Aqua and Akane are already resolved to draw out The Real Arima Kana, but she also gets support from Himekawa Taiki. He can sense that Akane is trying to steal the show and is determined to deter her, even to the point of resorting to “air glasses” since contact lenses scare him.
When Taiki-as-Blade squares off with Aqua-as-Touki, he’s ready to play and have fun. But Aqua knows he can’t go toe-to-toe with Lala Lai’s ace, so he adopts an emotionless performance, the polar opposite of Taiki’s. It’s a defensive maneuver that enables Aqua to hold serve, but Taiki is too talented an actor to allow such a gambit to succeed.
Aqua ends up ad-libbing when Kana-as-Tsurugi ends up in his arms. He describes her as a soft, weak woman who has no business on a battlefield of men. Kana is shocked by Aqua’s ability to improvise and throw her off balance, and she probably doesn’t mind the close physical contact either. She can tell that Aqua is telling her to “do the kind of acting she longs to do,” but she worries that if everyone “does as they please,” the play will suffer.
This thought is borne from her experience as a child actor, as Kana served as her mother’s avatar for quite a while. When Kana was popular and profitable, her mother benefitted. But when Kana’s career started to plateau and decline, her mother also declined. Her father fell for another woman and left them. Kana lived in squalor, and in a constant state of fear she wasn’t doing enough. Her mom defined her own worth and put the weight of success on her little kid, which is to say, she was a shitty mom!
It’s no surprise that the day Kana was confronted by Akane saying she hopes no tomfoolery was afoot in the audition, she lashed out at Akane. Akane may have been a fan of Kana’s, but she didn’t know the real Arima Kana in the slightest, nor did she know the weight she bore. It’s a weight that made her fine with foul play to get her even minor roles so that she could make ends meet. Kana allowed herself to be consumed by the cynical, cutthroat adult sensibility.
But here, on the stage of a 2.5D play adaptation of Tokyo Blade, Aqua’s performance guides Kana to place where she can forcefully cast aside the idea that she’s “fine over here,” swallowing “all the distasteful stuff” and “making everyone happy” with compromised acting.
She initially tells Aqua in this liminal mental space that lifting her up will only cause problems for everyone. But Aqua is telling her that causing problems is the point. He wants to see her act the way she wants to. And Akane only wants to defeat that Kana. Thus unlocked, Kana finally gives them what they asked for, and turns in an raw, unleashed, selfish performance. And it absolutely rocks.
All the while, Aqua is watching both Akane and Kana shine so brightly they scorch his eyes, and above all having fun while acting, and he cannot reciprocate. We jump back to Akane fulfilling her promise to him by researching panic disorder and ways to deal with it. Specifically, he has to know what triggers his panic: guilt.
Akane may know there’s a trigger, but doesn’t know the source of it. Gotanda Taishi has known him long enough to know: it’s his sense of guilt over Ai’s death. I can’t help but feel like Aqua feels validated, as finally someone comes out and says what he’s felt ever since Ai died. Gotanda even surmises that Aqua is pursuing the upper escelons of acting solely for the sake of exacting revenge.
Gotanda doesn’t judge Aqua for this. In fact, he helps him out by telling him that if that’s truly his goal, then he has to forever discard the idea of ever having fun acting. Instead, he must suffer as he performs, since for him “acting is something painful and arduous.”
As he fights Taiki/Blade as Touki, Aqua embraces that mindset. If Taiki, Akane, and Kana are having the time of their lives acting on that stage, he’s going to do the opposite and suffer as hard as one can suffer, thereby defeating all of them and gaining the recognition he’ll need to gain access to those who killed Ai, and exact his revenge. It remains his only reason for living. Sorry, Ruby!
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