![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hibike! euphonium came out in 2015. i was in high school then.
at that point in my life, band had been a pretty central core of my life, give or take four years or so at that point since i had started in middle school. i wasn’t very good at my instrument (im still not tbh), not like my peers, but i enjoyed playing it. i was a flutist, because my cousins are flutists. i also played piano concurrently at the time, but i remember wanting to be a violinist originally. the only reason i didn’t was because my parents couldn’t afford to buy a violin for me, and i didn’t know renting out an instrument was possible. but lessons would have been expensive anyways. so i didn’t. kind of like kumiko, when she picked up the euphonium, just kind of randomly after not being able to play her chosen instrument (but in all honesty, i might be misremembering that detail, it’s been a while since i last watched hibike in its entirety).
there was something special about hibike, back then. i mean, it’s still special now, but there was something about going through the motions of what the characters were going through, in the nature of an ensemble, trying to sift through the weirdness of life as a teenager. like, balancing family, then your potential future, your grades, your practice, your interpersonal relationships - all of that, i was doing in real-time as i watched hibike euphonium. it’s a special kind of experience, i think. to be seen, down to the very niche of it all. to be absolutely enamored by a girl in the same ensemble as you, to have that weird upperclassman you have grown so fond of, that you admired, only to blink one day and find yourself in their position. and it’s only until you’re in the shoes they left behind do you realize that, wow. they really didn’t know anything, either.
i poured every experience i went through in high school into my hibike stories. there’s a part of me in every story, in every cringe line, in every something or other. i think the most apparent is in Finding You. i remember someone comparing the personification of emotions as a reference to Inside Out, but in reality, i was inspired by some short story i read online. i’ve searched desperately to find it, but i have literally no idea where it is. it was about a woman who sits in the empty apartment she once shared with her lover, talking to each of her emotions until Love walks through the door. i think the woman says something about, “i’ve been waiting for you.” and Love says, “i’ve always been here.” something profound like that, i think. i remember feeling very touched and inspired by that, because i had gone through so many experiences like that during high school. and i thought, eh, why not write it with kumiko and reina?
(i was also very inspired by heather cubed HAHAHAHA god that story was so good)
in hindsight, i probably would have written that story differently now. i ended Finding You with kumiko forgiving reina for leaving suddenly and wanting to start over. but realistically, if i were in her position, i wouldn’t have. but high school me desperately wanted a happy ending because i didn’t quite get one. so i gave kumiko and reina one.
i entered college, graduated, and now im in grad school. i fell out of writing during 2018, then came back into it with a vengeance some time in 2020 i think, when i started writing for hololive. but i remember during that rut, it felt like nothing i was writing was ever good enough. even now, i find myself in a similar situation. i had a few stories for a few fandoms, but they never took off. they’re decomposed skeletons in my google drive. school is hard. life is hard. writing amidst the everything is even harder.
but i remember the easiest story that came to me was a kumirei story. i just had an idea, a vibe, and i went with it. and it came so easily. just a short story, called silent love, about kumiko and reina sitting on mount daikichi and a snippet of intimacy between them. in a moment of turmoil in my life, where i was so unsatisfied with everything i was doing, i felt an incredible amount of peace just writing that one story. maybe this is what people mean when they say they have a comfort ship. kumirei is my comfort ship.
or maybe hibike is just my comfort fandom. everything just comes easy. a break from it all.
—
i didn’t watch liz and the blue bird when it first came out. i fell out of anime and stuff because i’ve gotten so busy with life. there’s only a few that i watched to completion in recent years. because of that, admittedly, i didn’t feel the need to. until recently, when on a whim, i watched it with a friend.
and wow. it felt like falling in love, all over again.
the music. the setting. the direction. the characters. all of it felt like a dream. because suddenly, im back in high school. it’s my senior year. im at the threshold of adulthood, or what i think adulthood should be like. im applying for college. im making memories with the people around me. im creating preemptive goodbyes in my head, because i knew one day, all of this will be gone.
i wanted to write a story that felt like that. i hope i did.
—
this is more of a nitty-gritty(?) of why i wrote the story the way i did. in the first, what, six or so sections? i wrote the dialogue sequences in the middle, italicized, because i wanted it to feel like it was a dream. like a flashcut or something, if you were to imagine it as an anime. i was inspired by lorelei and the laser eyes, a game who shared dialogue through snappy cuts and cryptic messages. i hope it conveyed that vibe, haha. for the last part of the story, where nozomi and mizore are talking on the rooftop, i formatted it “normally” - because it’s thought that this is kind of like, where they’re actually talking with each other. being actively in the present instead of storing it as a memory. just there here, the now of it all.
i settled on titling the story a round, kind of as a play on words. the first reason is because it always feels like mizore and nozomi have always been in each other’s orbit. even when they were apart, i’d like to think that nozomi lived in mizore’s mind, constantly. ever there, ever present. haunting her. also, the structure kind of also felt kind of cyclical, with starting then ending with a kiss, similar themes in recurring conversations, things like that.
in musical terms, a round is when a single melody is played a few beats or measures apart by two or more people. it kind of feels like someone is trailing after the other. i thought it was kind of fitting here’s an example: row row row your boat
the constant recurrence of spring as a metaphor was entirely accidental, mostly because im not creative; but i’d like to think my subconscious had the idea spring is both a marker of the beginning and the end, especially in the japanese school year. but yeah. entirely coincidental HAHAHAH
them being likened to bluebirds also feels like a gimmie because [gestures to the title of the film they star in]. but i also wanted to convey by showing how, at one point or another during the relationship, they have both been liz and the blue bird. i think the most apparent is that mizore was liz and nozomi was the blue bird, but then at the end, it kind of flips. there’s kind of a huge time skip near the end of the story because that’s where the events of the movie is supposed to take place. but it’s been a bit since i watched it, but oh well! we make do.
i wanted to end the story kind of ambiguously. i mean, clearly it’s the end of this chapter of their lives (and this story), but where they go from there can be left up to reader interpretation. personally, i feel like they come back to each other. they always do. always in each other’s orbit.
as i was thinking about this story, i thought to myself multiple times, “well, if liz lets the blue bird go, can’t the blue bird just come by to visit any time?” and i think that’s the whole point of the narrative. it’s not about letting go forever. it’s about giving them the choice to come back. because, as they say, if you love something, you let it go.
and if it was meant to be, it’ll come back.
—
thank you for reading.
and just like kumiko, i was in band
at that point in my life, band had been a pretty central core of my life, give or take four years or so at that point since i had started in middle school. i wasn’t very good at my instrument (im still not tbh), not like my peers, but i enjoyed playing it. i was a flutist, because my cousins are flutists. i also played piano concurrently at the time, but i remember wanting to be a violinist originally. the only reason i didn’t was because my parents couldn’t afford to buy a violin for me, and i didn’t know renting out an instrument was possible. but lessons would have been expensive anyways. so i didn’t. kind of like kumiko, when she picked up the euphonium, just kind of randomly after not being able to play her chosen instrument (but in all honesty, i might be misremembering that detail, it’s been a while since i last watched hibike in its entirety).
there was something special about hibike, back then. i mean, it’s still special now, but there was something about going through the motions of what the characters were going through, in the nature of an ensemble, trying to sift through the weirdness of life as a teenager. like, balancing family, then your potential future, your grades, your practice, your interpersonal relationships - all of that, i was doing in real-time as i watched hibike euphonium. it’s a special kind of experience, i think. to be seen, down to the very niche of it all. to be absolutely enamored by a girl in the same ensemble as you, to have that weird upperclassman you have grown so fond of, that you admired, only to blink one day and find yourself in their position. and it’s only until you’re in the shoes they left behind do you realize that, wow. they really didn’t know anything, either.
i poured every experience i went through in high school into my hibike stories. there’s a part of me in every story, in every cringe line, in every something or other. i think the most apparent is in Finding You. i remember someone comparing the personification of emotions as a reference to Inside Out, but in reality, i was inspired by some short story i read online. i’ve searched desperately to find it, but i have literally no idea where it is. it was about a woman who sits in the empty apartment she once shared with her lover, talking to each of her emotions until Love walks through the door. i think the woman says something about, “i’ve been waiting for you.” and Love says, “i’ve always been here.” something profound like that, i think. i remember feeling very touched and inspired by that, because i had gone through so many experiences like that during high school. and i thought, eh, why not write it with kumiko and reina?
(i was also very inspired by heather cubed HAHAHAHA god that story was so good)
in hindsight, i probably would have written that story differently now. i ended Finding You with kumiko forgiving reina for leaving suddenly and wanting to start over. but realistically, if i were in her position, i wouldn’t have. but high school me desperately wanted a happy ending because i didn’t quite get one. so i gave kumiko and reina one.
i entered college, graduated, and now im in grad school. i fell out of writing during 2018, then came back into it with a vengeance some time in 2020 i think, when i started writing for hololive. but i remember during that rut, it felt like nothing i was writing was ever good enough. even now, i find myself in a similar situation. i had a few stories for a few fandoms, but they never took off. they’re decomposed skeletons in my google drive. school is hard. life is hard. writing amidst the everything is even harder.
but i remember the easiest story that came to me was a kumirei story. i just had an idea, a vibe, and i went with it. and it came so easily. just a short story, called silent love, about kumiko and reina sitting on mount daikichi and a snippet of intimacy between them. in a moment of turmoil in my life, where i was so unsatisfied with everything i was doing, i felt an incredible amount of peace just writing that one story. maybe this is what people mean when they say they have a comfort ship. kumirei is my comfort ship.
or maybe hibike is just my comfort fandom. everything just comes easy. a break from it all.
—
i didn’t watch liz and the blue bird when it first came out. i fell out of anime and stuff because i’ve gotten so busy with life. there’s only a few that i watched to completion in recent years. because of that, admittedly, i didn’t feel the need to. until recently, when on a whim, i watched it with a friend.
and wow. it felt like falling in love, all over again.
the music. the setting. the direction. the characters. all of it felt like a dream. because suddenly, im back in high school. it’s my senior year. im at the threshold of adulthood, or what i think adulthood should be like. im applying for college. im making memories with the people around me. im creating preemptive goodbyes in my head, because i knew one day, all of this will be gone.
i wanted to write a story that felt like that. i hope i did.
—
this is more of a nitty-gritty(?) of why i wrote the story the way i did. in the first, what, six or so sections? i wrote the dialogue sequences in the middle, italicized, because i wanted it to feel like it was a dream. like a flashcut or something, if you were to imagine it as an anime. i was inspired by lorelei and the laser eyes, a game who shared dialogue through snappy cuts and cryptic messages. i hope it conveyed that vibe, haha. for the last part of the story, where nozomi and mizore are talking on the rooftop, i formatted it “normally” - because it’s thought that this is kind of like, where they’re actually talking with each other. being actively in the present instead of storing it as a memory. just there here, the now of it all.
i settled on titling the story a round, kind of as a play on words. the first reason is because it always feels like mizore and nozomi have always been in each other’s orbit. even when they were apart, i’d like to think that nozomi lived in mizore’s mind, constantly. ever there, ever present. haunting her. also, the structure kind of also felt kind of cyclical, with starting then ending with a kiss, similar themes in recurring conversations, things like that.
in musical terms, a round is when a single melody is played a few beats or measures apart by two or more people. it kind of feels like someone is trailing after the other. i thought it was kind of fitting here’s an example: row row row your boat
the constant recurrence of spring as a metaphor was entirely accidental, mostly because im not creative; but i’d like to think my subconscious had the idea spring is both a marker of the beginning and the end, especially in the japanese school year. but yeah. entirely coincidental HAHAHAH
them being likened to bluebirds also feels like a gimmie because [gestures to the title of the film they star in]. but i also wanted to convey by showing how, at one point or another during the relationship, they have both been liz and the blue bird. i think the most apparent is that mizore was liz and nozomi was the blue bird, but then at the end, it kind of flips. there’s kind of a huge time skip near the end of the story because that’s where the events of the movie is supposed to take place. but it’s been a bit since i watched it, but oh well! we make do.
i wanted to end the story kind of ambiguously. i mean, clearly it’s the end of this chapter of their lives (and this story), but where they go from there can be left up to reader interpretation. personally, i feel like they come back to each other. they always do. always in each other’s orbit.
as i was thinking about this story, i thought to myself multiple times, “well, if liz lets the blue bird go, can’t the blue bird just come by to visit any time?” and i think that’s the whole point of the narrative. it’s not about letting go forever. it’s about giving them the choice to come back. because, as they say, if you love something, you let it go.
and if it was meant to be, it’ll come back.
—
thank you for reading.
