Missing records, love, and mystery in "Bloom Into You" [Part 1]
Yuu in the student council record room
For today's post, I thought I'd look at the sixth episode of one of my favorite yuri anime, Bloom Into You (called Yagate Kimi ni Naru in romanized Japanese), titled "Words Kept Repressed / Words Used to Repress," where a record room in the Student Council building is shown and is a key part of the episode itself. For this post, I'm using the subtitled version rather than the dubbed version, since I prefer subs to dubs, but that's a discussion for another day.
Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Nov. 14, 2020.
In the episode, Yuu talks to Sayaka, who tells her that Touko is so wrapped up in the stage show because of what happened to the Student Council president seven years prior and entreats Yuu to investigate it. She goes back to the Student Council building's records room [1] and finds that the whole book with records for that year is missing... I wonder why? Dun dun dun! She later locks up the student council building, after getting a key from her teacher (who will be mentioned later in this post) and determines that someone removed the documents specifically from seven years ago for a "specific reason," although she doesn't know what that reason is yet.
Oh no, the records are missing!
Later in the day, after her class ends, she goes to a records room, which you could call a records center or a repository more broadly, at her high school to do some more investigation. A teacher (basically like a records custodian) comes in to ask if she found what she was looking for and she says no. He also seems perplexed that the records are missing as well (he should have done better records management?). She thinks about it more while sitting behind the desk at her family's bookstore, asking herself, "even the records in the main building are missing?"
This is a case even worse than the deletion of records about the clone army by then-Jedi Dooku, later named Count Dooku! There is no Jocasta Nu to declare that if records aren't there they don't exist, an obvious falsehood, so that's good.
© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.
Continued in part 2
Notes
[1] The same room was also shown in the fourth episode, "The Distance Between Fondness and Kisses / Not One of the Characters." In that episode, there is a scene where Yuu is putting away files, along with Sayaka and later in the episode, Maki talks to Sayaka in that room about her insecurities, when it comes to Touko.