I only started watching Sound! Euphonium a few months ago, just before the third season started to come out. I came into this because I recently rewatched A Silent Voice, and it clawed its way into my brain so heavily that I found myself needing to watch the rest of the media that Yamada has had a hand in creating. This led me to wanting to watch Liz and the Blue Bird. I know that you can watch that movie on its own, but I decided it would be nice to watch the source material first.

And man, am I glad I did! I absolutely adored everything about the show, including the third season, up until Episode 12, where my feelings start to become a bit more murky and complex.

To me, the show has this incredible sense of tension that was almost baked into its very core. Every line of dialogue feels like it's pulling you in two different directions, and the characters feel that tension, and respond in key, as they twist and turn and try to understand the way that they all fit together with one another. It's all very complex and messy and hard to understand, just like real life is, especially for teenagers. The way that it depicts the college admission process in Japan and the pressure that puts on students to abandon their passions, or the problems of seniority and respect, or unrequited love, just feel so weighty and have this power to just stick with you long after you hear Kumiko reassure you that, yes, the next piece will begin.

Unlike many, I really did enjoy the majority of Season 3. I thought that the pacing was perhaps a bit fast, and I would have enjoyed seeing the performances and the emotions that they were laden with portrayed on screen, but I thought that Kumiko moving fully into her position as a leader and a caregiver fit her arc perfectly. It also rang very close to home for me. I had intense social anxiety while I was in high school and only began to shake that off in my final year, and like Kumiko, I gradually found my confidence over the years, until I finally became the president of a couple clubs. It was that progress that sprang me into being an RA in college, a position where I blossomed and tried to help others do the same. I originally guessed that Kumiko might decide to became a music therapist, but becoming a teacher was another fitting path forward for her.

I also don't buy into the argument that Taki suddenly became useless. I think that he recognized the leadership in his students and, as much as possible, wanted to give them the room to grow into the position. To me, that is the role of a phenomenal advisor: to recognize the potential of one's students, and then to provide them the support they need to find their own strength. We see this play out multiple times throughout the season in the private conversations between Kumiko and Taki. He acknowledges the difficult choices he has to make, and has made, almost as if he's questioning her. "Are you sure you want to do this?" He knows, and he wants to see her find the confidence to recognize her own potential. Kumiko realizes what she wants to be largely because of the responsibility Taki gives to her.

I did mention that Episode 12 lost me. I'm still not absolutely sure how I feel about Kumiko losing the soli. On the one hand, there is a poetic beauty to it that echoes a core theme of the show. Sometimes, no matter how hard you might try, things don't end in a clean way, and you're going to be left to pick up whatever pieces are left in the aftermath of that loss. We saw it in their first year, and even more in their second, when it seemed to obvious they'd get silver, only to not even make it to nationals. Shuuichi, as much of a side character as I think he is in the anime, experiences this with Kumiko, and Kumiko with Asuka, and Yuuko with Kaori, and Kaori with Asuka, and so and so on. But on the other hand, it is also a piece of fiction. One that drips with this intense tension and reality, yes, but one in which that beautiful tension really makes me root for and absolutely adore the characters and wish only the best for them. I so desperately wanted Kumiko and Reina to have that moment together, that perfect solidification and "next step" of their connection. I wanted to see them perform together on the national stage, dangit! That was what the whole season was building up to!

I won't lie and say that it didn't make me cry, or that I didn't love it and hate it at the same time. I'm left with this muddled mess of feelings, which is, perhaps, part of the point. Maybe I wouldn't feel so sour about it if other things had worked out differently.

And on that point, let's talk about Reina and Oumae. I firmly and fully believe that if you don't see the clear, obvious romantic tension between the two of them throughout the entire series, perhaps most prominently in this season, that you are either intentionally and maliciously ignoring it, or are just a very, very dense viewer when it comes to romance.

The obvious connection between them is part of what drew me in. I wasn't around when all of the conversations around the show being yuribait were aflame online. Going into the series, my only knowledge of it was of Liz and the Blue Bird's trailer. I actually thought the show would focus on Mizore and Nozomi and that we'd see the clear romantic relationship between them grow. Instead, we got Kumiko, Reina, Midori, and Hazuki as our main big four.

Once I realized that, I had no idea what the show was going to be about. Despite that, after a couple episodes, it became so obvious to me that the two had something. It was a foregone conclusion to me. The absolute TENSION that lingers between the two is palpable, and yet, you feel some unseen force, some thread of fate (as it's literally displayed in the show) that binds them together and is being gradually, little by little, pulled closer together through their own stories of growth. Time and time again, KyoAni devoted immense amounts of effort and budget into creating these jaw-droppingly beautiful scenes between Reina and Oumae. They confess their love for one another, establish death pacts, build hopes of being together forever, cling their hands together, play songs that speak of burgeoning love... like come on, man! You're telling me that you don't see that?

I've watched plenty of anime. I know that real yuri is a rarity. It's very funny to point and laugh at how I "fell for the bait", that I should "know better; it's anime", but what's so frustrating about this is that it was INCREDIBLY WELL WRITTEN! Romance was not the focus of this series, and yet, it managed to depict the burgeoning, awkward relationship between two women who love women in a way that was more nuanced and realistic than most explicitly lesbian media in the world. Let me explain a bit.

Oumae clearly has no interest in Shuuichi, but he persists, and the two end up together for a short time. Even in that short period, you can feel the tension between the two of them, the way that Oumae doesn't want to take it any further. She literally stops him from kissing her! That's such a classic burgeoning gay act, when you finally get presented with the reality of a hetero relationship and freeze up. Some part of you that you don't comprehend realizes that this isn't what you really want. They break up shortly after. Her excuse is that she's busy, which has some truth to it, but it's very easy to instead read it as a moment of realization that she really does have no feeling for men, or at least isn't sure how she feels about them.

Contrast that to her moments with Reina. The hikes up to the top of the mountain, the raw emotions she feels at the moments of betrayal, whether they be accusations of her being a bad president or the simple act of Reina not waiting up for her after band. The way she freezes up when Reina traces a finger down her lips and confesses her love on that warm, summer night. It's just night and day.

Another common refrain is that Reina's affection for Taki should have made it clear that it would never have worked out. If only. As I watched the show, I never interpreted Reina's affection for Taki as anything other than the puppy love of a young high schooler, built when she was literally a young child who was just starting to understand how her romantic feelings worked. Affection for someone older than them who seems to have this confusing world figured out is also very common in gay youth, especially when that relationship is, at least on the surface, hetero and "acceptable".

I fully expected Reina to grow past this, as she began to recognize her feelings for Oumae. It actually felt like this was happening! I can't even recall her affection for Taki being mentioned in the season, save for the tension it wrought on Oumae and Reina's relationship when Oumae doubted Taki's decision. That, too, I found beautiful and poignant. Reina holding onto this last shred of her love for Taki, even as she's beginning to doubt Taki because his choices have begun to hurt Oumae, who she cares so much about. Rather than recognizing her feelings for Oumae and realizing that her infatuation with Taki is childish, she refuses and doubles down, something that's very common in both media and real life. She lashes out at Oumae, inflicting her own inner frustration and doubt on the person who is shaking up her world.

All of it, and more, and more, and more, just feel so incredibly relatable as a person who, much like many gay folks, grew up closeted, but slowly began to realize their gayness in their high school years.

And that's why this season leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For the past three seasons, alongside movies and OVAs, we saw this beautifully constructed, complex romance building, and building, and building, and then it just... vanishes. Reina falls back into her stupid, unrealistic affection for Taki that, as an almost adult, she should have grown out of. Oumae fails to confess her feelings, despite her arc of coming to understand herself and her own growing confidence finally reaching a beautiful crescendo. We don't even get to see them say goodbye, or see them interact as adults. Instead, we're left with this massive gap between them, a literal physical and emotional distance that feels so contrary to the insane intimacy they've built up over the last 3 years of school. Again, looping back to the core theme of messy endings, we could argue this was intentional. Maybe it's truly brilliant writing. But that doesn't mean that it can't leave me, a gay enby who was in love with the nuanced, sapphic relationship between Reina and Oumae, very disappointed.

Now, I can already hear a certain group of people coming out of the woodworks shouting that this anime isn't about romance. And to that, I have to ask whether we watched the same show? While I'll agree that this isn't a romance anime, it is one that focuses on the connections between people and how they shift, change, and grow over time, and many of those connections are either dripping with romantic subtext or are outright explicitly romantic. We have an explicit romance between Hazuki and Shuuichi, between Gotou and Riko, and Shuuichi and Oumae. There's also the romance between Reina and Taki which, while one-sided, does serve as a major point of tension throughout the whole series. And then there are so, so many more that aren't outright thrown in our face, but which are heavily implied. Kaori and Asuka, Oumae and Asuke, Yuuko and Kaori, Natsuki and Yuuko, Mizore and Nozomi, Kanade and Oumae, Motomu and Midori, and so on. Moments between these characters oftentimes drip with romantic subtext, and I think ignoring that subtext ends up ridding the show's relationships of a lot of nuance. Yes, it's not a romance anime, but romance is incredibly important to the show.

Where does this leave me? Disappointed, of course, and a bit empty. I full heartedly believe that, had they stuck the landing and let Reina and Oumae develop an explicit romantic connection, this would have become one of the most realistic, well-portrayed depictions of adolescent sapphic love, period, all while also focusing on other important themes of growth and coming of age. Yes, I know it wouldn't jive with the novels, but the anime is already far and away in its own canon after all the changes KyoAni made. Why not take it a step further? The author has stated she would have been fine with it, so why not? I don't know. Perhaps it was always the plan for it to be like this, or maybe it was a set of upper level management decisions that stopped it from going forward. Much of the final episode does feel a bit hack-sawed together, in my eyes, so it wouldn't be the craziest theory.

Putting rampant speculation about why aside, I hate that such a beautifully crafted house of cards came crumbling down at the very end. While Oumae becoming a confident teacher is an incredible end to her arc, it could have been so much more. The concert, in large part because of the decision to have Oumae not perform the soli, felt far less meaningful. Our final moments with most of the characters are fleeting and, in many cases, non-existent. It all felt so... rushed. Again, that may have been an intentional choice, meant to mirror the way that time can pass us by in an instant as things come to an end. But, as a viewer who cares so much about all of the beautiful characters in this show, many of these pacing and story issues left a bad taste in my mouth.

It's hard for me to recommend a show when I know that it's ending falls flat. There's beauty in the journey, of course, but also so much sorrow when that journey ends with a flop rather than a bang. In this case, while I personally dislike most of the ending quite heavily, I think I would still recommend the series as a whole. There is so much beauty and depth to be found along the way, and a poor conclusion doesn't ruin that, even if it might taper some of its beauty.

Here's to hoping that this isn't the end of Sound! Euphonium, and that, maybe, the pieces can be picked up and built into something even more beautiful. :)