With You, Our Love Will Make it Through

Episode 12

I have very mixed feelings about this finale. While it does do a lot of things right, there is a part of me that also feels like it really skimmed on some meaty material that was just lying there, ready to have teeth sunk into it. This episode is all about Tsunagu wrestling with whether or not he should take the safe approach to handling a complicated situation or if he should go in guns blazing with his emotions. I do like the resolution to Tsunagu and Mari's character arc. As difficult as this situation was, it gave them the final push they needed to display their relationship out in the open, which ended up becoming the right answer. This doesn't mean that everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows, but the image of them just walking through the school holding hands already puts a lot of people's emotions at ease. The irony is that they were afraid to showcase the relationship because of uneasy tensions between humans and beast folk, but their relationship itself ended up alleviating a lot of tension.

I'm glad that the newspaper kid got some kind of punishment for illegally recording students. I do find it interesting that initially, he kept trying to push the fact that Tsunagu assaulted Mari, almost as if that situation would've absolved him of illegally recording students at the school. Then again, I have met people who are brazenly stupid like that, so I can't say it's unrealistic. However, I'm not sure what the message of the meeting was supposed to be. Tsunagu comments on whether or not this kid wants to be a beast folk himself and goes into the history between the beast folk and humans. The show has always been very vague about the history between these two different living creatures, so to pull it out like it's a thematic silver bullet feels very weird. But that sort of gets into my problem with the finale and the entire show as a whole. While the emotional crux of the characters and the tender moments are incredibly well done, I don't think the show really knew what it wanted to do with its setting at all.

I keep hearing lines about how different beast folk and humans are, but I feel like I didn't actually get to see a lot of that throughout the course of the show. The show even tones down the pheromone physical attraction thing that acted as the show's inciting incident by the second half. I saw a lot of murmurs from people being scared or unsettled by beast folk, but I didn't really see a lot of examples of beast folk outside of Tsunagu and Kisara, who barely talk about how they feel about situations like this. In fact, Tsunagu standing up for his emotions is the conclusion of his character, but that came at the cost of my not getting to really see what he is struggling with throughout the show.

It also doesn't help that Tsunagu is a unique beast folk in general with a human mother. I can make so many jokes about the fact that his mom just looks like a grown-up Mari, and maybe there's a lot of maternal cravings going on there. But the fact that this is the episode where I find out the most about his mom and how it is never really brought up that she is overseeing a case involving her son and a human teenager when she herself was in that very same situation feels really odd. That should be talked about more, shouldn't it? But it's not, and that's my biggest problem with the show.

Maybe you could argue that I'm looking for things the show isn't interested in, but the show clearly is interested in these ideas because it keeps bringing them up. I guess the message of the show is that love triumphs over all, despite prejudice, but so many edges of the show have been shaved off with each passing episode to the point where I feel like I'm left with nothing to really think about. Even the love triangle, which I wasn't even that invested in, just sort of fizzles out by the end because it's implied that Yukihiro and Kisara are going to have a relationship in a potential future season.

This finale introduced some kind of stakes and then resolved them as quickly as they were brought up. I am interested in season two and how the public would actually react to a relationship between Tsunagu and Mari. I also want to know if the series actually follows through on them actually sleeping together like that final joke from Tsunagu at the end. But if we do get another season, I hope it's actually about something because now that arguably the biggest emotional issue of the show has been resolved, I wonder what else it has left to say.

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With You, Our Love Will Make it Through is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.