YMMV / Blue Flag

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • During the School Festival, Toma approaches Masumi and says "You said we were the same, but you're wrong. I'm still not the same as you. So I'll support you...". This vague sentence referring to the already quite vague Wham Line in Chapter 5 created a number of guesses. They include:
    • Toma can't find himself to forget or ignore his same-sex crush and find a straight relationship. He thinks this would be bad for them both and intends to support Masumi in chasing after Kuze.
    • Toma thinks Masumi is strong for burying her own socially controversial feelings, but doesn't have the same strength, and still wants to chase Taichi, even if he ends up hurting himself but will support her attempt at a straight relationship.
    • Toma wants to help Masumi better come to terms with her sexuality, something he is already okay with. He intends to support her both in coming out to him and possibly to others.
    • Toma sees that Masumi has given up on being with Futaba, for any reason, however, he himself hasn't given up on confessing or even dating Taichi, and intends to support her in trying to get the girl.
  • The series discusses, at great length, the expectations society has for relationships between men and women, and how their actions towards each other are "meant" to be interpreted. Working back from the final chapter, did Taichi really fall for Futaba, or did he misdiagnose his own jealousy at seeing Toma and Futaba together and try to make sense of his feelings based on what he thought was "correct" in that situation?
• Arc Fatigue: Despite it being the moment that everyone was waiting for, the chapters after Toma's love confession to Taichi have been criticized for being rather slow and tedious. Nearly 10 chapters after Toma got suspended from school, and not much has actually occurred other than characters monologuing and arguing about ideas about what's okay in society in kind of abstract ways. Multiple chapters go by where Taichi just sits around quietly as others talk around him, making people wish he would hurry up and take a position on the matter in some way. About the only notable thing that has happened since Chapter 40 is that Mami realized that Masumi is also gay like Toma.
• Awesome Art: The panel composition for starters and most fans of this series also praised the art style, where using simplicity as the background the mangaka showed an impressive range of emotions from the characters that complement the overall story.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Out of the main trio, Taichi and Futaba come under the most criticism, especially after they both start dating each other. Both are considered less interesting than the rest of the main cast, but on the former's part he comes under fire for his mixed bag treatment of his relationships with Toma and Futaba, while the latter is criticized for her passivity and her being protected by most of the good side.
  • Mami for the most part is liked for her very honest personality or scrutinized for her speeches. Her desire to have platonic male friendships also gets criticism, seeing it as trying to have her cake and eat it too when it comes to her crush on Toma.
  • Shingo gets some criticism as well. For some, they like how his relationship with Mami remains platonic or how he is usually a voice of reason for Toma's friend group, but others think his later conversations serve as a mouthpiece for the mangaka since he normally never gets called out for those opinions, and his neutral stance in between Toma and Kensuke isn't helping either of their cases.
• Broken Aesop: Mami's rant in Chapter 32 about how she hates how people think men and women can never be true friends without romance getting in the way is capped off by how she mentions that her attempt at befriending Taichi was to help her understand how to get closer to Toma. While she genuinely wants to be friends with Taichi, some found it poorly timed, which even she admits.
• Come for the X, Stay for the Y: Come for the LGBT theme that is going to be taken seriously in a shonen romance manga, stay for the the school life theme where characters are facing their adulthood in a realistic manner.
• Common Knowledge: No, the story isn't a Boys Love manga. It's a shounen, and the story is more than just Taichi and Toma's relationship.
• Designated Villain: Mami Yagihara. Readers don't have a good vibe from her due to being an Alpha Bitch character that would potentially wreak havoc upon the story, but as far as an Alpha Bitch go she's not even that bad; being slightly hostile towards Taichi's group after Toma's injury is fairly reasonable for someone that can be immature, and while In-Universe the other girls dislike her for hogging up Toma for herself, it turns out that Toma never clearly turned her down and gave her the impression that she still has a chance.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Einosuke, one of Toma's younger teammates. He is the only one to have a problem with Taichi, but he gained a lot more love from the fandom when he apologized earnestly to Taichi.
• Friendly Fandoms: Due to the similar LGBT-friendly themes, some fans of Blue Flag also find themselves interested in the manga Our Dreams at Dusk.
• Harsher in Hindsight: They weren't right about everything, but the girls gossiping about the Love Triangle in Chapter 42 were right about Futaba and Taichi breaking up after high school and Toma and Taichi's relationship being so strong that they end up together.
• It Was His Sled: Toma and Masumi's same-sex crushes on their friends Taichi and Futaba respectively is an early spoiler, but it's such a huge selling point of the manga that people who haven't read it yet already know. The official English release dropped any pretense of keeping it a secret, including Toma and Masumi's crushes in the opening summary.
• LGBT Fanbase: Toma turning out to be gay and in love with Taichi, as well as Masumi being in love with Futaba has not gone unnoticed by gay fans who instantly fell for these characters after the reveal. The large amount of realistic Gayngst of the manga and a lack of the comedic gay stereotypes usually seen in manga (especially shonen manga) added a depth that gay fans don't usually see in Japanese media, and some nuance and plot points about it rare even for Western media, and became instantly attracted to it. The fact that it doesn't chicken out and actually had Taichi and Toma, not only become a couple, but a married couple at that, added to its appeal among gay fans.
• Misaimed Fandom: There's a large number of fans that think that Mami's problem in her sub-arc boils down to "maintaining a friendly male relationship despite romance", and think the problem would just resolve itself if she took herself off the market or started falling in love with/dating Shingo.^note The reasoning being that for the former, nobody would hypothetically break up their preexisting relationships for her if she got coupled off; in the latter, the message would be "boys and girls can continue to be friends while they're lovers". Both solutions are explicitly shown to not work, as Mami cites that people would still get suspicious of her relationship with boys even if they have a steady, with the girlfriends themselves accusing her of stealing their men. Note that they agree with the "boys and girls can never be true platonic friends" statement, and think that Mami is at a stage where she's in denial of this belief and needs to accept it to "mature".
• Moe:
  • Kuze inspires a lot of protective feelings because of her low self-esteem and her wish to become stronger. She's also cute as a button, and even more so when her hair gets shortened.
  • Taichi isn't exactly far behind, especially because he often gets portrayed in a super-deformed style that makes him very similarly cute to Kuze.
• One-Scene Wonder: Chapter 18, where Noda (the black-haired girl wearing a backpack) in the convenience store became well-liked due to defending Kuze instead of affirming her friend's statement that Kuze is using Taichi to be close with Toma.
• OT3: To many fans who can't decide between Futaba/Taichi and Toma/Taichi, Futaba/Taichi/Toma has grown popular. In some rarer cases, Futaba/Toma/Taichi/Itachi has been satisfactory to people who want everyone to have their Unrequited Love corresponded.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: It is fair to say that Mami did not have many fans for a good portion of the series, considering her main traits were being extremely clingy towards Toma who clearly was ambivalent towards her and being pouty the rest of the time. And when it seemed she was preparing an Operation: Jealousy with Taichi (starting to hang out with him out of the blue despite previously showing nothing but disdain towards him, and right after he started dating Futaba too), people expected to dislike her even more. But then she received an arc for herself that gave her more character and depth, and we learned her rather sympathetic motivations and the fact that the aforementioned Operation: Jealousy was no such thing, just a very poorly timed attempt at becoming Taichi's friend. She has gained a fair amount more fans since then.
• The Scrappy: It's extremely difficult to find someone who actually likes Kensuke. At best, they're neutral toward him. At most, they dislike him for his entitled and forceful behavior toward Mami and how he essentially forces Toma out of the closet by reacting way out of proportion about something that wasn't even meant for him to be known in the first place. Not even his Freudian Excuse about being molested by a man before helps him be any more sympathetic, because he's pretty much generalizing Toma to be in the same category.
• Ship Mates: You can expect that everyone who ships Toma/Taichi is also shipping Futaba/Itachi. During the later stages of the manga, Masumi/Mami began to pop up after their first non-hostile interaction together.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: After the revelations that Toma is in love with Taichi and Itachi is in love with Futaba, there's a debate among fans what should be the endgame couple, particularly, who Taichi should end up with.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The final two chapters are packed with enough twists and time passing to have warranted a whole arc, if not an entire second half. During said chapters, partially in narration, the cast graduate high school, Taichi and Futaba break up a few years later and don't speak for a few more years after that due to awkwardness, Futaba gets engaged to a new man, and at her wedding, we learn that Masumi married a man (who oddly is similar to Futaba) and, the big one, Taichi and Toma end up together. It's disappointing that all of this occurs off-screen.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Following the festival, people have started becoming tired of the never-ending suffering the main characters go through, which someone has described as "emotional Torture Porn". This together with some Values Dissonance towards the treatment of LGBT characters has made some believe they are being led to a never-ending cascade of misery to a beloved group of characters.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Japanese fans pondered about the exact nature of Masumi's husband in the finale. While most acknowledged his awkwardness being the result of attending a party for people he's unfamiliar with, some Japanese fans took notice of him asking Toma about his looks, alongside his mentioning that he "doesn't know where he fits in" after marrying Masumi and his awkward pauses between sentences, surmising that he may be a transgender man worried that he doesn't pass.
• The Un-Twist: Fans were not surprised when Chapter 11 shows us that Masumi has a crush on Kuze, given how overprotective she is of them and how close she seems to want to be with them.
• Values Dissonance: In Chapter 47, Seiya and Toma have a talk that seems much more conservative to Western readers than for Japanese, to whom the conversation might sound even reasonable. Seiya seems to dance around the subject that he knows that Toma is gay. He says he wouldn't agree with it and object, but would never disown Toma, and understands he is just looking for his own version of happiness.

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