Aug 30, 2022
Lots of feelings on this one.. at first glance it is a simple love triangle with a (gay) twist, fun right?
Wrong! This story is so much more than that. To me Blue Flag at it's core is about heteronormativity. This comes up in many ways throughout the story: the entire poltline of Mami not being able to uphold friendships with men and everyone assume she is trying to get with Ichinose. Kensuke only seeing women as objects of desire and men as friends and then having this challenged when he finds out Touma is gay. This whole thing in the story of attraction vs friendship
...
and that these two concept are mutually exclusive according to heteronormativity (including this under here since I don't have a better word for this) is something I rarely see discussed in media.
The entire conversation of Kensuke, Nimura and the two girls with Ichinose brought up some interesting points about this and what is right and wrong when it comes to personal viewpoints about this, but ultimately the story didn't dive in deep enough and the author didn't seem to want to take a hard stand on wether or not Kensuke should be supportive of Touma or not. Which I personally found very disappointing and kinda lackluster.
I also really enjoyed the ending as I don't enjoy cliche "and they lived happily ever after" type endings. I also liked how Masumi turned out to be bi which explained her previous struggle with friends and romance because as the story brings up: "If you are attracted to someone you can't be friends with them". Which for her as a bisexual woman means that she should be friends with women and in relationships with men but can't do either because she wants to be able to do both. (Also her husand is like ally goals)
Which brings me to my final point about Ichinose. At first I thought making him marry Touma was a fanservice ending kinda giving us "last minute gay" à la Supernatural but when you really think about that's not it at all. Who says that Ichinose wasn't attracted to Touma (men) all along (*whispers* Heteronormativity). It makes sense really, Ichinose says/thinks a lot of things about Touma that Futaba expresses as well. Feeling jealous of him, wanting to be him this sense of admiration is something equated to love a lot in anime I find. The reason I didn't read this as such tho was because I was viewing all of this through the lense of heteronormativity, I wasn't able to see Ichinose as anything but straight even though his attraction to men was never officially ruled out. (I'm over here bi erasing myself :D) it was really a punch to the gut when I realised I had a lot more work to do when it came to erasing my inner prejudices and assumptions.
Ehm anyway destroy heteronormativity and dismantle the patriarchy :)
Have a nice day! Hope this made sense to anyone out there..
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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