At its heart, Midori loves my sister is a story about taking an earnest approach to inherently dishonest relationships. In Sui’s case it’s having to hide that she loves her older sister’s boyfriend, and in Midori’s case it’s grappling with the fact he essentially accidentally groomed Sui. Despite these two massive moral shortcomings that are characterized by lying to Momo in one way or another, both Sui and Midori’s most noted trait is that they are honest to a fault, being especially bad at masking their expressions. In falling in love with each other, they both recognize they shouldn’t, but are unable to hold backtheir feelings regardless, Sui before the timeskip, and primarily Midori after. Like Sui says to Ayame, even if she knows it’s wrong she wants to enjoy those feelings anyway, she can’t bring herself to pretend they don’t exist.

Interestingly enough, both of these characters’ secondary love interests share the role of direct opposition to these ideas. The weaponization of the childhood friend trope which is normally used to represent ideas of purity, normalcy, and most prominently comfortability are used to offset the murky relationship between the two leads. Momo and Midori are a successful childhood friends to lovers trope, while Ayame to Sui is the signature losing male lead childhood friend. Ayame puts it pretty well himself, putting it in otome terms, that he’d be the normal route for Sui, while Midori is the thorny path, but what if Sui wants to take the thorny path anyway? It’s important to note that Sui doesn’t reject Ayame three times just because she can’t forget Midori but mostly because she doesn’t want to lead Ayame on in a pretend relationship. The ideas of “what a normal romance is” are challenged by Sui’s unwavering honesty, recognizing that liking Midori is abnormal and Ayame is a societally respectable option that she believes probably could fall in love with, but still choosing to believe in whatever her heart happens to gravitate towards anyway, which unfortunately was Midori.

Because Sui is the victim in this dynamic, it’s much easier to rationalize her feelings, but the way Midori feels is what really hammers home what the story is really about. Obviously there isn’t much moral defense for Midori, he realized Sui liked him while she was a freshman and did basically nothing to try and damper those feelings properly, because he is unable to be dishonest to Sui, as even before he liked her back he was unable to give her a reason to stop liking him. Midori could have easily put on a fake persona to get Sui to stop liking him, and he did try distancing himself, but his breakup with his childhood friend turned girlfriend, Momo, signifies when he stops being dishonest with himself. For a while in their relationship, they hadn’t gone on any dates, and while they did care for each other, they both accepted they didn’t romantically love each other and continued a loveless relationship anyways to try and hold on to their idea of normalcy and comfortability. After they break up, Midori initially tries to be cold and walk out of Sui’s life without troubling her more, but when she honestly tells him how she feels, he is unable to be distant and again is honest about how special Sui is to him, despite knowing deep down it would reignite her feelings and continue to trap her emotions.

As the story progresses, Midori only becomes increasingly aware of how much he affects Sui, but still is unable to mask his at the time platonic feelings for her. Luckily for him, she is a university student herself when they happen to meet again and Midori actually starts catching feelings, but he isn’t naive enough to forget that he still basically groomed her and would also be betraying Momo to pursue Sui romantically. Aware of all of this, as per usual, even after he tells Ayame he wouldn’t set Sui down that thorny path, he is honest to a fault and this time with actual romantic feelings. The circumstances are erased and only the honest feelings are left.

To be honest, outside the obviously strange name, this is a lot of what makes this series so hard to recommend. I can’t just pretend it’s a normal good romcom with a strange premise, but I truly love how the story uses the controversy that comes with an age gap to bolster its themes. Age-gap being a subgenre at all in Shoujo has always been kind of weird to me despite a few of my favorite shoujo including it, but this story was both refreshing and eye-opening for me. Two hopelessly honest people stuck with feelings in a comically dishonest and twisted relationship, betrayal of a sibling, betrayal of a partner, potential grooming, and despite all of that, they can’t pretend they don’t love one another, and selfishly want to preserve these emotions that they know are wrong. As the story progresses, I do hope Ayame can somehow win over Sui and help her get over this horrendous scenario, but at the end of the day, Sui will love who she loves because she follows her heart before any social guidelines. Ayame is slowly becoming less and less okay with being her 2nd choice, and with recent chapters, Sui has expressed that she is still unable to fully move on, so in this story of moral and true love, it's also possible neither will win, only time will tell.