Bloom Into You
Bloom Into You is a Japanese yuri manga series written and illustrated by Nio Nakatani. The manga began serialization in the Japanese monthly shōnen manga magazine Dengeki Daioh on April 27, 2015, and ended on September 27, 2019. The story follows two female high school students, Yuu Koito and Touko Nanami, and the relationship that develops between them as they learn more about themselves through their experiences together.
Prior to creating Bloom Into You, Nakatani self-published various doujinshi works which featured girl-girl pairings of Touhou characters. Although she had not intended these works to be of the yuri genre, they were received as such by readers. This led her to be interested in producing a romance story featuring an unambiguous love between girls. A Dengeki Daioh editor approached Nakatani at a doujinshi convention, proposing that she draw a yuri series for the magazine, an offer which she accepted.
The manga was collected in eight tankōbon volumes that were first published in Japan between October 2015 and November 2019 by ASCII Media Works under the Dengeki Comics NEXT label. The volumes were later licensed for English release in North America by Seven Seas Entertainment, and were released between January 2017 and August 2020. An anime television series adaptation produced by Troyca and covering the first five volumes of the manga aired between October and December 2018. The anime is licensed in North America by Sentai Filmworks.
Plot
First-year high school student Yuu Koito unexpectedly receives a confession from a middle school classmate. Feeling that she does not understand love, she turns him down. She later sees second-year student council member Touko Nanami turning down a confession, and becomes convinced that Touko feels similarly about romance. She approaches Touko and the two begin to bond, before Touko suddenly confesses feelings for Yuu, surprising her. Although Yuu does not feel capable of reciprocating, Touko is not bothered by this and says she would be very happy if Yuu were to not return her feelings.Touko runs for the position of student council president and asks Yuu to be her campaign manager. To the dismay of Touko's best friend Sayaka Saeki, Yuu accepts the role. Touko expresses that she feels emotionally reliant on Yuu, as she is the only one to whom Touko can be vulnerable. Yuu decides to join the student council in order to support Touko, who ultimately wins the election.
As president, Touko plans to revive the student council play, which has not been performed in seven years. Yuu is against the idea, and chooses not to suggest her novelist friend Koyomi Kanou when the other members ask who could write it. Sayaka tells Yuu to solicit Koyomi's involvement, and to look into the student council president of seven years ago. Yuu subsequently learns that Touko's older sister Mio was the student council president at that time, and had been producing a play, but was killed in a traffic accident before its premiere. Yuu realizes that Touko is emulating her sister and wants to produce the play in her place. She tries to convince Touko that this is unnecessary, but Touko coldly refuses.
Koyomi finishes the first draft of the play. The narrative follows an amnesiac girl who must choose which person's view of her is her true self, with the original ending involving the girl choosing her lover's view. When the student council holds a study camp to practice for the play, actor Tomoyuki Ichigaya, a former classmate of Mio's, is brought in to help. From him, Touko learns that Mio was a very different person than who she is now, leaving her conflicted. Concerned, Yuu has Koyomi change the ending to have the protagonist choose to be herself instead of conforming to a specific person's view, believing that this will help Touko come to terms with herself. When the play is performed at the cultural festival, its narrative and Touko's performance are acclaimed by the audience, and the manager of a local theater troupe approaches Touko, asking her to join them and become an actress. She initially declines, but eventually reconsiders and accepts.
Touko thanks Yuu for her support and reiterates her wish for Yuu to stay with her as she is. However, Yuu has developed feelings for Touko, and abruptly confesses her love. She misinterprets Touko's shocked response as rejection and runs away, causing Touko to realize that she has been overly imposing. Meanwhile, Sayaka speaks with café owner Miyako Kodama, in whom she confides her own romantic feelings for Touko. When the second-years take a class trip to Kyoto, Sayaka formally confesses to Touko. Touko turns Sayaka down, acknowledging her love for Yuu. Although dejected, Sayaka accepts this. Elsewhere, Yuu realizes that she is running away from her problems. The two reconcile and Yuu finally openly reciprocates Touko's feelings.
Over time, Yuu and Touko become more emotionally and physically intimate with each other. This culminates when they go bowling together, with the agreement that whoever wins gets to make a request of the other. Yuu wins and asks to sleep over at Touko's house. Touko agrees, confessing she had wanted to arrange that as well. They spend the evening at Touko's parents' condo, where they have sex.
Three years later, Yuu and Touko have graduated high school, enrolled in college, and are now wearing rings on their fingers. They reunite with the former student council members to attend the cultural festival at their old high school. As Yuu and Touko reminisce about how their relationship started and reflect on their new lives as adults, they walk off into the night.
Characters
;Yuu Koito;Touko Nanami
;Sayaka Saeki
;Seiji Maki
;Suguru Doujima
;Koyomi Kanou
;Akari Hyuuga
;Riko Hakozaki
;Miyako Kodama
;Rei Koito
;Tomoyuki Ichigaya
;Chie Yuzuki
Production
Background
Prior to creating the series, Nio Nakatani was known primarily through her work on doujinshi, especially those based on the Touhou Project series. Because her works were primarily about relationships between girls, she gained a reputation as an author of yuri manga. This surprised Nakatani, as she had not intentionally set out to write yuri nor considered her works as such, saying that she primarily sought to depict complex human relationships that interested her. However, as she nonetheless was interested in the yuri genre, she became interested in drawing an unambiguous love story between girls.When Tatsuya Kusunoki, an editor of the manga magazine Dengeki Daioh approached Nakatani at a doujinshi convention, asking if she wanted to draw a yuri series for the magazine, Nakatani accepted the offer. Kusunoki stated that he had always enjoyed yuri manga and had wanted to produce one. He said that as Dengeki Daioh had not previously featured a similar girls' love story, such a proposal was not sure to be accepted. The editor-in-chief ultimately approved of the idea, which Kusunoki attributed to the publication's "open-minded" culture, as well as the magazine's financial resources.
In discussing her approach to the yuri genre, Nakatani expressed that while she liked romance stories, she was disappointed with narratives that paint a relationship as necessary to complete oneself emotionally, as it made her feel as if "something was wrong with me." Nakatani felt that same-sex romances often avoided this dichotomy, and that as she struggled to write a convincing heterosexual romance, she was more drawn towards creating manga about same-sex couples. While Nakatani had also drawn boys' love manga previously, she ultimately said that yuri was more interesting to her, as she wanted to draw cute girls. In one interview, she said that yuri was difficult to define, but that "once the reader thinks it is yuri, then at that moment it becomes yuri." In a conversation with Riddle Story of Devil creators Yun Kōga and Sunao Minakata, she concurred with Kōga's statement that yuri is about "girls getting involved with other girls," adding the qualification that it is "feelings between girls." She also cited the anime adaptation of Sound! Euphonium as an influence, saying it showed "everything I want to do in yuri."
Early development
Besides it being in the yuri genre, Nakatani had not decided on any story details before accepting Kusunoki's offer. She developed many ideas for different plots and characters, almost all of which were ultimately scrapped, except for Touko's character design. The editor-in-chief suggested a "secret love," which Nakatani noticed was common to the yuri genre in stories where the characters had to keep their same-sex relationship secret due to both being girls. Nakatani did not want to focus the narrative's attention on the social challenges of girl-girl relationships, as she felt it would be too simple and was more interested in exploring the characters' personal flaws. Thus, she thought of a twist on the idea, wherein rather than keeping their love secret from others, the drama would come from two girls keeping their love secret from each other. This became the impetus for what would become Yuu and Touko's romance story.Kusunoki proposed a "light and dark" yuri story to Nakatani, where a "dark" lead character would be in some way redeemed by the "light" character, as this was a dynamic seen in other yuri manga he had previously enjoyed. Touko was created first as the "dark" half of the pairing, while Yuu was made to fill the "light" role. Nakatani wanted Touko to be attractive but "troublesome," and designed her to appear superficially perfect, while in reality being a difficult person with deep emotional insecurities and self-hatred, who would confess her love but not wish to be reciprocated. From there, Nakatani developed Yuu as the type of girl who she imagined would be able to help and eventually come to love Touko.
Yuu was intended to visually and temperamentally contrast with Touko, as a deliberately cute girl with a deeper "cool" aspect. Her personality was written to be someone who would not feel happy about Touko's love but also not reject her, which led to her being created as a girl who desired romantic feelings but did not understand them. As they were planning the characters, Kusunoki and Nakatani asked others around them for stories about their experiences with romance. One woman said that she did not understand romantic feelings, and Nakatani based the manga's depiction of Yuu's emotions on her story. As Touko's role as the student council president was decided, Nakatani conceived Sayaka, Touko's friend in the student council, who would have an unrequited crush on Touko. Nakatani wanted Sayaka to come off as "extremely cool," and she was designed to contrast Touko's "lovable" image when standing beside her as her student council vice president and academic rival.
In devising the setting, Nakatani opted to set Bloom Into You in a co-ed school environment, as opposed to other yuri manga which often opted for all-girls school settings. This was because she felt that including male characters in whom Touko did not take any interest served to establish Touko's attraction to girls as a unique individual trait that set her apart from other girls shown in the story. Nakatani accounted for readers potentially expecting that Yuu or Touko would later end up in a heterosexual relationship, and thus introduced the male characters in ways which clearly precluded this possibility.
Maki, a major supporting male character who takes interest in Yuu's relationship with Touko and offers her advice, is depicted as not being interested in relationships for himself. He was intended as a foil to Yuu, as while he did not feel romantic feelings, he was happy despite not feeling them. This aspect of his character also served to preclude him as a potential romantic interest for Yuu or Touko. Nakatani included Maki to show that people could be fulfilled without romantic relationships. The anime's character designer, Hiroaki Gōda, felt that while he could not directly relate to the story's female cast, he identified with Maki's desire to watch Yuu and Touko's relationship develop. The adult lesbian couple of Riko and Miyako were introduced to suggest what Yuu and Touko's relationship would possibly become in the future. The designs of many of the central characters were all decided upon before the manga started its serialization.