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These friendships have something lacking (Rent-A-Girlfriend Ch. 245)

This week, we get a long overdue interlude with Kazuya confronting the fallout with Kibe after Paradise and the now-revealed secret of Chizuru’s true identity among their friends. This is a great opportunity to look back at Kazuya and Chizuru’s attitudes toward their friendships and how both sets of relationships have something lacking. Let’s take a look.

Kibe saying he’ll gut Kazuya is supposed to be a sweet moment. Mmkay.

Kazuya and validation

The big thing to remember about Kazuya is that his friends and family constantly doubt him. Recall that when Kuri and Kibe saw Kazuya with Chizuru, they immediately assumed she was trying to sell him something (or trying to get him involved in a cult). Played for laughs as this was, it is a constant theme in Kazuya’s relationships, as his family couldn’t believe Chizuru could be his girlfriend, either, and his father once assumed Kazuya could only be giving Chizuru money because he must’ve borrowed some from her before. In other words, Kazuya can do almost no good in their eyes. The only time he really ever got recognition from them was from Nagomi in Paradise, the culmination of a long string of doubts finally seen for what they were.

But Kibe doesn’t have that kind of epiphany. Here, he excuses Kazuya’s deception by saying… that Chizuru is worth it. This continuation of Kazuya’s friends and family having such Chizuru-centered morality is disturbing at best, compounded by how he says that Kazuya better make it work or else. I get that Kibe doesn’t want to see what they went through be for nothing, but this is warped. There’s really no way around it. And Kibe doesn’t bring himself to do what Nagomi did, which is apologize to Kazuya in turn for having saddled him with the weight of being a disappointment again and again and again. As much as Kazuya sees Kibe as a good friend, Kazuya cannot see that all these people around him (except, crucially, Chizuru, and maybe his mother) treat him as a fuckup first.

Chizuru and her… friends?

Chizuru said she would reveal the truth to her friends… if she had to. (105)

Chizuru’s relationship with her friends has always been strange. We’ve never gotten the real sense that Chizuru was actually close with her school friends. Kazuya speaks out here assuring Sasano that Chizuru isn’t putting on a facade for them, but his assurances can only go so far. They didn’t know Chizuru was an actress before (at least, Kazuya mentioned they might find out, and Chizuru said she would come clean to them after if they did find out).

One can rightly get the impression that Chizuru isn’t really friends with these girls beyond a surface level. That stands in contrast to her acting friends: we’ve seen her trade messages and talk with Shiori (244), the girl she did her first play with before. We also know she would go shopping with Umi (124), ostensibly for more than just Kazuya’s phone case.

And yet now we are primed to look at Chizuru’s relationship with her school friends more closely. Will Kazuya actually bring up this point, and how would Chizuru act on it? This is a bit of a mystery since we don’t know how they are truly important to her, if at all. It’s also not clear that this is a point that will come up while Chizuru is taking Kazuya to her grandma’s house.

So, in one case, we see a friendship that doesn’t seem to acknowledge how imbalanced it is, with Kibe and Kazuya not even considering that Kibe has mistreated Kazuya in any way. In another, we can’t even be sure Chizuru values her school friendships whatsoever. These unbalanced relationships leave some tension still in the story going forward.

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