Humans are story tellers by nature.

We have been telling each other stories for many, many years, decades even, and we are very good at it, but I think most people don’t realize just how good we truly are. I should know, I made a blog dedicated almost in its entirely to exploring the nuances of storytelling using TV shows aimed primarily at children as a framework.

Because I am genius like that.

Any professional that actually gets paid to think about this stuff will probably tell you that there is actually a finite number of stories you can tell, such as boy meets girl, the Hero’s Journey, and Die Hard, but what makes of storytelling such a fascinating field of study is how we keep finding new ways to tell those same stories over and over again.

Like Die Hard on an airport.

Of course, if you’re a human that consumes media regularly or were alive back during the 90’s romcom craze, you’re most certainly aware of the most popular type of story there is: The Love Story.

Ah yes, Love.

If quantum mechanics are to be believed, Love might be the greatest force in the universe (citation needed), so it is not surprising that it is also the most prolific story archetype out there; from the Iliad to G Gundam, Love has been the engine to some of the greatest stories ever told.

And Grease 2.

Being a writer on the internet, I am naturally well versed in all things romance. Just check my AO3 history if you don’t believe me. That is probably why it is extremely rare for a Love story to impress me, the damn things are just everywhere, but that doesn’t mean that a Love story can’t move that black hole that is where my heart should be, which brings me to today’s topic: Nakatani Nio’s Bloom into You.

Published between 2017 and 2020, with an anime adaptation in 2019, to say that I love this story is like saying that I love dramatic catchphrases: There are Fates worse than Death.

I am not entirely sure what that means.

Love stories are common enough that there’s probably one standing behind you right now (don’t turn around), but I find very few are as compelling and thought provoking as Bloom into You, and since I already went to the trouble of opening a Word document, I figured I would break down to you, my dear and captive reader, why exactly this is one of the best Love stories I’ve ever experienced.

And bear in mind that I have watched Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla II.

This movie taught me how to love.

A Visual Language.

There are many ways to tell stories. And by ‘many’ I mean like five, but contrary to what Shadow Puppet enthusiasts would have you believe, none of them is truly superior to the other. They are just good at engaging the audience in different ways, and none of them can be quite as difficult to understand as the visual language.

No, not you. Go away.

To be clear, writing words, constructing sentences, crafting dialogue, all of those are stupidly difficult. Hell, I can easily write 5,000+ words essays on a whim, but ask me to write a single line of dialogue and I will curl up on the floor and cry.

My point is, writing is hard, but it is straight forward.

The thing about images though, is that you often need to find the way to tell things to the audience without actually saying anything; the real challenge of making a movie, drawing a comic book or doing animation, is not to tell a story through images, but to understand that the images themselves ARE the story.

Visuals can say things to an audience in a way that dialogue can’t, so what goes into single panel, image or shot can be as important to the narrative as any line of dialogue, if not more. That is probably one of the reasons why I enjoy animation as a medium so much; sometimes a mere second of animation can have more thought put into it than the actual story.

With the exception of Yuru Yuri. There are no thoughts in Yuru Yuri.

Like most successful Manga’s, Bloom into You was eventually adapted into an Anime. And a stage play. Which is super ironic if you know the plot, but that only goes to show you how good the story is.

Anyways, what I really want to focus on is on how, even though the narrative features fancy schmancy things like ‘dialogues’ and ‘narration’, most of the characterization of the story is actually conveyed in a visual way, and this is particularly true when it comes to our main characters: Nanami Touko and, most importantly, Koito Yuu.

A protagonist? With Pink-ish hair? Groundbreaking

Unlike most protagonists, especially in a love story like this one, Yuu has very few moments of introspection. You do often hear her thoughts on other people or her current situation, but these inner monologues rarely delve into her own emotions; instead, the story shows us her emotional state through a combination of facial expressions, narrative context and simple visual cues.

Hint: Whenever you see this thing, Yuu is thinking of Nanami.

Visual storytelling like this is not new, but what makes Bloom into You so special is not only how extensive its use is, but how effective it is at delivering some of the most pivotal moments of the story; there are, for example, two specific scenes where the feelings and motivations of our main characters come to an impasse, and this confrontation is visually represented by having them meet halfway through a river.

The water represents my tears.

There is one particular scene that I think perfectly… illustrates Bloom into You’s masterful use of visual storytelling, one in which our main girls are walking home on a rainy day while sharing an umbrella.

Because overused cliches give me life.

This simple scene might seem meaningless at first, maybe even dumb, but the entire context of the story makes it brilliant; the crossing light going from red to green and back to red as both characters fool around works as a perfect metaphor for their relationship, where they can only remain happy so long as that relationship stays just the way it is, but neither of them can stay there forever.

Such is the power of traffic safety.

What’s most interesting about this moment though, is the fact that, well, this only happens in the anime adaptation.

The scene is certainly in the manga, but the framing device of the traffic light is completely gone; the setup, dialogues and fluffiness that makes us feel all giddy on the inside are still there, but it all happens in the backdrop of your typical mostly white manga panel.

Look, you try to draw a traffic light in a black & white manga.

This really goes back to what I said before: when it comes to storytelling, different mediums might as well be different languages, for each of them has different ways of saying the same thing. The Bloom into You anime adaptation was certainly crafted with a lot of care, and the format really allowed to expand the visual nature of the original narrative, something they very clearly took advantage of.

The essence of the story didn’t change, but our perception of it did.

A story is only as memorable as what you get out of it, translating it to other mediums can be as hard as writing it anew, but if done right it opens to door to other levels of interpretation that maybe weren’t even possible before. Even if the events and characters are the same, that new perspective could help you appreciate aspects of the story you may not have noticed otherwise.

Dude, I think they’re gay.

We feel, therefore we change.

What is a person? Just a miserable pile of secrets?

Philosophers have been debating this question for centuries in order to decide who will become the next Plato or something, so I am not even going to pretend that I can give an answer to it, or at least not for free. I can however, ponder the meaning of this question in the context of a Yuri manga.

It’s what he would have wanted.

A funny thing about humans is that we spend a lot of time trying to find the right way to live, as if there’s some magic set of instructions that will allow us to lead a fulfilling life, which is why we spend so much time trying to figure ourselves out until the day when we finally create a Fursona.

Wait, that went to the wrong place.

You might say that a story about two girls discovering what it means to fall in love might not be the best venue to explore the human condition, but to that I say, what is more human than feeling?

And therein lies the brilliance of Bloom into You; rather than being a simple will they/won’t they affair, which amounts to roughly 98% of all love stories and CW’s The Flash for some reason, it is a story centered about the question of identity, who we are and who do we want to be, and it is all framed around a simple idea:

Is Love a conditional thing?

Which, incidentally, is also the plot of Ernest Scared Stupid.

The thing about Love, says I, a bachelor, is that while there’s an infinite number of songs about how amazing it is, Love is actually one of the scariest things out there.

Sure, to believe in love is great, but to actually be in love means giving someone else the power to hurt you in a way no one else could. That’s why being rejected is so scary, but even if they do return your feelings, who’s to say that will never change?

Which is why people love dogs. They don’t judge you.

That is why the drama in Bloom into You is so compelling, because it doesn’t revolve around whether or not the girls will return each other’s feelings, but around what happens if they do. The uncertainty of not knowing if a person can accept you for who you are, or if you truly know that person at all is what drives the conflict in the story.

It is very easy to tell someone to be honest about their feelings, but humans and their relationships are never that simple. Rather than being liberating, sometimes those feelings can be a prison of our own making. Case in point, Saeki Sayaka.

She’s the Gay one (left).

I say that in jest, but I actually mean it.

While this is a Yuri romance, Saeki Sayaka is the only main character for whom her sexuality is a defined part of her identity. Unlike Nanami and Yuu who never really consider the implications of loving another woman, she doesn’t struggle to understand who she is or what it means to love another person. She has literally been there, done that.

‘That’ being ‘girls’.

Being more experienced in love does giver her something of a ‘Top’ position in the narrative (see what I did there?), but that comes at the cost of also having experienced heartbreak; while her feelings are certain, her fear of rejection is so great she hides herself behind a mask of reason and politeness. That actually makes her more interesting as a character though, since you often need to read between the lines in order to understand what’s going on in her mind.

Lesbians do work in mysterious ways, after all.

She’s the closest thing the story has to an antagonist, not because she’s evil, which to be fair would be kind of hot, but because in a story about how love can change people for the better, she’s the one who wishes for things to remain the same.

And in an ironic twist of fate, that is exactly why she’s the most important character in the story.

Because she’s the one who ultimately realizes that while Love can be terrifying, to live without it is even worse. In one of my favorite moments in the whole damn thing, when confronted with the reality that Yuu had the courage to do what she couldn’t, to face the person she loved even if it meant losing her, she did one of the most difficult things any person can do: she admitted defeat.

Drama Queen.

She waited for the world to change for her sake only to discover too late that world doesn’t change for you, it changes because of you. While tragic, her story is actually a pretty clever encapsulation of the main theme of the narrative: change is inevitable, so it doesn’t really matter what that change is, but rather how we face it.

We can reject it, cower from it, embrace it, we can even stock pile it, but whatever it is we do, that choice is what ultimately defines us as individuals.

And that is what Bloom into You is really about.

Okay, that and girls kissing.

Maybe Bloom into You could have worked as a regular boy meets girl narrative, but the fact that this story is centered around characters that are not bound by traditional gender roles makes this point even more poignant; it’s not about what they are, but about who they are.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Yuri genre is inherently the superior form of storytelling. All I am saying is that the first man that went to space was named Yuri and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

“I did it for the girls.”

Not a Love Story

I often say, or at least I would if people asked for my opinion more often, that the best Love stories are not the ones where two characters fall in love with each other, but rather the ones where they become better people because of each other. That is actually one of the reasons why I usually don’t invest myself in the romantic aspect of most stories; when you establish romance as the end goal, once the characters reach that point then the relationship has no more place to grow.

Picture unrelated.

That is probably why I love Bloom into You so much, because it sets the romantic relationship early on and then focuses on how Love causes relationships to change. And the reason why it’s so successful at exploring this idea is because, well, Bloom into You isn’t really a Love story.

It is a story about Love.

It’s about how love changes our lives in unpredictable ways, about what it means to love one another and to love ourselves, about how we all experience love in completely different ways. For some, falling in love can be violent and unexpected, like getting hit by a runaway truck. Yet for others, it can be such a subtle thing they might not realize what that feeling it is until it’s too late, like a Ninja driving a runaway truck.

Find me a better metaphor. I’ll wait.

The thing about Love stories is that they are just that, stories, and by their very nature all stories have to end. But relationships don’t work like that, and that’s the one thing Bloom into You understands better than any other story out there; romantic or not, our relationships with others don’t end because they can’t end.

They can only change.

Because everyone changes, and nothing can make us change more than Love itself.

Visual Representation.

Love is one of the ultimate expressions of free will. We may not always get to decide who we fall in love with or why, but the fact remains that we are the ones who chose to love in the first place.

We don’t love because we’re told to, or because we are meant to.

We love because we want to love, and no one can take that away from us.

It might seem ridiculous to give so much credit to Bloom into You, but this kind of story is probably one of the reasons why I tend to gravitate towards the Yuri genre. I mean sure, girls kissing girls is nice, should be a national sport if you ask me, but most importantly, these kinds of stories show us that Love is an emotion that transcends identity, that love is part of the human condition regardless of who you are.

Turns out these guys were really onto something.

We could talk about this all day, in fact, depending on your reading speed we may just have done exactly that, but if there’s a lesson I want you take away from all we’ve talked about, let it be this one:

Humans have spent too much time trying to understand Love, not because we’re horny, but because Love is the one thing that is truly universal, and yet I don’t think we will ever figure it out. Not because we’re dumb, at least not all of us, but because Love is not a problem to be solved, nor something we’re supposed to understand.

 Love is something that is meant to be lived.

Sometimes it’s painful, sometimes it’s sad, but sometimes is also worth it. So, we shouldn’t be afraid of love, we should embrace it, even when it burns. Whether you want it or not Love will always be part of your life, and if you let it, Love will help you… become the person you were always meant to be?

Man, I wish there was a better way to phrase that.