Answered Question: Midori’s Inner Thoughts Regarding Chiaki Prior to Climax

Ask No.1: I’m very curious about how would you resume Midori’s mental state before, during and after Climax 🤔 I know Chiaki was mostly hiding his true feelings but Midori I think it was much… Complicated? Or something like that? I think I need a second opinion about Midori more than Chiaki, but if you want, you can also say your opinion about Chiaki 😓 sorry if it’s too much trouble

Ask No.2: I don’t know what happened with a question I made a while ago, but I wanted to ask it again in case it didn’t get through 😭 the question: how was Midori’s mind working before, during, and after Climax towards Chiaki? What inner thoughts were inside his mind? I don’t know if they explored the before climax event thoughts, but I would like to know what’s your opinion on it 👀

Sent in September 2024, answered in June 2025. tweet link of the answer

for starters, i am so, SO sorry for how long this took. ever since september ’24, work has been a rollercoaster that demotivated me out of a lot of things. i kept wanting to write an answer to this, and i just never had the emotional energy for it 😭 but i’m slowly getting back my pace…!! i completely understand if this answer took too long, but i’m still so glad to get this ask all the same, so thank you for sending it!! ❤️

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THIS IS A REALLY FUN QUESTION FOR ME!!! midori’s mental state before, during, and after repayment festival are actually so integral to his relationship with chiaki and answer a lot about why he acts a certain way (particularly his actions in !! era)

i talked about it before in a thread lovemailing the beauty of zodiac midori leading up to the current midori. i ABSOLUTELY recommend reading it because i think it answers your question! in this post, i’ll break the thread down even further so it’s (hopefully) easier to make sense of what i meant. …hopefully. so a lot of what i say here might feel more complete when read along with the thread!

BUT, DISCLAIMER THAT what i’ve written here is just a simplified summary. each segment has a lot of layers and depth to it… so there are definitely more nuances to it than what i’ve written here!

indeed, midori is pretty complex because he went through various stages with chiaki, relationship wise, emotional wise, etc… all of which are interesting and important. SOOOOOOO IMPORTANT to the point that if you alter any of them, their relationship just wouldn’t work.

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when they first meet, midori starts off feeling like chiaki is an overwhelming, confusing, obnoxious and suffocating person who just won’t leave him alone, and he can’t for the life of him understand Why. no matter how many times he tries to escape or push chiaki away, chiaki just comes back stronger and more persistent. midori attempting to skip practice so much is WHY chiaki started to pick him up from his home in the first place. (something midori never asked for! among many other things he never asked chiaki to do, ever)

we don’t really get that many glimpses of this anxiety in stories, but climax reveals to us that a chunk of his behavior with ryuseitai and especially chiaki is the fear of not living up to people’s expectations of him. that people expect something amazing and wonderful from midori because of his looks, get to know who he truly is, find out he’s "nothing special", and get severely disappointed and leave him. experiencing that had really warped midori’s perception of himself (thinking he truly has NOTHING in him and that nobody can change that "fact"), and made him believe only his family would ever love him for who he truly is deep down.

so imagine that midori, who came out of all those experiences back in middle school, immediately being bombarded with this relentless senior who’s convinced there’s something in him, that "he has the qualities to be a hero"… it’s terrifying because why the hell would chiaki see that in him???

but despite midori’s attempts to escape or his whining, chiaki continued to pull him back in and get him to "show his potential". and this meant day in and out, midori would experience the shenanigans and the "mess" that is ryuseitai, this unit that seems to barely take itself seriously and yet apparently totally does because "we’re heroes!"

as much as it exhausted him, he eventually gave in to it because it’s "too late to quit this school now", "i don’t really have much of a choice at this point", etc… and that constant persistence to be pulled back into the light and warmth of chiaki and ryuseitai eventually became the norm for midori. this is where hero show, supernova, and plenty of other summer stories happen. supernova in particular marks the point where midori TRULY realizes he’s doing something he would’ve NEVER done if he didn’t enter the idol course, and seeing his middle school classmate just being a "normal person like he once was" while he’s on stage further amplified that realization… but most of all, it makes him realize that after all that exhaustion and hell practice he went through… he’s actually happy here, with ryuseitai.

and from there on, this new norm becomes so commonplace for midori that it feels worse when it ISN’T him with ryuseitai (like in orihime and hikoboshi. he didn’t enjoy practice with trickstar much, mostly because of subaru, and felt relief when chiaki and kanata were finally back.)

HERE is where we enter midori’s potential as a hero budding and taking form, slowly but surely. and this beautifully transitions to the stories that explore midori’s feelings towards chiaki: sweet halloween (autumn season) and zodiac (winter season)

before that, one thing i LOVE about the summer stories is that it’s also the time midori is most annoyed and fed up with chiaki, usually expressing it in a "it’s already hot as it is (during the summer weather), can you NOT make it worse (with your suffocatingly hot personality)". this makes the contrast between summer midori and autumn midori so cute, because he shows explicit signs of warming up even MORE to ryuseitai in autumn, as it’s no longer a season with exhausting hot weather to deal with on top of chiaki. summer was also a veeeery busy time for ryuseitai, and then they had a break in summer from work (that chiaki himself made sure to give them), and i feel like that also contributed to his warming up to them throughout summer and his potential finally taking form after all the new experiences.

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and so, this perfectly leads into sweet halloween, where midori learns something entirely different and opposite of what he’s understood about chiaki so far. all this time he’s grown so used to chiaki being overly energetic, overly loud, overly suffocating, constantly pestering him to do things, etc… but in this case, he’s quieter? he’s fidgeting? he seems overwhelmed, to the point that he has no time to "pester" midori…? i find it very interesting that the reason midori picked up on chiaki acting weird was because chiaki’s behavior lacked the traits that he kept seeing from him over the past few months. it went against midori’s norm. the norm that chiaki HIMSELF created by constantly committing his time and efforts to midori day after day.

also, midori’s intrigue and confusion about chiaki’s "different" behavior implies to me that he’s been subconsciously seeking for answers behind a lot of questions he’s had about chiaki up until this point. "what is up with this guy" "why is he like this" "is he seriously always this energetic? how is that even possible?" and so on and so forth… and finding out chiaki has such a massive "weakness" to him likely meant the world to midori, hence him trying to get to the bottom of it in sweet halloween.

up until this point, chiaki has felt too… Unnaturally Perfect. Too unnaturally capable of constantly giving, providing, and always being there for other people. he even managed to get the reluctant, unwilling midori to open himself up a little more. but it's hard to shake off the feeling that chiaki is hiding something about himself… namely, traits that would make him less perfect, less reliably capable, but… it would make him more human.

this story marks a MASSIVE milestone for midori and finally makes that "bud of potential" inside him take form, albeit still small and fragile. he’s the only person in ryuseitai who very quickly picked up on something strange happening with chiaki, all due to how much his current norm is related to him. but unfortunately, by the end of sweet halloween, the most he managed to do is notice it enough for chiaki to admit it to the rest of ryuseitai, and try to subtly be there for chiaki, and… that’s kind of it. he tried to convey his feelings to chiaki, telling him "it’s okay to be yourself", but chiaki didn’t hear it…💔 hence it being the start of that small budding of his form of heroism.

and this is where the rest of my thread comes into play, especially for during and after climax, so i really recommend reading it!

midori tripped up a lot while his potential was taking form. midori felt embarrassed (zodiac), incapable (chiaki’s as well as his own crying scene in climax), or like a failure for trying (this happened more often in !! era though), but he never fully gave up either. every struggle made him attempt a new way to grab hold of chiaki. that's where his desperation starts to kick in in !! era, namely after motor show and during comet show. (note that this ask does NOT cover anything about ES2 midori!)

but since this ask is mostly about pre-climax, i’ll stop here!! i had SOO MUCH FUN WITH THIS, I WANTED TO GIVE IT AS MUCH ATTENTION AS I COULD BECAUSE I LOVE!!! MIDORI’S PSYCHE!!!! THERE’S SO MUCH TO BE SAID!! i might expand on this whenever i have the time (or the midori brain worms get to me), and i’ll mention on twitter if that ever happens! thank you again ❤️