This series quietly ended up growing very close to my heart, and while I'm sad to see it go, it made for a wonderful ride, all the more so because you could leap in and leap off at any point, because it's not the destination or the journey that matters, but the ideal of escape, the willingness and capacity to conceptualize it, to imagine amid pressure and monotony and boredom the prospect and fantasy of stimulation, to make a mind in peril of becoming the ultimate prison under routine and deadlines into the very engine of spontaneous liberation. This concept is the fuel that propels the eternal motion(less) machine that is this story, a ship (ha-ha) that can be itself precisely because it always changes, and needs to change in order to keep sailing, to bob onward through the heat waves and brainstorms toward tomorrow.
I adore the way in which Futari Escape celebrates decentered and organic creativity that does not necessarily need to be propelled toward the manifestation of some Great Work, but matters in and of itself, nourishing the very mind that harbors it whether or not it is deployed to water some yearly harvest or prize gardenia, a creativity that is the ability to see pleasure in the mundane, adventure in the environs, life in the dance of dust particles and comfy yawns. I love the resistance, if not outright rejection, of the pressure to be productive in a socially-mandated manner, the admission that one needs to some extent to perform the soulless and silent song-and-dance that hats a wage, but can and indeed must also carve out a life beyond and throughout this, a life not necessarily located in some romantic eat-pray-love journey of self-discovery whose cost of undertaking shall demand more drudgery than it heals, but also in the space of small moments, passing joys, flights of fancy and whimsical asides. (Futari Escape is in fact an OL yuri story because the office in OL yuri is by no means a set corporate location, but the manifestation of the eldritch fiend that is capitalism whose corruptive and insidious influence queer women valiantly resist; in this series, that monstrous manifestation is far less physical, which necessitates the OL-as-resistance-fighter to take similarly spiritual, imaginative and epistemic measures in turn)
The metatextuality of this ending, then, is entirely fitting, because the series was in some ways always metatextual, as all fiction tends to be by essence and design. Trapped in narratives, ambushed by expectations, hemmed in by pressures and condemned by the tyranny of the life-course, Sempai and Kouhai simply have to improvise, innovate and break the rules of their genres, those scripts of unemployment and occupation used to label people as deviant or pressure them to remain productive, and write in thoughts and feelings the tale of their breakout. Short tales, perhaps, and in some cases mere daydreams, but in a world where the shadow of alienation swallows the sun whole and renders that life-star the mere metric of shifts and schedules, dreams are kindling for the soul, refuges in the over-underground of the mind, the final bastion and shelter for what is passionate and empathetic and human in us all. The metatext is dream-reality, a hazily bordered realm encompassing and surpassing, not beyond, but within and parallel, into which we step back to look within in fanciful motions that reveal in centerless orbits the movements of life and thought, too complex to be labelled or bottled by the tyranny of production. As Sempai and Kouhai conducted this dance of layers to stay on their toes and preserve the levity of their lives throughout the series, so they perform their greatest performance to cap it all off, creating themselves through a visionary world, making themselves into the subject of their art, for what is art but a symphony of life, creating from and created by? They'd written for us Futari Escape all along, in every issue and in every panel, inspiring and inspired, and shall continue to do so forevermore, transcending in life (and hopefully in the eventual extra doujins) the close of the page, the fullest achievement and enactment of this story's errant, easygoing, emancipatory ethos.
Indeed, this organic, fluid, quicksilver-flashing ethic is reflected even in the titular relationship, for Sempai and Kouhai are, to quote a Tumblr post I recently enjoyed, "Two old guys who have a gay thing going on... no, having a gay relationship and having a gay thing going on are not the same, it's complicated". There exists in their dynamic, in this flirty, bantering, gruffly intimate inter-reliance of shroom-mates, so much potential that is kinetic without exhaustion, without conversion exactly from 'friends' to 'lovers', maintaining a flexibility that can encompass all these categories without subsumption, an elasticity that suits itself infinitely to the demands of the moment and whatever improv they feel like enacting, not pretending in the sense of some nonexistent divide between appearance and reality, but performing in the sense that they create in every interaction richer senses of a private and provisional cosmos. Friendship can be profoundly queer when well-penned, for while love may glue a queer relationship, friendship is what supplies and supports a queer community, and these two are in every sense a two-person commune, a love-thy-neighborhood on whimsy's wheels. If Crescent Moon and Doughnuts spoke to the part of me that's ace, Futari Escape speaks to the part that's aro, because regardless of whether or not these two brilliant fools end up dating in some subsequent installment, their relationship is still charged with that greatest kind of love that sublates and surpasses romance to affirm life itself in all its glorious oddness.
