idk how ppl read this and keep assuming she didn't know she was attracted to her friend. she literally says she knew since middle school. you guys are reading this completely wrong. she never did anything because she thought it would be unrequited this whole time. so she dated boys instead. which can mean a whole bunch of things. but no where does it state she didn't ENJOY being with all those men. they just weren't who she was in love with. ppl, even straight cis' try to do that all the time, this is nothing lgbqt unique, only it probably comes up more often for obvious reasons. And even if things are so much easier now, it's easy to forget that it really wasn't that long ago where things were much different. i'm only 35 and i grew up without knowing lgbqt was a thing until i heard about it in middle school, from word of mouth, and it was not in a good light. shit being able to brows the internet was still a baby thing when i was in highschool, and not something we would think to go to to learn about lgbqt. and the only kind of media i ever saw it show up in was shit like mariasama ga miteiru, which i actually read as a scripted translation, cause you could still barely see scanlations on the web. THIS IS WHY "omg i never realized til 10 years later i was gay" STORIES STILL EXIST BECAUSE IT STILL EXISTED FOR PROMINENT MANGA ARTISTS.
Exactly.
Artist who draw today's stories were children when Lgbtq+ was not mainstream. Without internet, no legalized marriage, no big corporate commercials pandering to pride, no (good) gay representation in media.