I never really saw Akira as a "love interest" in this series to the point that I was thinking that the subtext tag was doing some heavy lifting in recent chapters but Komachi has entered that chat and it's some good food. SSS tier Yuri dynamic, the girl who (thinks she) causes everyone to die and the girl who stops everyone from dying. It's poetry.

the way Shizuku's confession is dragged out, like a can being kicked down the road, again and again, even though Shizuku knows Kaori is dying, still feels manufactured to me. An arbitrary twist of the knife on top of a tragedy that would be plenty sad on its own even if the leads had been allowed to at least see each other face to face during the confession.

im 50/50 on this. the last like 1/4 of this series has felt like a death march towards an unavoidable conclusion, and in some ways I can see how that feels exploitative or manufactured but at the same time it really adds to the experience and matches a lot of the feelings of having someone important to you dealing with a terminal illness. each and every chapter for the last like 10+ has had me open it with a sense of dread wondering if this would be The One, in the same way every call from the hospital could be The One. Heartbreaking conclusion that we all knew was coming and would have felt cheap for it to end any other way, and reconciling with that is fascinating and beautiful in a pognantly cruel and twisted way.

all the flashbacks have made it kinda difficult to trace the sequence of events in this series, so I reread from the beginning really attentively and I think I have the timeline pieced together, in case I'm not the only one confused.
Aikawa loses her desire to play music at her previous school after receiving harsh criticism and being told not to play the way she enjoys.
Aikawa transfers into the current school, while her mother? reminds her that she is expected to continue music, (with the gifted silver polishing cloth for the silver trumpet she was told to use, even though she loves the sound of gold trumpets).
Aikawa heard Katagiri practicing on the roof and decides to get close to her to try to rediscover her love of music, and she seemingly does, beating Katagiri in the audition and being overjoyed that Katagiri wants to play with her even after losing the audition. But the band director or w/e recommends that she quits, which seems like its going to lead into the present day events, where Aikawa is dating the boy "until the competition" where she will presumably quit taking music seriously.

Best guess at this point is she's trying to distance herself from Katagiri in preparation for leaving the brass band?

I...uh...don't exactly trust this manga to do this topic justice? I honestly can't decide if it'll be more annoying for this to be a fake-out or a genuine attempt at drama that feels a little unearned.

Yeah, I may be proven wrong but this feels kinda....unsalvageable? either it's a very poor taste fake-out or a tone shift that's very much a blindside. and even if things work out, it makes it kinda difficult to root for an endgame where the main pair end up together because it went from a harmless series that you don't think about too much to a pretty....bad vibes dynamic? hopefully I'm wrong because I liked this series up to this point.

11/10 character design, 10/10 art, and a really cute story on top of it.