Sion and Nezumi’s Ambiguous Relationship
I may run a Nezushi RP blog, but my favorite aspect of No.6 is how it explores their relationship without giving it a name. Are they close friends? Lovers? Friends with benefits? It’s never explicitly stated. However, it’s undeniable that they’re drawn to each other, and care deeply about each other.
In today’s common media, I feel like relationships are over-simplified. The guy will always get the girl because he’s a guy and she’s a girl and they’re obviously going to fall in love and have a million beautiful children together. Anyone who’s had a relationship knows that it’s never that simple, and while a romantic story will end with the couple getting together, it’s a lot of hard work and struggling that is never shown.
While same-sex couples are not any more complex than their heterosexual counterparts, I agree with Asano when she says that the extra layer of ambiguity allows for a relationship to be fully fleshed out instead of oversimplified by the reader.
There’s no clear-cut reason why Sion and Nezumi care for each other, much like real life. We can see the chemistry they have and make our own assumptions and analysises about their relationships based on what we see.
It’s because we aren’t given an answer that we care so much. There’s an element of mystery, and we want to be able to solve it, but there aren’t any true answers to be found.
So we’re forced to introspect and look at these two as individuals and look at their flaws and how they interact.
And that’s what I love about their relationship.
As much as we might think otherwise, they’re not “made” for each other. Such a relationship would be completely against the standards and message that No.6 attempts to make about individuality and conformity.
Sion and Nezumi stumble and awkwardly bump heads and make mistakes and try to fix it. They fight and lie and scream at each other until they turn blue in the face. All of these are flaws — could be reason to leave — but they don’t. Why? Nezumi is abusive and Sion could be a life-endangering liability. They have every reason to part ways after they leave No.6.
The problems that Sion and Nezumi face are ones that anyone forced to live in the basement of the same apartment for three months unexpectedly would. They’re issues between personalities and people, not limited to romantic relationships.
There are many times when feelings transcend the labels that we try to slap on top of them. Emotions are complex, and are very hard to describe in words. Many times, we have to resort to complex metaphors to even begin to describe what we’re feeling. No.6 accurately captures the complexity of a relationship between two people — regardless of whatever labels had been slapped on them in the past.
