The Summer Hikaru Died EP2 Reaction
Added 2025-07-13 22:15:48 +0000 UTCMARINATED CHICKEN
its so peak guys WTFFF i'm actually so happy to be watching this on the channel. that last scene with yoshiki and the woman made me so sad :(
my dress up darling will be uploaded later tonight. :)
Comments
HOLLLY
derin demir
2025-07-16 17:28:20 +0000 UTCI did not see it coming from ep. 1 but they went so hard with the cicada imagery. The cicada molting but failing to emerge and dying could be interpreted as Hikaru going up the mountain, perhaps trying to prevent Yoshiki from being taken away from the creature in his dad's story. In the process he may have accepted and steeled his feelings for Yoshiki, but he wasn't able to complete his mission which resulted in his death and possession and also inability to directly express feelings. But it could also represent Yoshiki and aspects of his psyche and life that were developing through his relationship with Hikaru. They were almost ready to take flight, but suddenly fall to the ground when Hikaru disappeared and died. Without what could have been with Hikaru, he fails to escape his old exoskeleton which is what is suffocating him (small town, family issues, his own mind). In this interpretation, the dead cicada's reversal at the end could represent Yoshiki's attempt to ignore the truth and go back to how things were, but the consequence is that something monstrous is created. The worst part is that it's possible that from the beginning even before he disappeared, Yoshiki was unhealthily latched onto Hikaru, possibly using his feelings for him as an escape from pain and aspects of reality, which became that much more tragic when he lost Hikaru, only for Hikaru to come back as a monster and become his escape once again, both from his older issues but also from the issue that Hikaru himself represents. This story is soooooo twisted and there's so much to think about which I love. Also I didn't make the connection until seeing this episode and it might be so obvious to everyone else π£ that one way to interpret Hikaru in a literal sense is simply as a person who suddenly grew into or accepted their queer sexuality. To the people of a small conservative village, someone coming out or accepting themselves as queer is often treated as a dangerous, criminal monster who took away the pure person they used to be and corrupted them. Queer people are also often told that something must have happened to them like stress or a childhood traumatic experience that has caused them to change, which tracks with the plot of this story as well with Hikaru disappearing before returning as a monster. And to Yoshiki, a queer person who hasn't yet accepted himself, monster Hikaru is both someone seemingly unfamiliar as he is displaying new behaviors and urges that his previous self didn't have and is at the same time a somewhat horrific and forbidden object of curiosity and desire for Yoshiki being both the same person he always liked and bringing out new, perhaps scary urges in Yoshiki as well. The "mixing" warned by the housewife would be like "being influenced by another queer to accept your queerness" almost like she's someone from a religious organization trying to make him question himself and stop his coming out after she saw him hanging out around Hikaru. There's also something innately heteronormative in the myth about the monster taking the person closest to you unless they become part of your family; if the person closest to you doesn't happen to be a lover who is of the opposite gender and will marry you, they will be taken away, thus enforcing that you should ultimately choose a heterosexual partner from a young age and pursue marriage over any other kind of possible closest human relationship, whether that be homosexual or purely platonic or something else. That's definitely a reductive analysis lol but it's feels so salient to me considering how in real life queer people who come out are often treated as though they've been possessed by a monster or that the old (not queer) version of them in everyone's minds has died. And before coming out, seeing other queer people especially those you're attracted to be open can feel deeply disturbing and existentially dreadful but also magnetic and hard to look away from. And on top of that, for people of any sexual orientation a sudden eruption of sexual urges as a teenager or at any time in life can be jarring and feel like there's something "different/other" inside that person or yourself (for further reading, see She Wolf by Shakira). For someone on the outside who has known you for a long time, it could look like seeing someone you thought you knew suddenly acting differently and unexpectedly, and that would be that much more existentially uncomfortable if you are repressing the same "different" behaviors you're now seeing in this person. It also didn't occur to me that you can even think of monster Hikaru as just a different (but perhaps similar, we all have a type I guess) person Yoshiki is projecting his dead friend/love onto. I feel like it does happen that people find it impossible to move on from a loss like Yoshiki's loss of Hikaru and end up projecting their previous love onto the person/people they partner with after that loss. They might endlessly compare the new partners to their previous love and ultimately experience a kind of horror of never getting what they really wanted but at the same time end up tarnishing and corrupting the image of their previous love by blurring the lines between the identity of the lost love and the the current partner, tragically making loving either the person you lost or the person in front of you evermore difficult and torturous.
holdmyhandsaw
2025-07-14 07:54:20 +0000 UTC
