#vol 45

[hqxreader]

EXCUSE ME SIR- 😍😍

THANK YOU RIZ FOR SHARING THIS WITH ME @marshmalloriz

@sachirou-senpai @osamusriceballs @tspookyshima-kei and all my other Sachi stans

[ridingthewhitechocobo]

Realise date, November 4.

[completeoveranalysis]

[completeoveranalysis]

Chapitre 45. 

I just want to point out that the title for this chapter is “Parting beneath the cherry trees”. And, like. No. No you are not allowed to be ominous already. That is not fair. I haven’t even started the chapter. 

It’s even more distressing because I think Clamp are deliberately playing on the extra-tiers of cherry blossom implications they’ve has built up here. We have Sakura, herself named after the Cherry Blossom, wearing the pattern of cherry blossoms on her clothing while also being surrounded by the falling petals of actual literal cherry blossoms. That’s three level of cherry blossoms, just like the three levels of meaning that have deliberately been established: Sakura, Outo, and Seishiro. And now they’re all mixing together and happening at the same time. Which is not a good thing for anyone, let alone Sakura. There’s also the implication that she’s looking up at something shocking, or at least surprising, It’s not a good implication, and I swear to god Seishrio can you just not.

All that aside there’s another interesting theme going on here that I can’t quite fully decipher just yet, but I’ll write out what I have so far just in case there’s something you can all laugh at (which, you know, best case scenario). The divide between the actual flowers and the flowers on Sakura’s dress creates a rather mysterious sense of duality; there are the real flowers and the fake flowers. It’s even more interesting that the two look almost exactly the same. Which - okay, it’s a piece of art, you might expect that. But this was a choice. They could have made them look different on purpose, to emphasise the difference between the two, but instead we have the same kind of angles and shapes used for both the real flowers and the fake ones. Visually, there is a very very faint border around some of the fake flowers, but that’s the only difference between the two. They look similar on purpose. 

Why is that a big deal? Because the only thing that lets us know if they’re real or fake is where they are in the picture. It’s only our own foreknowledge that tells us the difference between the “real” and the “fake”, and if they switched places we wouldn’t know or be able to tell. There’s also the implications in their placing; the real ones are falling but they’re free, they exist in three dimensions and are more alive. The fake ones are trapped. They can’t move or make any progress and are trapped in the same moment forever. And yet they both look exactly the same. 

I don’t quite know what this could be leading up to.