The author also confirmed this will be more of a deep friendship thing rather than romance
Except that's not what she said, but go off. All she said was that she didn't want to put a label on what Konatsu and Koyuki have because she thought it would be confining. The same idea comes up almost verbatim near the end of Bloom Into You, and I don't think anyone could seriously argue that that those characters' feelings aren't romantic.
Where did she say this? I was going from what was posted on the scanlator's site, and they stated that this was labelled by the author as "girl friendship", if memory serves. The post by the author herself was in moonletters, so I am banking on what other people said was written there.
Also, I fail to see the point of bringing up "Bloom Into You", that was explicitly a series about romance, it called it such since the beginning, and the whole point was that the main couple went beyond mere friends. Show me one single scene from this series that tells that, in actual words. I agree that the subtext is so thick here it barely needs yuri goggles (or rather, it does not need them), but there is not a single scene where they actually say anything openly, and the whole thing can technically be called an extremely close friendship. I just do not see any similarity between the two works that would merit this comparison.
In addition, I went and skimmed the last chapter of "Bloom", because the scene you are talking about sounded completely unfamiliar to me. I failed to find it, so feel free to link that as well.
last edited at Dec 30, 2019 2:17PM