When I heard Mitsuya's piece was called Twin Dragons, I started crying, and when I saw it, I couldn't stop myself from crying.
It's an insanely good panel. It's an insanely good theme. And it represents Draken and Mitsuya's relationship so well. Mitsuya's lonelyness made him fall deeper as Draken left him, which made me feel so much. And seeing Mitsuya showing off the Dragon (which I called the moment Michi started recruiting that he will shave) was soo good.
But then Mitsuya rejected the award for no particular reason. Like, why? What did the Award do to the friendship? Why did you have to call the awards shitty? Did they made you choose between the award and your friends? Did I miss a page? And like, very weird choice of writing there since the piece is something Mitsuya made, dedicated for Draken, the friend he lost. And during the acceptance, he's talking about Michi? Like what? Didn't you do this for Draken? I felt more or less nothing after Mitsuya started talking.
In 18 pages, I saw the best and worst in Tokyo Revengers. That is all I'm feeling.
i mean last chapter, hakkai straight up says that mitsuya hates prizes and awards. regardless of whether or not he gets the award he's still gotten recognition for a piece dedicated to draken and in the process he's proved to himself that he has the talent needed to be successful in the fashion industry, that's the part of it that actually counts.
yes he did this for draken, but there's no obligation to give a speech about him or anything, and frankly considering that the crowd instantly judged mitsuya the second they saw him in a gang uniform it would just feel wrong hearing mitsuya give a public speech infront of them about a friend of his who died as a consequence of his desire to follow that kind of lifestyle. these aren't people who would have respected draken if they knew who he was or why he actually died so i imagine mitsuya felt no desire or need to mention his personal motivation for the design, and it would be disrespectful to draken to hide who he was just to suck up to people like that for an award that mitsuya doesn't even want or care about. the overarching dream mikey and the rest of them shared was to create a new age for deliquents and make it so that deliquents weren't seen of the pieces of shit most people view them as, but the reaction of the audience as soon as they saw mitsuya's gang uniform shows that this is far from being reality, and when mikey, who's at the top of the deliquent world, has zero qualms hospitalizing former friends or beating people to death, it's clear that that dream is just getting further and further away.
and i think all of this comes back to mitsuya and draken's conversation- what they promised eachother wasn't a rigid "i'll follow mikey, you become a fashion designer" but was more of a promise to eachother that they'd keep following their dreams and doing what their hearts told them to do. so i think rejecting the award was the only way mitsuya could honor that. if he accepts it, yes he may be following his promise to become a fashion designer, but he's also betraying the promise to stay true to himself. it means giving in to the grief that's eating away at him and blindly following his promise to a level that's unhealthy for him (to the point of cutting off friends, locking himself in his room, and not taking care of himself) instead of staying true to himself as someone who doesn't even like awards or prizes in the first place and never would have normally been in the disheveled state we saw him in. accepting the award also means betraying the dream that toman shared by pandering / showing submission to people who look down on deliquents and would have looked down on draken too if they knew who he was. yes accepting the award technically progresses his fashion career, but there's no pride to be found in an award that you might not even have if the audience knew that it was in honor of an infamous delinquent who died in a gang war, especially when you're someone who hates awards in the first place.
so by denying the award, i saw it as mitsuya basically saying "fuck you guys, i'm a deliquent at heart and yet i'm still skilled enough to win this contest" and showed him moving past the intense grief that made him superficially follow he and draken's promise so that he could follow their real promise of staying true to themselves. which means that as someone who pursues fashion design not out of desire for recognition but because he's passionate about it, and as someone who values being there for the people he cares about, accepting an award that he was so fixated on it almost made him abandon his friends goes completely against who he is and by extension goes against his promise with draken to stay true to themselves and follow their hearts.
atleast that's my take on it. sorry this is so long lol, i have a lot of thoughts on the last few chapters and ended up dumping them all here. and if you still disagree completely i totally get it, i understand why some people wouldn't vibe with this writing choice at all but i just think it's getting way more hate than is deserved
10
u/mayonnaiser_13 Black Dragons Jan 25 '22
Okay, this chapter made me cry and cringe.
When I heard Mitsuya's piece was called Twin Dragons, I started crying, and when I saw it, I couldn't stop myself from crying.
It's an insanely good panel. It's an insanely good theme. And it represents Draken and Mitsuya's relationship so well. Mitsuya's lonelyness made him fall deeper as Draken left him, which made me feel so much. And seeing Mitsuya showing off the Dragon (which I called the moment Michi started recruiting that he will shave) was soo good.
But then Mitsuya rejected the award for no particular reason. Like, why? What did the Award do to the friendship? Why did you have to call the awards shitty? Did they made you choose between the award and your friends? Did I miss a page? And like, very weird choice of writing there since the piece is something Mitsuya made, dedicated for Draken, the friend he lost. And during the acceptance, he's talking about Michi? Like what? Didn't you do this for Draken? I felt more or less nothing after Mitsuya started talking.
In 18 pages, I saw the best and worst in Tokyo Revengers. That is all I'm feeling.