Yatora is continuing his prep work for taking the TUA entrance exam and like many third year high school students, this after school prep work is overtaking everything else in his life. His old friends are surprisingly understanding and supportive of him — Yatora doggedly pursuing art has given some of them the kick needed to follow their own interests — but Yatora knows that the odds are against him, against any individual student really, for getting into the one public art university in Japan and he is stressed.
Everyone else is stressed too, but as the fifth volume draws to a close it seems like Yatora’s stress might cost him the exam and his chance at the only art school he can afford
This chunk of volumes takes us close but not quite to the end of 2021’s anime adaptation and I remain surprised at how fast of a clip the anime went through the material. Reading through these volumes with that thought in mind, I didn’t spot many scenes that had been cut entirely from the anime but I did notice a few smaller, character-defining that seemed to have been cut for time; I remember noticing in the anime that a few moments involving Yatora’s rival Yotasuke (from the first two volumes) had been cut which I felt made the relationship between them a lot muddier but thankfully nothing to that extent that jumped out at me this time.
I do feel that small character moments like that are critical to what is a very internal story of a young man choosing to pursue a particularly emotionally taxing route in life and that’s part of the reason why I would slightly recommend the manga over the anime adaptation here. Between the fact that manga-ka Tsubasa Yamaguchi graduated from the real life TUA and the fact that a lot of the details about Yatora’s prep and exams also match up with Akkiko Higashimura’s experiences in Blank Canvas, I’m inclined to think that this is a reasonably accurate depiction of pre-art college life in Japan and it also inspired memories in me of my own college years that the anime didn’t. I didn’t go to art school as my photography program was instead located in the college’s school of technology and more broadly focused on being a commercial photographer (that is, learning how to read contracts, marketing yourself, etc), but between that experience and my friends trying (and failing) to get into our college’s art program there were certainly some similarities between my life and Yatora’s.
From the bone-numbing exhaustion, the mindset of thinking about potential projects at all times, a mindset that you practically have to drag yourself into, all of that was certainly what my own final semester felt like, not just like I was living in a different reality from everyone around me but I really was! Yatora’s practical statement of “oh I have a notebook and pencil on hand, so even if we go on a wild trip I can keep working towards my prep school quota” described a familiar situation to mine and also reminded me of the threats of a “working spring break” my professor warned us about if we didn’t make progress on our senior portfolios asap. I wouldn’t consider these bad memories or necessarily a bad experience per say(especially since my program was revamping to have people better prepared for this capstone class), but even I have to look at what Yatora and his classmates are going through and think god, these schools just want ready-made artists, your “entry level worker with 5+ years experience,” ready to come in and start with every basic skill mastered. I wonder how many of these kids, both in-universe characters and real students have breakdowns in their first year alone.
The other big moment in this batch of three volumes concerns Yatora’s childhood acquaintance Ryuji/Yuka (since they seem to go by Yuka more often I’ll be using that name, even if Yatora doesn’t). They’re pretty miserable, flunking out of TUA’s first exam stage on purpose (although really, if the school wants something “edgy” in the form of a self-portrait, drawing a giant X and walking out does fit the bill!) and struggling, flailing to find purpose somewhere in life without drowning. Yatora is really unsure of what to do here; Yatora isn’t super close to many people and Yuka always kept them at a bit of a distance, and when he does clumsily try to reach out Yuka snaps that he’s the kind of guy who’d bring a life preserver for a drowning person but not jump in himself, something that Yuka sees as worse than useless.
I can understand Yuka’s thinking and emotions, as a high schooler in crisis and close to being kicked out by their own family, but, as someone who has been bringing the “life preserver” to friends when I was even younger than these characters, I didn’t like how the larger story of Blue Period seemed to reinforce the idea that Yatora should be willing to drown in order to help. There’s a saying, adapted from the airplane customer guidelines, that in case of emergency you should put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others, because you can’t help if you’re incapacitated and that has long been my own approach to friends in crisis. If you get so overwhelmed (drowning) that you can’t help your friend, well, then it’s two of you who are stuck and neither can help the other which, in my opinion, makes the whole endeavor a bit useless.
Yatora doesn’t end up fully jumping in with Yuka, but they do find a way to make the life preserver bigger, and I do hope that Yuka continues to be a reoccurring character and one who manages to find happiness and a path that brings them to it. But for the moment, it looks like Yuka will be taking a backseat as Yatora goes for the second TUA exam and has to fight his own health on top of everything else (as someone else who has had stress hives he has my sympathies, although he should also get some strong antihistamines instead of just skin lotions) for his one shot this year at getting into college.