Please explain to me chapter 4 like I'm five, I didn't understand it
Kira is tired of people she does not know falling in love with her. From her perspective she's not doing anything, just existing, and then suddenly now and again a stranger who intensely wants things from her appears. Worse yet the unwanted attention causes her social problems, so it's experienced as an imposition that she starts to resent. "You have no idea who I am and yet you show up, demand the most intimate things from me and fuck up my social life in the process??" Which is a fuckin mood, though I didn't experience it myself until I was in my 20's, and which has mercifully subsided now that I'm an old hag.
Then Hikaru shows up and she thinks it's going to be more of the same, except Hikaru actually asks to be rejected. There's this dynamic in social justice circles that might be illustrative here, where sympathetic people on a higher rung of the social hierarchy get verbally abused by those lower on it because people who deal with bigotry can't take it out on the actual bigots but you can yell at a friendly straight person or whatever. It's a kind of displacement, the people you actually want to yell at won't ever understand why you're yelling at them but the friendly straight person will see and understand your pain, so you take out your frustration on them instead. Hikaru actually isn't shallow in the way Kira disdains, despite her uncontrollable infatuation she has her priorities and asks to be rejected, but Kira sees her as a convenient outlet for her frustration so she decides to mess with her. As she gets to know her she realizes she's treating her as a prop in her internal drama the same way people who don't know her asking her out do, and starts to feel guilty about it. And catches feelings in the process.
There's a trope in medieval Arabic literature (you're an extremely precocious five year old, we're assuming) where a character gets asked by a monarch to become an advisor, and the character refuses, because they're a pious person who does not sully themselves with ugly demands of power, their priorities correctly concerned with heaven rather than earthly matters. The offer to become a vizier establishes the worth of the person, and the rejection of the opportunity for more social status establishes their piety. In a sense Hikaru established her worth by asking to be rejected, because what is not demanded can be freely given. Kira can love her back and feel it uncoerced specifically because Hikaru never asked to be loved.
^ really nice analysis! Beautiful.
