Talk:Takako Sugiura/@comment-397235-20140621044642

Reminiscing about middle and high school with a friend of mine an hour ago, I realized why I kind of like Takako, and why I felt bad when she died. She reminds me very, very, very strongly of one of my sort-of friends I've known since I was ten.

Both Takako and my friend have glasses. They both have very, very strong female friends who are the center of a popular group. Neither one talks very much. Neither one has very many friends. They spend a lot of time glaring at people (the girl I went to school with hated my best friend for reasons we're still baffled by; in high school she'd go off on me for no discernible reason). Both are more than a little unstable and potentially violent. They could both be somewhat pretty if they smiled every once in a while.

I mean, a lot of the characters in this show are very readily identifiable to anyone who remembers public schools (I knew several guys who had personalities like Naoya, there's always at least one Izumi in any grade, I was basically Tomohiko aside from the homicidal part, I think I dated Aya and Yumi both [although those two did not like each other, something I bare partial blame for], there was always the quiet girl who read, like Sayuri, there's the quiet guy who girls find cute like Yuuya [though the guy in my class, who was a friend of mine, didn't look like a girl]). My best friend and another close friend of mine have basically the same backstory as Tomohiko and Naoya (they've known each other since preschool; my best friend in kindergarten through tenth grade lived down the street from me).

It's crazy how universal some of these characters are: people who exist in a fictional Japanese high school in the late nineties dovetail perfectly with people at a real American high school in 2008 (the irony of that is not lost on me either; I'm writing a story right now set in that year as a partial reference to this series and partially because unlike 98 I actually remember that year).

I think I've overthinking this and should go to bed now...