Who is Furukawa Yui?
Sure, she’s an artificially-created body sent back in time to save Kaori. But that mission has made her far more than that. With each failed attempt that resets the timeline, she amasses more memories and feelings, becoming a more and more integral participant in the mission, rather than a simple observe-and-protect role.
Again and again the universe finds a way to kill Kaori, and Yui feels close to a solution that’s an intricate balance of intricate planning and limited intervention. But working alone without the ability to ask for help from anyone else (for obvious reason) put her at an instant disadvantage against the universe, and it doesn’t play down to its opponent.
Yui even has time against her. While she’s been able to go back a great number of times (dozens? thousands?), going back has very real consequences. More and more of her afterimages appear, stirring up rumors of ghosts, while anyone who comes in contact with them falls into a coma and never wakes up, a “syndrome” that is probably their consciousness being sucked into a different timeline. Yikes!
After seeing how hard the rest of the Astronomy Club and a haunted Sou in particular worked to make Yui’s mission possible last week, this week did everything from her perspective, and really made a case for just how difficult juggling the cumulative variables has become for her, including one variable that has nothing to do with temporarl oscillations or runaway buses.
That variable is love. Her love for Sou, in particular. Remember that Yui was originally a prototype for a body that would hold Kaori’s consciousness, freeing her from the body the accident had destroyed. I maintain that some if not most of Kaori either transferred or copied to Yui unbeknownst to Sou or the others.
If that’s the case, the love triangle of Yui, Kaori, and Sou is really a triangle of two different Kaoris and Sou; one more complication in what’s looking like a mission that was doomed from the start.
At the same time, Yui can’t be passed off as a mere copy or knockoff of Kaori any more than she can be dismissed (or dismiss herself) as a tool; not after everything she’s been through. All of those trips, all of those wonderful memories she has with Sou and the others before Kaori dies, keep building up, and each time she touches The Box they all come surging back.
Sou may only be joking when he says Yui is like “an old woman” for sitting out in the sun, but perhaps she is very old indeed, in terms of her life experience and the amount of cumulative time and happiness she’s spent with Sou (none of which he could possibly know about).
Right now, with time running out, Yui believes the only way to Kaori is if Sou loves her. Each time we’ve seen her die was before he could properly respond to her, so there’s something to that. But Yui may be overlooking something, because to her this is a Mission and she’s an expendable element.
Maybe the only real way to save Kaori is for Yui to let herself love Sou. If there’s a part Kaori in her consciousness, the clashing of that part with the Kaori in the past could be what’s triggering the latter Kaori’s death, as if time and the universe were correcting the paradox of two girls with identical love for Sou.
I’ll admit I may be a bit free-wheeling (and way off!) in my theories and analysis here, but I love how this show really gets the ol’ noggin churning, which can’t be a bad thing!
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“Sure, she’s an artificially-created body sent back in time to save Kaori. But that mission has made her far more than that. With each failed attempt that resets the timeline, she amasses more memories and feelings, becoming a more and more integral participant in the mission, rather than a simple observe-and-protect role.
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I personally think this should have been the main emphasis of Ushina post episode 1, rather than 7 episodes of largely slice of life, an Episode 9 second failure, and a Episode 10 info dump of what I suspect is a montage of every story route and ending in the VN.
They could have compressed episode 2- 9 into two-three episodes focusing on the most plot relevant points and events. Kaori dies again in Episode 3 or 4, and the next episode adapts what Episode 9 demonstrated to us. Then, each subsequent batch of episodes would have Yui increasingly finding her own ego and self, as she fails in her mission, time-line after time-line, despite beginning to rigorously test what works and what doesn’t after the second or third failure. Each episode or two could have been devoted to one of the methods used, and one of the slice-of-life events we had in Episode 2-9 that was most relevant for that strategy.
And then, the Syndrome occurs in Episode 8-9 with increasing frequency (ie: time is running out, people are being put to sleep forever, the time-lines appear to be falling apart) and then, in Episode 10 focuses on how a Yui that has developed her own ego produced radical divergences in Kaori’s response, leading to the point we are at now.
Instead, what we got was a very, very rushed episode that basically sped through Yui’s character development.
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