We’ll probably only be together as far as the ground.

※This article is a repost of an article originally published about 5 years ago.

　December Without an Angel had a shockingly huge impact on my life. It made me blurt out—half joking, half serious—“It’s okay to make every bishoujo game heroine mentally unstable!” with the same reckless energy as “Gunpla is freedom!”

　I’ve talked about this many times, but among them all, the heroine Yukio Sumadera was especially overwhelming. If you’d like to know just how groundbreaking her scenario was, I’d be happy if you checked the note article I’ve attached. She’s truly one of my favorite heroines.

　The emotional peak of the Sumadera route is, without question, the final exchange on the rooftop. The protagonist, having resolved to die together with her—a girl consumed by suicidal ideation—ties their hands together with a ribbon and prepares to jump.

　At that moment, she says: “We’ll probably only be together as far as the ground.”

　It’s a line of extraordinary beauty, perfectly expressing the poetic nature of Yukio Sumadera’s character. A calm—precisely because it is calm—beautiful response to the familiar fantasy of “let’s die together and become eternal.” If she were the type to murmur something sweet like “we’ll be together even after death,” she wouldn’t have etched herself so deeply into the memories of so many otaku, even more than a decade later.

　At dusk on a rooftop, a man and a woman bind their arms together with a ribbon so they can die at the same time. In that ideal, almost absurdly poetic moment she longed for, she softly says, “We’ll probably only be together as far as the ground.”

　In that instant, her unstable, painfully twisted adolescent sensibility feels as though it reaches its absolute peak. I could easily spend an entire night just thinking about the complicated emotions contained in that single word—“probably.”

An Ahead-of-Its-Time Heroine: “Yukio Sumadera” - HazeDenki.net

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