Bloom Into You’s sixth volume begins with the curtain about to rise on our play-within-a-comic. After an entire series spent playing the part of her sister, Touko will in this performance be playing the part of someone who rejects that philosophy outright, and chooses to embrace their own fledgling, uncertain identity. It’s simultaneously a gradual step and a terrifying one. On the one hand, she’s only playing the part of the person Yuu wishes she could be, in the context of an established, inauthentic performance. But on the other hand, she will be performing this new self in front of a vast audience, essentially the entire student body that she has sought to “fool” all this time.

What Yuu hopes, what really everyone hopes, is that Touko will realize her performance wasn’t ever that inauthentic in the first place. The distance between who we really are and who we act like is rarely as dramatic as fiction tends to make out – and in fact, changing our personalities over time is nothing more than “performance” put into practice, as we make a daily pledge to act in some way we find more productive or healthy or authentic, and through that performance eventually come to see this new mode of behavior as routine. Touko is wrestling with anxieties that are perfectly natural, but which have grown into a profound psychological barrier due to her sister’s death. If she can comfortably perform letting go of the past on stage, perhaps she might find the strength to carry that performance off the stage.

The paneling and character blocking are as purposeful as ever as the students make their final preparations. As our leads wander the school halls, it is now  easy to recognize Touko in her “taking things too easy” artificial mode, while she deliberately avoids eye contact with Yuu. For Touko, this sort of appearance of confidence and congeniality is actually a red flag, emphasizing her retreating into her sister’s persona as a protective shell. Noticing this, Yuu consults Sayaka, who tells her not to worry. Their relative responses to this situation reflect both their unique relationships with Touko and also simply the length of their friendship – as usual, Yuu is eager to challenge Touko, and at this point feels comfortable enough with Sayaka to even chide her for trusting Touko too much.

In contrast, Sayaka has known Touko for far longer, and has come to understand just how competently and consistently Touko can wriggle her way through seemingly painful situations like this. She’s also come to embrace passivity on her own part in dealing with Touko, something that we saw last volume does indeed cause her some self-hatred. Sayaka’s method of dealing with Touko’s defenses is subtle and cunning, but also passive – she merely maintains hope that Touko will fall one day, and thereby realize that there was never any risk of losing what she has. Sayaka believes her own words will never reach Touko, and so has given up on challenging her attitude at times like this, confident that either Touko will handle it or Touko will fail to handle it, which might actually be better for her.

Sayaka was never brave enough to push through Touko’s defenses, and risk losing the closeness she’d fought so hard for. But Yuu has pushed through, and so when Touko briefly, silently admits to her insecurities before the performance, it’s Yuu she confesses to. Yuu is now able to reach out to the Touko beyond her public performance, the Touko who is scared this play will be a big failure, even after the confident, dramatic speech she just gave to the rest of the crew. That Touko needs a friend, and is grateful to be reassured by Yuu.

As the curtain rises on play-Touko’s hospital bed, the manga’s purposeful paneling is now complimented by a clear focus on chiaroscuro, a dramatic contrast between lighting and darkness. Touko, alone on the stage, is utterly overwhelmed with white light, a combination of the bright stage lights and the clinical hospital room stage. Through these, the manga realizes her sense of being utterly exposed. In contrast, the audience is conveyed as indistinct figures in the darkness, denying Touko any human response to her performance. She must perform bravely and openly, without knowing how her performance will be received – a precise echo of her emotional threshold.

Her first visitor, a classmate, informs her she was a perfect honors student, and friendly with everyone. Touko’s character bashfully admits she’s worried she won’t be able to live up to that standard, which serves as a funny reflection on our actual Touko. The real Touko believes she’s a fraud who’s only pretending to be successful and well-liked, but she is undeniably successful and well-liked. Having a sister who was an honors student doesn’t automatically grant you the skills to become one yourself – Touko fought to earn those skills on her own, and has in fact eclipsed her sister’s behavior due to her own misguided impression of how perfect that sister was. With loving friends and respect among the community, Touko’s accomplishments aren’t “fake” or in some way owed to her sister’s example – she has already built a Touko who stands above and beyond her sister’s image, if only she were willing to accept that.

Further visitors offer more contradictory visions of Touko, with her brother stating she was cold and distant, and her lover Sayaka saying she was very emotional and needy (tragically positioning herself in the same “past you must grow beyond” role she’s accepted in real life). The distance between these aspects underlines the truth of Yuu’s reflection that “maybe it’s okay to be contradictory.” Everyone contains multitudes, everyone shows different aspects of themselves to different people, and attempting to compress an entire human identity into one specific performance is a project bound for failure – the precise failure that Touko has spent her adolescence pursuing. Touko could never capture her sister’s contradictory complexity; and in fact, our own contradictory complexity is not even a stable thing, but rather a continuously morphing amalgam, as we perpetually transform from who we once were to who we will eventually be.

Though she tries, Touko’s character cannot put on any of these prior selves with confidence, having no idea what motivated each visage, or how the assembly fits together. All she can do is be herself, the girl sitting in this hospital bed, uncertain of who she is but eager to find out. Just as in real life, it is Nurse Yuu who begins to nudge her down this road, who discovers the first genuinely true thing about current Touko. While play-Touko stresses about her duty towards the identities she’s lost, Nurse Yuu diligently cares for her, discovering first that she likes white gerberas, and then that she likes a particular author, small but crucial steps towards discovering her authentic self. Even her anxieties, painful as they may be, are authentic; encouraged onward by Nurse Yuu, Touko accepts that her fear of being discarded and need to impress are earnest parts of herself.

The last act of the play serves as a realization of what our real Touko must do, as she accepts she cannot live up to the images others have assigned her. Though she’s as terrified as our own Touko, this process actually comes as a glorious relief, with her classmate, brother, and lover all embracing this new authenticity. As Sayaka expected, what both Toukos need is to experience failure, and thereby learn that she is still among friends, and in no way lesser for failing to live up to an arbitrary standard. Rising to address an auditorium now saturated with light, both Touko and her character seem ready to embrace a new and earnest world. In the end, the only person who judged Touko for not being Mio was Touko herself.

The days following the play are a whirlwind for Touko, and a source of quiet anxiety for Yuu. Touko is immediately scouted by an acting troupe, and begins exhibiting greater independence as she embraces talents and passions outside of the script left by her departed sister. Through acting, Touko discovers something that’s truly “hers,” a source of pride and potential path forward beyond high school. Of course, all this new independence means she’s less dependent on Yuu – a shift Yuu accepts with as much grace as she can, while secretly fretting over the loss of their prior intimacy.

Yuu eventually presents her fear of “losing what she already has” to her sister, who offers a key lesson that can only come with age: whether or not you choose to change your relationships, those relationships will inevitably change over time. Though high school provides a significant measure of stability in people’s schedules and relationships, once you get out into the real world, you realize that nothing is truly stable given a long enough time frame. We must be willing to accept change, and thus we must be courageous in our approach to relationships with others, lest the only change we experience is our bonds stagnating and fading. It is unreasonable to fear losing what we have for a stark but undeniable reason: we will lose what we have eventually, and it is up to us to ensure it is replaced by something worth pursuing.

But in the heady rush of first love and emotional crucible of high school, it can be difficult to weather those changes with grace. Instilled with new confidence, this volume’s last scene sees Yuu confessing her genuine love, in a sequence whose deft paneling chains the audience to every nervous gesture and gasp of breath. A full page perspective shot draws us directly into Yuu’s position, making it easy to understand her when she interprets Touko’s “I’m sorry” as a rejection. Their situations have been neatly reversed: Touko believing in Yuu as a stable point, Yuu performing indifference out of fear of disappointing or losing Touko. And though Touko has now moved beyond her static position, her fear of love still bars her pursuit, driving one more rift between them.

Still, even though this scene ends tragically, it’s clear neither of our heroines will let this parting stand. As both the play and Yuu’s sister acknowledge, to truly love something is to know it will change, and that you will be there alongside it, loving it for growing just as you are growing too. Touko was chasing a stable fantasy, but stable fantasies cannot apply to living human beings. Both Yuu and Touko have changed significantly over the course of this narrative, but that need not mean their bond should be severed – rather, both of them have grown from a position of codependency to one of genuine love, where their fondness for each other exists alongside all the other riches and priorities of their lives. There is nothing shameful about reaching towards a happier self.

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