Hello Melancholic! and the Infinite Sadness
Let’s play a game. I’m going to describe a series and I want you to try to guess what it is. The series takes place in the novel setting a high school. It revolves around a group of girls who play music together. At the start of the story, one of the girls is directionless. She hesitates to join but is able to find herself and new friends through the incredible power of music! Sounds like a fun pitch, right? Let’s also pretend for a moment that you didn’t read the title to this post. What series do you think I’m describing? If you’re having trouble narrowing it down to just one guess, I can’t either hashtag sorry not sorry. There are dozens of series out there that fit almost this exact description.
The field of high school stories about girls in bands is so saturated that it might as well be a sub-genre of its own. Of those many entities, I want to focus on one that you might not have heard of before: Yayoi Ohsawa’s Hello, Melancholic! Published in Comic Yuri Hime from June 2019 to November 2020, the series had a relatively short run of only 14 chapters. It also hasn’t and likely will never receive an animation adaptation.
The world of yuri comics can be brutal. With multiple magazines publishing multiple contemporaneous stories all targeting a niche audience, a lot of weight is placed on how well the first volume of a series sells. If that first volume doesn’t impress, it’s likely that the series will land on the chopping block not long after. Unfortunately, this seems to have been the case of Hello, Melancholic! However, those 14 chapters are still the home of a charming series rich with some very interesting ideas that deserve greater acknowledgement and unpacking.
The story of Hello Melancholic! follows Minato Asano, a socially anxious high school student and talented trombone player. Despite her efforts to blend in with the background, there’s only so much you can do to be discreet when you’re carrying a trombone case. There’s even less when you’re carrying a trombone case and just so happen to stand at least a head and a half over every other person in the school. Eventually, she attracts the attention of the extroverted Hibiki Sugawa who wants to adopt an introvert start a band.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. If you change the names around that sounds an awful lot like the premise of global sensation and Jeff Rosenstock endorsed anime Bocchi The Rock! That’s quite a long shadow to be stuck-in. It probably didn’t help that Hello Melancholic! Started publication two years after Bocchi the Rock! Even though both series center musicians struggling with social anxiety, Bocchi’s Hitori and Minato differ in some important ways.
My kamioshi...
For starters, Bocchi The Rock! makes it clear that Hitori is conventionally attractive when she’s not hiding in trash cans. Even when she is, she’s just in a state of quantum cuteness until she can be observed again. Her social anxiety also isn’t rooted in anything specific, it’s just something she has as part of the narrative and hasn’t been expanded on as of writing this. Minato’s social anxiety is presented as being at least partially rooted in discomfort with her body. As I mentioned before, she’s significantly taller than every other character in the series and hunches over to minimize her height. Her voice, which she describes as husky, is also a point of discomfort for her. In terms of style, she also dresses boyishly; her hair is shorter and messier than the other girls in the series, her casual clothes are less feminine, her chest is smaller and her uniform skirt is longer than those worn by her peers presumably to cover more of her legs.
She sees herself as less than the other girls in the series. They’re confident, feminine and stylish. They probably wing their eyeliner right the first time, know how to style an updo and all those other eldritch majiks. In her mind, they’re practically angelic and she is a wretched girlthing crawling on her belly. No one else in the series sees her that way, but her internalization of that perceived difference ends up bringing her to think about herself as undeserving of their attention – nevermind their friendship.
One of the things I tend to pay attention to a lot lately is character design. Hair is a big part of communicating a character’s personality. You can take the exact same character design and shift the bangs around and end up with entirely different impressions. Like how having a character’s bangs chicly hanging in front of one eye communicates a cool or mysterious vibe and is the objective pinnacle of character design. Everyone agrees. Case closed. Moving on! Minato is the only character shown to have any loose hair and her bangs are always hanging in front of her face. Other characters either part their hair or style their bangs in ways that would require regular maintenance cuts. It’s a small attention to detail but communicates a lot about who she is as a character.
Minato appears even less traditionally feminine in flashbacks. In middle school, her hair was even shorter, implying that her current style (or lack thereof) is from growing her hair out. She is also only ever shown wearing either a girls school uniform or the timeless t-shirt and jeans combo. If it wasn’t for the girl’s uniform you might even assume she WAS a boy.
Ignore that loud record scratch you just heard. I haven’t had time to properly set up my new turntable yet.
So yeah, seeing a meme pitching Hello Melancholic! as a trans narrative was how I first discovered the series. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to connect the dots here. The boyish appearance in flashbacks, idolization of “real” girls, general discomfort with her body and playing trombone are all big flashing arrows pointing toward a conclusion so low-hanging you might just walk into it if you aren’t careful: Minato is a trans woman. In fact, once you read it through that lens, it’s hard to read it any other way. Trust me. I’ve tried very hard.
However, whether Minato is or isn’t trans is never mentioned. The series only had a short run prior to cancellation, so it’s entirely possible that this was intended to be something addressed and expanded on later into publication. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any interviews with the author mentioning whether that was something they had intended with the character. For now, Minato, not unlike Schrödinger's cat, is locked in a box of quantum gender that we as readers cannot peer into.
How you read her depends on you as a reader. If reading Minato as trans helps you connect with her narrative or enriches your understanding of her character, you’re free to do so. If you prefer to read her character as just being a tall cis girl, go right ahead. When I initially sat down to outline how I wanted to approach this post, I had wanted to use the series as a jumping off point into a bigger discussion about the role of canon and author intention as something of a companion to my previous post about queerbaiting. As I rotated things around in my mind palace, the less I thought any of that actually mattered. The less weight I put on whether you can or cannot read Minato as trans, the more I appreciated the series as a whole.
Let’s take her insecurity around her height for example. It’s not a secret that trans women, especially trans women who transition after going through some amount of masculinizing puberty, tend to be taller than average. However, tall cis girls also exist. Even though I’m fairly tall at 5’9, I’m not even the tallest woman in my family. A very cis cousin of mine is over 6 feet tall. Not only that, she leans into it. Standing next to her when she was wearing spike heels was one of the only times in my adult life that I’ve felt small. Even though it was less “cute and dainty” and more “how a rabbit must feel when it realizes it’s in a nature documentary about predators,” we still take those!
In Minato’s case, whether she is as tall as she is because she’s transgender or because she just happens to be a tall cis girl is less important than the fact that she is insecure about her height. The same is true for any other part of her experience with her appearance whether it’s her voice or apparent discomfort with femininity. The path there may be different, but the destination is the same.
Once upon a time, I told an ex-partner that I felt awful because the clothes I was buying never seemed to fit me like I wanted them to. She just looked at me and said “welcome to womanhood” with all the tact and empathy of turning to another person about to be hung and asking “first time?” You know, like the meme from the internet™. It was a shitty thing to say but there was a kernel of truth under the torrent of venom. Right now right-wing media, and distressingly also centrist media, is trying to drive a stake between the experience of trans and cis women with all the gusto of someone trying to kill a vampire. Except that there is nothing monstrous there. The venn diagram of the experience between cis and trans women is practically a circle. They are both just slightly different flavors of the experiences of being a woman.
Sure, there are nuances and exceptions. For example, I had to think fast when a coworker turned to me during girl talk and asked what kind of cravings I get during my period but that’s extremely minor in the grand scheme of things. There is more in common with our experiences than differences and more room for solidarity than separation.
There is one chapter in particular that has really stuck with me. In it, Hibiki and Minato are out on a date. While they’re walking around, Minato sees their reflection in a window. In that panel and throughout the rest of the chapter, Minato’s proportions are exaggerated compared to the rest of the book. I took the shift to be an expression of how the stress of the situation is distorting her view of herself. In revisiting the story to write this, that panel reminded me of how it felt to walk around a Christmas market with my wife just a few weeks ago. It was a lovely time soured by this nagging voice in the back of my head that got a little bit louder every time I’d see another woman who I felt was “more” than I am. As the voice got louder my mental image of how I must look to other people became more and more distorted. By the end of our walk, I too was thinking of myself as this wretched girlthing trolling through the market like something out of a Grimm Brother’s story. It caught me off guard.
I’ve always had some degree of body dysmorphia and I know that I don’t always perceive myself accurately but it was never this bad before. Unfortunately, the combination of COVID lockdowns and working from home have created ample space and time for the all-time tag team belt holders of dysphoria and dysmorphia to find new and exciting ways to power bomb my self esteem through a table. It’s something I imagine we all deal with to different degrees. Even cis people seek gender affirming care and experience dysphoria even if they’re not talked about that way. Rationally, I know that it’s mostly in my head and I;m probably not alone in feeling that way, but as a lyricist who once said “I'm gonna fuck the devil in his mouth” also once said, “If it’s all in your head, that’s still very terrible.”
Before closing, I do want to pivot to a trans perspective specifically. The truth is that hormones and surgeries can do a lot but there are still limits. A friend once described it as riding a rollercoaster. There are high highs and low lows at the start but eventually it all evens out and this is just your life now. After eight years, there’s nothing I can expect from medications, no more surgeries to do and I fear not much more to gain from voice training. This is just my life now and I still don’t always love myself. On bad days, I feel like I failed to become the kind person I want to be. I am also endlessly distraught at the lack of cute shoes in extended sizes, but that’s another issue. None of us get to choose how we’re made. If you’re someone who also struggles with this, I wish I had something more profound to say than “that sucks and me too” but sometimes that’s what you’ve got to give.
Even though Hello Melancholic! treads familiar ground, its depiction of dysphoria and body dysmorphia as sources of social anxiety and social comparison are cutting. I was genuinely surprised how much of it landed for me. More than that though, the story's throughline of how feeling the things you can’t control about yourself doesn't make you undeserving of love makes it into something really special. The ambiguity around whether Minato is transgender ends up making those ideas much more evocative than they would be otherwise. I can’t say for sure that this is a point that Yayoi Ohsawa intended to make with Hello Melancholic! or something that they stumbled into but it’s an appreciated reminder either way.
The three volumes of Hello Melancholic! are available in English via Seven Seas if you want to give it a read yourself.
Until next entry, be nice to yourself (yes, even the person writing this) Afterall, a lyricist who once said “Your parasympathetic nervous system reacts. And you're in fight or flight mode” and has been apologizing ever since also once said, “It’s harder to be yourself than it is to be anybody else.”