On Gero's feelings — the coin resting in his own palm

Manga spoilers through ch. 174. This is my second post. The first one was about Mei, so this time I wanted to look at the other side of things, which turned out to be the harder half to write about. The usual response, after all, is that there isn't much there to write about in the first place. It runs a little long, so here's the short version. The rest is below if you'd like it. The common reading is that Gero has feelings toward the candidates and none toward Mei. I'd like to suggest a different way of looking at it: both are there, and only one of them has a name waiting for it. The face turned up is marriage prospect. Everyone on that side arrived pre-labeled, and a feeling that lands somewhere already labeled gets sorted the moment it shows up. The face against his palm is adviser. That label has no room for romance in it, so whatever turns up there never gets filed — not missing, just unnamed. Unnamed isn't the same as unimportant, though. By now Mei may well be the person Gero could least do without, and the story got there without ever putting a word to it. Ch. 100 seems to show the sorting fail as it happens, and the detail that convinced me is that Gero opens the friendship category himself and then closes it himself. I'm not claiming any of this amounts to romance on his side. He's never named it, and I've tried to keep the more cautious reading of each scene standing. The frame. I keep picturing a coin resting flat on an open palm. One face is turned up where anyone can see it, and the other is lying against his own hand. It's one coin, which matters — what he feels toward the candidates and whatever he has toward Mei aren't two different things, just two faces of the same one. And nobody else is hiding the underside from him. His own hand is the only thing in the way. What's stamped on each face is a role. The side facing up reads marriage prospect. The side against his palm reads adviser. Why the upturned face sorts right away. Everyone on that side came to him through the marriage hunt, so the stamp was already there before any feeling had a chance to arrive. This is a prospect, this is the part of my life where that sort of thing happens. My guess is that Gero recognizes a flutter quickly not because it's bigger, but because there was already a place waiting for it to go. Adviser is a perfectly good stamp too — it has plenty of room for trust, for reliance, for gratitude. What it has no room for is romance. So a feeling that fits none of those isn't turned away, exactly. It just sits there with nowhere to be put, on the face he happens to be resting his hand on. From the inside, I doubt that feels like love at all. It probably feels more like what is this. How much of it is sitting unfiled. Worth saying plainly that unfiled doesn't mean small. Think about where Mei actually stands in Gero's life at this point. Mei is the one who showed him that a life outside the family was even possible. In ch. 157, when he decides his whole path has done nothing but hurt the people around him, Mei is the one who gets him back on his feet — and what he says afterward is that with Kinosaki beside him, there's nothing he can't get through. In ch. 173, when he gathers everyone he has to go break his own house, Mei is already standing beside him rather than among the people he's setting out to protect. That isn't a working arrangement that happened to run long. It's someone who's become genuinely necessary to him. And the story managed all of it while the only word available for the relationship was still adviser. The stamp is what's missing the mark. The weight isn't. Ch. 100. Gero offers to take Mei somewhere as a thank-you. There's nothing romantic in the offer itself. Mei's answer is that this is a date, and that the two of them aren't in that sort of relationship. He's caught off guard, backs off, says to forget he mentioned it. Then he mutters, mostly to himself — but we're friends, we can hang out, right? — and then, still to himself, no, it's not the same. He reaches for a category on his own and takes it back on his own. That's the part that stays with me. Nobody sorts an absence, and if this were simple fondness for someone he values working with, the sentence could have stopped at we're friends. That shelf holds fondness perfectly well. There's a more cautious reading here, and I think it's a fair one — he's fairly inexperienced socially, and the image of two guys wandering around an amusement park may have just struck him as odd on its own terms. I'd rather hold that alongside my reading than against it. What seems to hold up either way is that he tried to file the thing and couldn't. The face turned outward. The visible side is real, and I don't want to imply otherwise. Gero rescues, protects, turns up when it counts, and the candidates fell for something that genuinely belongs to him. When one of them says in ch. 172 that he'd have done the same for anyone, I read that as an accurate description of that face rather than a knock on what she saw. It points outward, at everyone. That's simply what that side is like. The part I can't work out. Ch. 173 puts both the family and the marriage hunt on the table. If Gero wins that fight, both stamps come off with them. Nobody is a marriage prospect once there's no hunt, and nobody is the adviser once there's no client. What's underneath doesn't go anywhere, since none of it was produced by the stamps to begin with. Which leaves the question I don't have an answer to. What happens to a coin once both faces have been wiped blank?