Mei Shijima - Blog Posts

WE ARE SO BACK SHIJIMAAAAAAAAAAMEIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!❤️❤️❤️❤️

Has anyone ever wonder why shijima wears glasses 👓

Any ideas and headcannons

i love Mei but like are they the same person or??? (Yes I read the manga but they still confuse me..)

So I just put it in persona series terms

As Shijima is the persona of Mei ideals and her dreams for the future in her tower painting she wants to show to the people but unfortunately she didn’t make it.

I CANNOT WATCH. I PHYSICALLY CAN’T. I AM WORKING. I CANNOT CRY RIGHT NOW.

(said as i pause the video and return to work with tears beginning to form)

(skhfklsahdkhskahkjfhjsl MEI 🥹 SHIJIMA 😭)

they did this scene so beautifully omg i was gonna start sobbing

SHIJIMA SPOTTED IN THE TBHK S2 OPENING

The death of a dream

I think for the first time I will talk about Shijima, even if her story is one of the ones that moves me the most.

Seeing her trying for the last time to do what she loves the most, and trying to immortalize it with lines and colors on paper. The tower, crooked, as if representing her trying to use all the effort she has to stay upright, even if the tower could fall at any moment. And even if it did fall, she would still be there, inside that tower, where her happiness would live.

Her desire to be happy didn't exactly only create another world, but another version of herself, because in her eyes the world is good and she was the one who couldn't keep up, so she recreated herself in a world where it would be possible to be happy, even in a tower about to fall.

Imagining herself in another world, in another place… in a place where she could be herself, even if it wasn't real, still brought joy.

Shijima's story also reminds me of the first Harry Potter book. The orphan boy who one day found a magic mirror that reflected what he most desired. He saw his parents, who had died to save him when he was a baby.

illustration by TomScribble

And Harry went there every night and day, over and over again, to be by their side, to see them smile for the first and countless times. Until Dumbledore, the professor, discovered and told him that dreams bring us joy, take us to the sweetest and deepest pleasure of living what we could never.

But it wasn't worth it to always be dreaming and forgetting to live.

At that time, it didn't make sense to me. Who would choose to stay in the real world? But the truth is that dreaming kills your hopes little by little.

Until you have none left.

Mei dreamed that Shijima would live, she did what had to be done, she stayed in the dream that Shijima made for her, but she never came back.

The wish that she had lost hope.

Tsukasa gave her the freedom to finally have enough strength to stop dreaming.

Shijima never stopped smiling, not because she was resigned to death, but because she knew that the dream would one day come to an end, but she wanted at least one version of her to be happy.

The tower, Shijima's last painting, was the representation of the happiness that she wanted to immortalize.

She was happy while she was alive, and she became eternal in the form that she loved most, painting.

Stopping dreaming is so hard. Watching the world fall apart makes it feel like you're falling apart with it. But it's necessary.

It's better to stop dreaming before you lose hope.

When hope dies, not even the world of dreams makes sense anymore.

Nothing does.

One day Harry Potter would realize that his parents were already dead, and he would have died with them if he had just kept dreaming about something he could never have.

But, just like Shijima, he knew the right moment to break the world of dreams. The boy who found the magic mirror that had been hidden in the deepest part of the castle, for having killed the hope of so many others.

Mei thought that "killing" Shijima would be the best way to break the dream

But killing her would bring nothing but negative feelings. Killing a dream won't bring you peace.

Accepting that it was good while it lasted will bring you true freedom. Like what actually happened.

She accepted that the dream was over, and went to face reality. Shijima accepted death, and Mei accepted that she is the part of Shijima that she wanted to live and be remembered, no matter how she was remembered.

I love how Aidairo make reality so raw and strong and how it reflects so well on them. How Amane "killed" his dreams, when he lost hope, how he quickly realized that the world was fake.

Because that happiness was so unreal to him.

Even if Mei had put him in a world where it would be just him and Tsukasa, happy as it should have been in the past, he would have known it was fake.

Because he no longer had hope, he killed hope when he raised the knife to Tsukasa.

When he spent so much time trying to change the past, trying to make things work out, trying to save his brother at all costs and at any sacrifice.

When he realized that going to the moon was no longer possible.

When he decided not to go anywhere.

He didn't give Tsukasa his freedom, like Mei gave Shijima - even if forced initially - or, Tsukasa himself didn't give Amane the freedom to leave, when he decided to sacrifice himself.

Amane was supposed to die.

Shijima was supposed to die.

But dreams made they postpone it.

In the end, reality still came.

And it's never easy. But at least accepting it completely is less painful than dreaming and losing everything in the end.

Seeing that none of it was real.

You're now drowning in reality and embracing the pain of a dream that never happened, but that you miss. And since that dream never came true, you lose hope.

What's there for you now besides reality?

It doesn't matter, you're not going anywhere.

Like Dumbledore said,

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live”

Sometimes, it takes a while to accept even that.

But it's needed.