Gdi, they're so cute
I love how Matsuri and Miss Sunflower actually take their time to get to know each other, how they cherish and care for each other, how warm and gentle their relationship is. This manga has done a pretty good job of keeping its slow and relaxed pacing, while developing main character's relationship slowly and steadily.
It's been a pretty long, but nice and wholesome journey. Since chapter 1, Matsuri and Miss Sunflower really have come a long way...
I agree with all of this, and I would even say that it’s not entirely clear that this series originally set out to develop along such serious lines as it has ended up doing. I recently re-read a big chunk of the beginning, and to me it feels like it first intended to be a (warm and gentle, always) episodic Cute Girls Doing Cute Things story, with the contrast between the nice but strict and stoical Miss Sunflower and the irrespressible genki girl Matsuri being the main point of interest, and with the romantic relationship that Matsuri desired seen as close to an impossibility—a sweet but mainly delusional aspiration by a juvenile Cloud-Cuckoo-Lander.
But eventually, as characters like Onii-san, Ayame, and especially the first Miss Sunflower were added, our Miss Sunflower’s emotional closed-off-ness was positioned less as an inherent aspect of her personality and as more of a problem to be overcome, and Matsuri’s thoughtful and diligent side became more developed. (It’s notable how thoroughly Matsuri thinks through Miss Sunflower’s possible reasons for coming to the book fair despite the age of the faxed flyer—as Matsuri would say, it’s because she’s always watching Miss Sunflower.)
I could be wrong, and maybe this series has always been playing a very long game. But although I’ve loved it from the start, I would not necessarily have predicted then that it would end up with the emotional depth that it has now or that the door to an actual romantic relationship between the MCs would be as open as it currently seems to be.
EDIT: In the notes to Vol. 5, the author says, “Originally I was aiming for two volumes,” so I guess it wasn’t always planned for the long game.
last edited at Apr 14, 2022 11:04AM
