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This topic may grow tired for those of you who have read my homosocial triangles in Scum Villain essay in Yaoi Zine 2 (which I’ll post here once the PDF goes live) but I want it for Chihayafuru just like, for the record.
Because Chihayafuru is a shoujosei which, as twt user tshirt3000 put it, reads “more genre savvy than it was probably intended to be simply because all the characters in it are so trope poisoned that they're textually frustrated by the limitations of their role.” The heteronormative structures (the shoujosei genre tropes) are so strong that the characters are trapped and all their funny little issues, impeded by the laws of heteronormativity, have nowhere to go. Which is how you get a classic “which guy ends up with the girl” love triangle that turns out to actually be a homosocial triangle.
For the unfamiliar, a homosocial triangle is a structure in which a woman is a symbolic conduit by which men seek to cement their bonds, and in which the true partner is a man (Sedgwick, 26). This framework holds whether the men intend to strengthen their bonds with each other via cisheteronormative norms, or whether their feelings towards the woman are true or not.
And I do think that both Arata and Taichi’s crushes on Chihaya are genuine and true (and they even do a genre-revolutionary thing of asserting that Chihaya is not just a love object but a person in their conversation about how "Chihaya doesn't belong to either of us"). It is just that Arata and Taichi’s rivalry has a larger effect on each of them and that the emotions they have about each other cover a much wider range than the emotions about their literal actual crush.
Sedgwick describes this very phenomenon:
I think a lot of the fandom, even shoujo love triangle truthers, would agree that Arata and Taichi’s Meijin qualifier match and its conclusion was one of The major emotional climaxes of Chihayafuru—a culmination of Arata and Taichi’s jealousy, resentment, rivalry, and longing for connection with each other.
Consider the way Arata agonized over his rivalry with Taichi and whether or not he was a bad friend for wanting to beat him, for viewing Taichi as a stepping stone, for crushing “Taichi’s most pure, most beautiful feelings.” Consider Taichi’s existential "I can't win against Arata even if I spend my whole youth on it” and yet devoting his whole youth to it.
Consider Arata imagining how they first met and how, if Chihaya hadn’t been in their class, Taichi would have definitely called out to Arata to ask him to play soccer, and Arata would never have said “okay,” because he’s only good at karuta, and they never would have become friends.
Consider Taichi, after the Meijin qualifier match is over, thinking that as he was laying the cards down, it was the first time since he started playing the game that he thought of the cards as dear.
More Sedgwick again:
The boys’ major emotional arcs are mainly concerned with each other even if it is though their rivalry over karuta and their rivalry over liking Chihaya.
There’s more I’d like to say about Arata’s settled, unbothered masculinity vs. Taichi’s weird hangups and rules about the right way to perform masculinity and also the way arataichi is yuri (ty convo w ingoodjest and fatesteeltaylor).
Some food for thought:
More on this later, maybe.
Works Cited:
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.
Tama. "Yaoi is for people who bit their peers in childhood." Yaoi Zine 2. 2023.
Because Chihayafuru is a shoujosei which, as twt user tshirt3000 put it, reads “more genre savvy than it was probably intended to be simply because all the characters in it are so trope poisoned that they're textually frustrated by the limitations of their role.” The heteronormative structures (the shoujosei genre tropes) are so strong that the characters are trapped and all their funny little issues, impeded by the laws of heteronormativity, have nowhere to go. Which is how you get a classic “which guy ends up with the girl” love triangle that turns out to actually be a homosocial triangle.
For the unfamiliar, a homosocial triangle is a structure in which a woman is a symbolic conduit by which men seek to cement their bonds, and in which the true partner is a man (Sedgwick, 26). This framework holds whether the men intend to strengthen their bonds with each other via cisheteronormative norms, or whether their feelings towards the woman are true or not.
And I do think that both Arata and Taichi’s crushes on Chihaya are genuine and true (and they even do a genre-revolutionary thing of asserting that Chihaya is not just a love object but a person in their conversation about how "Chihaya doesn't belong to either of us"). It is just that Arata and Taichi’s rivalry has a larger effect on each of them and that the emotions they have about each other cover a much wider range than the emotions about their literal actual crush.
Sedgwick describes this very phenomenon:
In any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: … the bonds of “rivalry” and “love,” differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent (Sedgwick, 21).
I think a lot of the fandom, even shoujo love triangle truthers, would agree that Arata and Taichi’s Meijin qualifier match and its conclusion was one of The major emotional climaxes of Chihayafuru—a culmination of Arata and Taichi’s jealousy, resentment, rivalry, and longing for connection with each other.
Consider the way Arata agonized over his rivalry with Taichi and whether or not he was a bad friend for wanting to beat him, for viewing Taichi as a stepping stone, for crushing “Taichi’s most pure, most beautiful feelings.” Consider Taichi’s existential "I can't win against Arata even if I spend my whole youth on it” and yet devoting his whole youth to it.
Consider Arata imagining how they first met and how, if Chihaya hadn’t been in their class, Taichi would have definitely called out to Arata to ask him to play soccer, and Arata would never have said “okay,” because he’s only good at karuta, and they never would have become friends.
Consider Taichi, after the Meijin qualifier match is over, thinking that as he was laying the cards down, it was the first time since he started playing the game that he thought of the cards as dear.
More Sedgwick again:
The bond between rivals in an erotic triangle [is] even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved (Sedgwick, 21).
The boys’ major emotional arcs are mainly concerned with each other even if it is though their rivalry over karuta and their rivalry over liking Chihaya.
There’s more I’d like to say about Arata’s settled, unbothered masculinity vs. Taichi’s weird hangups and rules about the right way to perform masculinity and also the way arataichi is yuri (ty convo w ingoodjest and fatesteeltaylor).
Some food for thought:
"Allow a simplistic and false dichotomy: if yuri is absence, then yaoi is presence. If yuri is overflowing emotion, then yaoi is thoughtless action. Yaoi is about immediacy, violence, gripping a cute boy by the scruff of the neck and shaking him until he whimpers. The emotions between two women create yuri; the actions and physicality between two men create yaoi" (tama)
Works Cited:
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.
Tama. "Yaoi is for people who bit their peers in childhood." Yaoi Zine 2. 2023.
