Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun - 40

"Going to See the World"

The most sure-fire way to screw up a kid is to completely forget that they understand more than we give them credit for.

We've always known that Haru and Yamaken were broken individuals, but never has the current state of their relationship been made more heartbreaking than it has now. Shizuku's rejection of his understanding of her, while not completely wrong, has hurt Haru to a far deeper level than she could have imagined. In Shizuku it seems that he sees salvation (as illustrated so beautifully by the spider-thread metaphor earlier on in the series), but he also sees a shadow of his previous relationship with his brother. Yamaken and Haru, it seems, were very close as children; something we'd been told and clued into a few times, but not something we had all that much access too. The problems began when Haru's intelligence started showing through and their father decides to move them to the main household. Though Haru remembers Yamaken being happy at the prospect of finally being with their father, he soon crumbles to the pressure and standards that he's expected to live up to, and Haru's own dislike for his father's household does nothing to assuade Yamaken's dissatisfaction. After all, in the older brother's eyes, it's his brother whom is considered special and brought them both to that life, but it's that same brother who doesn't take any of the rules seriously. In other words, Yamaken is jealous of Haru's ability to disregard what others want of him, but he's also resentful of the fact that it was Haru's intelligence that brought their father's attention to them in the first place. As for Haru, he's like any other genius, misunderstood and completely unable to comprehend why it is that Yamaken (and Shizuku by extension) claim that he's unable to understand them. It's not his fault that things happened the way they have, and even if it were, to him it seems that no one ever makes an effort to see things the way he does. He's lost the brother he adored and looked up to, and now Shizuku seems to be pulling away from him too, and as Shizuku is about to find out, certain scars don't go away with just a simple apology.