Please forgive any spoilers in this response.

As for Tsukiko, she has tried to get her facial expressions back. It was perhaps glossed over, but just after Youto is able to recover his facade the focus turns to Tsukiko. She comes ever so close to recovering her expressions, but she sacrifices them in an effort to make her sister happy.

I think we can read a few things into this: 1) That Tsukiko still hasn’t sorted out her issues, so she is not ready to accept her true self yet. 2) Tsukiko is afraid that the connections she’s made are due to the change in her personality, thus if she reverts to her true self she will lose her new friends. 3) The director is having too much fun with Tsukiko’s deadpan.

You’re right, though. There’s a bit of Tsukiko accepting her changes happening. Also, it showed a lot of maturity to make an altruistic choice and sacrifice her emotions for her sister (twice!) There’s actually growth in all the main characters, so this isn’t entirely unprecedented. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that correcting her mistakes is a bad idea, though. It’s a bad idea to be unable to express yourself and physical cues are important as well.

What about Tsukiko, though? She hasn’t tried too hard to get her facial expressions back. Granted, the story’s not over yet, but she seems to be treating it as being (for the most part) exactly what she needed, rather than a correction of the wrong sort. And yet she has grown at least a bit, I’d say. The extra bit of magical restraint has helped her learn how to express herself better—she just can’t use her face to help here, so has to stick with her words and actions. Perhaps correcting her past mistakes wasn’t such a bad idea in this case? Or perhaps instead she’s learned from this mistake as well?

(Both the series and this blog)

I can’t say I know any other group of writers that’s this big and puts out consistently meaningful and relevant pieces. Altair and Vega, keep doing what you’re doing. It’s incredibly important and you guys are fantastic at it. Thank you for this article, for past articles and for articles to come. Really.