More thoughts on Otherside Picnic vol 8
This post was originally posted on the website cohost around the end of September 2024, as a followup to this poem to explore some more facets of Otherside Picnic volume 8. Some of my notes then snowballed into this gigantic essay instead.
Spoilers below for volume 8 of the Otherside Picnic novels.
On the translation
As opening thoughts, I need to start with a small paragraph praising Sean McCann for the fluidity of the translation. Truly, the characters have found their English voices so well throughout the volumes, and it has been a delight to witness them talk with Sorawo at length in this one, in such fitting ways. Of course, part of it is strong character writing to begin with; but I measure how much that can be lost or ring hollow depending on the translation. Here, it all just felt wonderful to read.
For some reason, as trivia, the first thing that comes to mind with this volume is Kozakura saying "I can finally treat these two like a couple". I don't know. It just feels very natural. I can hear her groan.
I'm crossing my fingers so much that if the series ever becomes available in French, it's translated well - this can really make or break a fiction, and I'd be deeply hurt if it ends up being unsatisfying in my native language.
On fear, and Toriko
Before I started this eighth volume, I was inexplicably afraid - incapable of guessing how the relationship between Sorawo and Toriko would go, how it would all unfold, and scared of whether that arc would end satisfactorily.
Back when I read volume 7, and before that too but particularly with volume 7, I remember searching "read Otherside Picnic" all over the Internet, in case someone had listed very compelling reasons to do so that I could readily send to all my friends. I thought it was masterfully written (the date! the buildup toward the confrontation with Satsuki! all of them having to let go of their attachments to her! the unexpectedly profound closure epilogue on Kozakura!) and I wanted other people to experience it, too; to witness the series' charm before that and live this incredible climax just as I did.
But still, I was afraid of volume 8.
It could have been ok, it could have been great, but it could also have been deep in the "still skirting consent issues in ways that make me uneasy" zone, as some moments before it have been somewhat.
You know, funnily enough, as I write this I realize that... I think I was afraid of Toriko.
It may be because I've always perceived Sorawo as a person more than a character, and seen Toriko as worryingly sidestepping her consent a few times, without ever showing any care about that (and that's not even not counting the bits that are in that weird territory between slapstick comedy and domestic abuse).
She is still not entirely off the hook - she explicitly kisses Sorawo without consent around the end of File 26, and I'm a bit iffy about how their first sex scene goes too, and it all makes me flinch a bit still. Yet, her addressing their few kisses where she initiated, and her obvious care around Sorawo's trauma, still go a long way to show she tries. More than ever, it feels like she is coming into her own character - unsurprisingly, as it is the second time after File 17 where Sorawo actually takes interest in her life - and she can really be more attentive and adaptable to Sorawo's needs than I thought.
Overall, their long conversation in that last File really made me more at ease around her, and I think I needed that; and now I can really start believing in those two functioning together.
I think this is one of the reasons why the end of volume 8 made me particularly giddy: I am tremendously relieved, and happy, to have witnessed the leads find each other at a common interface.
After so much time wishing them something healthy... at last, with this volume, I trust that they can find that. Whichever form it takes.
On relationships
"Accomplices No More" felt daunting, terrifying - full of possibilities as a title. My best guess, my wrong guess, constructed from expectations built from all the previous volumes and that I want to analyse deeper in a (much) longer upcoming essay, was that something would happen to Toriko. She would transform, or disappear; and Sorawo, by going after her, would realize her repressed feelings then.
This would have mirrored, in some sense, File 4 (or File 11 the other way around, as it really feels like this is what Toriko goes through then).
As File 24 started to unfold - and Benimori to ascend to MVP in my head in one single in-depth conversation - I started fostering hopes about the rest of the volume discussing romance in greater details. There are some fascinating discussions on what love is in a few yuri, like around the end of Bloom Into You or mainly the first arc of Whisper Me a Love Song, and it would have felt fitting with Sorawo.
And yet, from this I was expecting some kind of "love can take different forms" and the story embracing a kind of romance still, as the above titles do.
(Not that it's a bad thing. It's really important for these stories to exist, too.)
But this-- this was even rawer, in so many ways I didn't see coming. By giving us and its protagonist tools to understand and reject the social framing and labeling of relationships in very organic ways, then by making us live this in first person so viscerally, this volume ended up as not exactly a romance. By doing so, it hit me with a level of reflection on relationships that I didn't think I would ever witness in fiction.
Instead of whatever I had thought, I got the split model of attraction, blurry greyaroace feelings, long relationship talks, communication through found common interfaces, and a glimpse of something insanely beautiful.
Instead of all that I had feared, this fiction looked me in the eye and said:
"Fluid relationships are ok, actually"
and ventured into something uncategorized,
into something new.