You can feel how badly this hurts (for both parties) and how a really bad miscommunication spirals out of control (I often get annoyed by ‘if we talked this would clear the air’ but this one is plausible and sold well, especially since Yuu doesn’t know there’s anything left to actually say). At first, Touko doesn’t respond, but the next time they are together she asks Sayaka about her feelings. Yuu has always loved shoujo manga and fantasizes about the day that, she, too, will get a love confession that will send her heart a-flutter.

It's good to have a character like Maki for representation, someone who is so completely asexual/aromantic that there is no mistaking it. And to be honest, I think that extra time processing both helped me to enjoy volume 7 more than I would have otherwise. But with Yuu confessing to Touko in volume 6, there was a lot of hands thrown up, essentially saying: "Well there you go, she wasn't aromantic/asexual, she just hadn't finished developing her sexual awakening" or "it just took the right person" or "I knew it was too good to be true that we'd get aromantic/asexual representation.

But I really think there's a continuum, a spectrum of sexual and romantic feelings, and so his comments feel dismissive. Un po’ sottotono rispetto ai precedenti due ma penso sia normale visto che ci stiamo avvicinando alla conclusione (il numero 8 sarà l’ultimo).

Yuu has always loved shoujo manga and fantasizes about the day that, she, too, will get a love confession that will send her heart a flutter. Nice melodramatic teenage angst, like: the very first person I said "I love you" to didn't love me back so now there is no chance of me ever having love in my life, you know, EVER, even over the next 60+ years. A lot of transgender people find this experience with people who wanted a one time sexual exploration, but aren't really interested in long-term relationships with a transgender person. So it's funny, having lived through those feelings, and it is also totally precious writing that captures that age.Despite a lot of concern and criticism with Yuu finally confessing to Touko at the end of volume 6 and the "inevitability" of their relationship by the time the series ends in volume 8, I still think Yuu provides that representation, which I'll discuss later in this review. Certainly she is different by degree than Maki, but I don't feel that her depiction completely betrays her status as a potential representation of asexuality/aromanticism either. I won't spoil the details of the confession, other than to say that Touko knew, for a long time, or at least highly suspected that Sayaka liked her. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Sayaka's arc wasn't just a loose thread to be tied though, it was meaningful character growth for both her and Nanami, and something I think was handled very well. I love how determined Sayaka was in confessing her feelings to Touko and didn’t react any differently to Touko after getting a response to her confession. And the movie resumes, with Yuu and Touko running across town to see each other and finally have their own moment. I’ve never been terribly invested in Yuu and Touko as a couple, not because I don’t like them, or because they shouldn’t be together, but just because this story was always presented to us as a Yuri romance.For anyone that's looking for a good romance comic that defies expectations and is relatively chaste, Bloom Into You is a good choice. All the teenage heartbreak is broken up by a sweet flashback chapter to the start of the love story for two of the adults in the series. Fortified by the knowledge that she is choosing to do what she wants to for herself, so she can grow from it, Sayaka finally confesses her feelings to Touko. It's still an imperfect series in a lot of ways, but it is also a crucial series in the way Yuu and Maki provide media representation of aromantic/asexual people.

The characters need this time to look around how everyone else has changed and how they have changed. But when the next person to confess to Yuu is the alluring Nanami herself, has Yuu's shoujo romance finally begun? But the author wrote the scene very well, I believe that this was one of the best scenes of rejection in a yuri manga that I have read. Sayaka finally confesses, expressing to Touko that at first she might have fallen for the version of Touko that she created for others, but even after getting to know her, her feelings stayed the same.

Adaption, editing and lettering are all top notch, which means you’ll never notice them, but kudos to Jenn Grunigen, Julie Davis and CK Russell and I’m thrilled to see a proofreader, Danielle King. I reject a binary being imposed on asexual/aromantic people and I think Yuu, whether intentionally by the author or not, establishes that possibility in a very realistic way.