Blue Flag
After the summer fireworks, Taichi and Futaba are officially dating. Not that it changes much – both still have to study for college entrance exams and their friendships with Toma and Masumi remain strong. But now there's a new friend in the mix: Mami, the girl whose crush on Toma seemed to set her at odds with Taichi, has suddenly decided that she'd rather be friends with Taichi than against him. Can that really be all she wants?
It was almost too easy to hate Mami when she first came into the story. She was the perfect stereotype of the pushy pretty girl who rules over her high school with a flawlessly manicured claw. Her anger at always finding Taichi with Toma and not thinking he was “worthy” of being Toma's friend, her toadying cronies, and her entire attitude and appearance simply screamed “mean girl.” She came off less as a character and more as a trope given legs and a voice.
But now in the fifth volume Kaito shows us that if we did hate her, we were just falling into the same old traps that girls like Mami, pretty girls who get along well with guys, have been subjected to forever, both in real life and in the fiction that built their template and stereotype in the first place. The story picks up from the finale of the fireworks festival and Taichi telling Toma that he and Futaba are now dating before quickly moving us back to the start of the new trimester. Mami immediately shows up with a new, shorter hairdo and swiftly strides over to where Taichi and his nerd friends are playing a game. When Mami asks Taichi and his gamer friends to help her start playing, having become interested when Taichi and Toma were playing at the hospital, everyone gets all up in arms about her trying to "steal" Taichi from Futaba or "using" Taichi to get to Toma. Later, when one of her male friends asks her out, revealing that he's broken up with his girlfriend to date her, Mami is furious, because this is just the same damn thing she's had to deal with ever since the world decided that she was "pretty", which meant that she had to be a man-stealing she-whore.
It's a major blow, not just within the context of the story, but to the readers themselves. Flashbacks to Mami's elementary and middle school days, as well as her first two years in high school, show us that she's never been that girl. People have always just assumed that she was because of her looks and her general friendliness. Nothing she does seems able to shake off the expectations others have of her: if she's too friendly when a friend gets a boyfriend, she's trying to steal him. If she's not friendly enough, she's being a snob. If she cuts off her hair in a desperate attempt to be less pretty, she must have had her heart broken. Mami is as trapped by the suppositions people make based on her gender and appearance as Toma and Masumi are by people's assumptions of their heteronormativity, but in her case she's actively fighting back – it's just that no one is willing to listen.
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