‘The Summer Hikaru Died’: A horrifying gay romance you can’t help but root for

What sets Ryohei Takeshita's adaptation of The Summer Hikaru Died, whose final two episodes are scheduled to drop Sept. 20 and 27, apart from typical BL (boy love) anime shows is how different yet intertwined these secrets are—and how quickly they both come to light.

"You're…you're not Hikaru, are you?" For those unfamiliar with the 2012 manga by Mokumokuren, Yoshiki's question early on takes us aback even more than it does Hikaru himself. It comes just a few minutes into the premiere after we learn that Hikaru briefly went missing on the mountain nearby, six months earlier. But what's more shocking is Hikaru's response.

"How did you…I thought I copied him perfectly." And with that, Hikaru's left eye melts as eldritch slime oozes out of his face, much like the ice cream that Yoshiki drops in horror at the sight of his best friend's transformation. "This body and personality ain't mine," admits the creature that's secretly inhabited Hikaru's body since his death six months prior. "But…I like you a whole lot. So please. I don't wanna kill you."

The words clench as tightly around Yoshiki's heart as the arms of his dead best friend do when the creature hugs him, begging for secrecy. But still, Yoshiki almost immediately accepts this doppelganger into his life, despite the very real danger it poses. "Hikaru's gone," reasons Yoshiki. "That ain't gonna change. So, even if he's a fake, I want him to stay."

Better to hang out with an eldritch horror than have no friend at all, it seems. Yet Hikaru wasn't just a friend to Yoshiki. He was always so much more than that, even if Yoshiki never admitted those feelings out loud. And the creature's affection towards him proves that this was also true for Hikaru before he passed.

The Summer Hikaru Died was always going to be an uncomfortable watch. It's right there in the name. Yet the discomfort Yoshiki suffers following that reveal exists in tandem with a different kind of tension that's still uncomfortable, yes, but also much more relatable to anyone queer who's grappled with the desire to voice their longing out loud.

Yoshiki struggles to reconcile the loss of his friend with the growing attraction he feels for the thing that now wears Hikaru's skin. He knows it's wrong, but why does it feel so good still? That tension's felt most viscerally in the second episode when the two boys find themselves alone together in the gym storage room.

If you were watching a typical BL anime, this might be the moment where that irresistible pull between Yoshiki and Hikaru leads to something more physical, and it does here too, except what comes next bonds them far deeper than mere romance ever could.

Wishing to show Yoshiki what's really "inside" of him, Hikaru unbuttons his shirt to reveal an impossible slit in the chest of his host body. Yoshiki can't look at first, overcome with the sight of Hikaru's bare torso, but Hikaru urges him on to look and even stick his hand inside.

It "feels nice," Hikaru says, at first, and when Yoshiki reaches in further, the demonic force begins to moan in pleasure as Yoshiki’s fingers move within. "Yeah, that's the spot," Hikaru says. "Nobody's ever touched me here before." But then Yoshiki is pulled further into this void too fast, and he quickly pulls back out again, afraid of what's happening to them both. While Hikaru laughs it off and offers "a free look" at his body, Yoshiki turns away in shame, and even bats his friend's hand away.

This shift from intimate to unsettling, this merging of sensual and grotesque, feels distinctly queer, wrapping up complex feelings of grief, shame, and yearning in a secret that bonds the two boys as othered and different—but also special. The anime leans hard into this, dispelling any fears that CygamesPictures would tone down the queerness or feed into ambiguity for their adaptation.

The Summer Hikaru Died thrums with a suppressed, near unbearable tension in which danger, but also lust and desire permeate every frame. Each lingering look, each innocuous touch, even each shift in expression speaks to the intensity of this—which brings Yoshiki as much comfort as it does fear.

On the surface, this fragile dynamic risks suggesting that queerness is demonic and evil. But to queer viewers, it's clear that The Summer Hikaru Died isn't feeding into harmful tropes. Instead, it's externalizing the internalized homophobia that Yoshiki and countless teens like him have battled before, filtered through the kind of horror lens that's long appealed to members of the LGBTQ+ community.

If anything is unquestionably evil here, it's the pressures that led to this struggle in the first place, the bigotry that drove Yoshiki to fear the parts of himself that he should be accepting most. That's not to say there are any easy answers to be found. Questions coalesce in the sweltering heat, hanging in the endless stillness as Hikaru and Yoshiki navigate feelings that might seem freakish or uncomfortable, but actually couldn't be more natural at their core.

Whatever else happens, the one thing that can't be refuted is the love that Yoshiki shared once with Hikaru, and continues to share now with the latter’s otherworldly doppelganger. By embracing that messy connection so readily through both metaphor and text, The Summer Hikaru Died doesn't just set itself apart from typical BL stories. It establishes itself as a groundbreaking anime that expands the scope of queer storytelling to create something truly unique and monstrous and even beautiful.