when we know that Kana’s going to graduate from being an idol in-universe. Where the interviews take place in the timeline is still up in the air, but there’ll certainly be some sort of timeskip if we’re to believe Aqua’s longer hair and piercings. Either way, Kana’s going to go back to being an actor, so any hint of romance between her and Aqua would’ve been more accepted by now. There’s little reason to lie in this case. But even if the interviews take place before Kana graduates from being an idol, Aqua’s final words within that page almost seem to seal the deal against Kana.
To me, acting is revenge. It was a strange thing for Aqua to say openly and a strange thing to hear now that the manga is 150 chapters in. Whether or not it’s also a lie is also up in the air because we see him here with a singular white star eye. Whether or not he’s lying in this instance is irrelevant because in both cases they don’t spell anything good for Kana’s chances to get together with him. Aqua has been consistently keeping Kana in ignorance regarding his revenge plan and the sheer mention of revenge here during the interviews goes against the idea of them getting together. If they did get together by the time of the interviews, it’d be difficult for Aqua to explain to Kana just exactly what he means by his statement when he’s already insulated Kana from his revenge plot in the first place. Aqua’s not stupid enough to self-sabotage like this, especially when he has a singular white star eye.
That’s all my reasoning on a textual level. Subtextually, there’s even more evidence that this isn’t going to go Kana’s way. For one, the events of the most recent three chapters all happened in quick succession. Aqua’s last conversation with Akane was basically Akane showing her hand that she still wants to keep Aqua from achieving his revenge. Soon after that Kana starts doing out of character proactive things in order to win Aqua for herself, and with an insight that she didn’t have previously because of Akane’s help. Do people really think Aqua isn’t going to detect this strange behavior or press Kana on her reasons eventually?
The moment Aqua ferrets out that Akane has been pushing Kana towards Aqua is the moment that the other shoe’s going to drop. It’s kind of a deal breaker in a relationship when your ex tries to pair you up with someone in an attempt to fix you. I think that’ll put Aqua off Kana right quick if and when he figures that out, assuming he doesn’t press Kana about her reasons outright. It’s a dumpster fire waiting to happen, and I’m intrigued to see how bad the fallout’s going to be. Give this girl some lasting goddamn consequences for her actions! It’s almost embarrassing to see her get off scot free for being such an absolute bitch and hypocrite.
There’s also the fact that any sort of relationship with Kana as an idol is teetering towards scandal. Aqua himself noted down the fact that it was dangerous for him to be around Kana when he was under the impression that Hikaru was dead, and while his reasoning may have been motivated by trauma, his analysis there wasn’t wrong. Just another thing people have forgotten with this chapter, but even though an embodiment of your trauma tells you to go for a person in a dream doesn’t immediately mean you’ll get together with them. Please.
All of this to say that we haven’t even talked about the elephant in the room. Ruby. There is absolutely no universe that she is going to just let Kana take Aqua. Sitting on your hands is a more Kana thing, really. If Akane hadn’t pushed kana in Aqua’s direction, she likely wouldn’t have done anything. In twenty chapters we’ve seen Ruby race forward beyond where Akane and even Kana have been running towards Aqua despite having more than half the manga to fester. She’s not going to take Kana as a romantic rival lying down.
