Not this again.
There is no indication that Touko was ever contemplating or had any inclinations toward suicide. People are reading way too much into that.
Your basic point is sound—a tragic end for Touko was almost certainly never on the table—but the above is overstatement. There certainly have been at least a couple of hints with ominous overtones in the story, specifically connected to the railroad tracks.
- Chapter 10: Yuu makes her first attempt at swaying Touko from her current path:
Yuu: There are people who would accept you just the way you are. (Etc.)
Touko: I would rather die than be told that. (Train roars by directly behind her.)
Sure, people say “I would rather die than ___” all the time without meaning it literally. But given the context, there’s a depth to that statement even if it’s not literal. Touko is not being casual in her phrasing, at any rate.
- Chapter 23: opens with Touko standing in a graveyard, and the first scene ends with her question, “And then . . .where can I go?”
The last scene begins with Touko smelling the obon incense just as she enters the train station, and then she repeats her previous question, “But what happens after the play is over? . . . Where . . Can I go?” (A rather more bleak formulation than, for example, “What should I do then?”) And visually there’s both the blank space in the distance and the sign reading, “Non stop to final destination.”
None of this is evidence that Touko was actually “contemplating suicide,” and as it turns out, some people at the time (no doubt influenced by the long tradition of Tragic Lesbians in popular culture generally and yuri manga specifically) were indeed overreacting, but there’s certainly enough death/finality verbal and visual imagery to be a bit unsettling.
They say that “two may be coincidence, three is a pattern,” and IIRC, we don’t have three. So readers at the time may have been overreacting to Touko’s personal crisis, but they weren’t making things up out of whole cloth either.
Considering the root cause of Touko's Major Malfunction it hardly seems strange that her thinking, especially in moments of severe self-doubt, might flit towards alarming directions. Or to phrase it differently, while she's well-adjusted and stable enough that it seems mighty unlikely for her to go actively suicidal the nature of her trauma - experiencing the death of someone near and dear at young age - is such that it doesn't really come as a surprise if she dwells on the concept of death, if only as a metaphor and abstract concept, to uncomfortable degrees.
Though when you think about it there might be some rather personal symbolism involved. After all in a certain sense her abandoning the "imitation Mio" persona she's painstakingly built up over the years and internalized - a path which both Yuu and Sayaka have been prodding her to take, occasionally somewhat unsubtly (*cough*play*cough*) - would mean the figurative death of that persona, a part of herself artificial though it may be.
And I suppose if you read the whole exercise as an elaborate coping mechanism for the grief of losing her sister (it could be argued in some ways she's trying to keep Mio alive in herself) it'd also mean fully accepting her passing; another figurative death in a way.
And teenagers being in a liminal stage of life are wont to fret over questions of their identity and future path at the best of times even without all the additional heavy psychological baggage she's burdened with; quō vādis, Touko?
last edited at Jan 3, 2019 4:13PM
