Haida Falling For Retsuko When He Saw Her Sneakily Filling Her Water Bottles From The Company Cooler

I don’t have time to type up a proper and polished meta post right now (because, much like Retsuko, I have work in the morning), but I wanted to say a couple things about the Haida/Retsuko relationship as depicted in season three while it’s still fresh in my mind.

First:

Haida falling for Retsuko when he saw her sneakily filling her water bottles from the company cooler shows that he does like her for who she actually is.

A recurring theme since the end of season one has been that Haida doesn’t know the “real” Retsuko, and that he primarily likes the image of Retsuko that he’s built up in his head. He says this to her in the hospital room at the end of season one, and it was touched upon again and again this season, particularly once Haida discovered that Retsuko was secretly in an idol group and hadn’t told him about it. At the office, Retsuko presents herself as a diligent, passive office worker who lets herself be pushed around by her boss and others. She’s sweet and polite, and a bit shy. This seems to be the Retsuko that Haida fell for.

But in the scene when he’s drinking with Fenneko, we find out that’s not the case. Haida tells Fenneko that he at first thought that Retsuko was too hard-working, which (given the context of the water cooler story) makes it seem as though the front that Retsuko puts on—diligent, sweet, shy, model employee—wasn’t attractive to Haida. It isn’t until he witnessed Retsuko “stealing” water from the company water cooler while trying to be sneaky about it that he started to develop feelings for her. In that moment, Retsuko thought she was alone, so she behaved in a way she ordinarily wouldn’t in front of her coworkers. She behaved in a way that was raw, that was honest to who she was, and that was who Haida started to develop feelings for. He started to develop feelings for the Retsuko he saw when she thought no one else was around. Haida hasn’t seen that side of Retsuko too often, because she hasn’t let him, but it’s safe to say that Haida won’t stop having feelings for her when he gets to know her even more. Rather, he’ll love her even more strongly.

Which brings me to point two …

Haida brought her to the karaoke room because he wanted to give her room to express herself honestly.

I haven’t looked at The Discourse™ too deeply yet, and frankly I don’t really want to, but what glimpses I’ve seen of it have indicated that people are upset at Haida for dragging Retsuko out of her mom’s house and having a heavy metal face off with her in order to get her to stop hiding and return to work, with him to be there by her side to protect her. As someone with a bad anxiety disorder who has had brushes with stalking in the past (though thankfully I wasn’t attacked like Retsuko was), I definitely agreed with Retsuko when she pushed back against Haida and I can see where others are coming from when they say that he came on too strong the way he did, that it was too much, too soon.

However:

We don’t know how long it’s been since the incident. When Fenneko said that Haida has been pining after Retsuko for five years, I was shocked. The three seasons combined certainly don’t feel like that long, and I’m sure that this is meant to mean that he’s been pining for her even before the show started (which tracks), but it’s a good reminder that time can pass far more quickly in Aggretsuko than we’d expect. For us that stalking incident just happened, but for all we know Retsuko has been holed up in her parents’ house for months. I would like to give Haida the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t yank Retsuko out of her mother’s house two days after the incident. I mean, we don’t know for sure, so maybe that is what happened, but I just feel like it’s been quite a bit longer for that, especially for Gori and Washimi to go along like they did (because you know they wouldn’t let anything happen that would hurt Retsuko).

Retsuko is never honest with Haida, so he pushed her to get that honesty. Haida says it himself when talking to Tadano in the plane: No matter how many times he asks Retsuko how she is, she always says that she’s fine and refuses to open up to him. And you know, that is her prerogative, she doesn’t have to tell him things if she doesn’t want to. However, this explains why Haida took her to a place where he knew she would be able to express herself (something that Gori and Washimi likely confirmed): Because he wants to be able to help her, but he can’t do that if she won’t be honest with him about how she’s feeling. If you’ll notice, most of what Haida says in the karaoke room isn’t about him wanting Retsuko to be his girlfriend (in fact, he doesn’t really bring it up beyond showing the match results; instead he says he wants to offer her safe harbor, wants to make her feel comfortable living her life again, and that doesn’t have to be romantic); rather, it’s about encouraging Retsuko to open up and live her life again instead of shutting herself away, and we can take this to be both metaphorical and literal. It’s also worth it to note that Haida didn’t grow angry when Retsuko started snapping and screaming at him; rather, he took it in stride and even encouraged that, pushing her with heavy metal lyrics of his own. Retsuko won’t open up to Haida in ordinary circumstances, or at least she hasn’t, so he took her to the one place where she would be able to literally scream at him if necessary, because if that’s what she needs to open up and get everything off her chest, so be it.

Retsuko does need to start living her life again. Look, what happened to Retsuko is absolutely terrifying. I get it. I’ve lived it (though again, not quite to that extent). But as terrifying as it is, she can’t put her life on pause forever. Eventually, she has to get back out there. She has to go back to work (not necessarily at the same company, but somewhere). She has to be able to go out again. She has to be able to feel safe in her own home again. Yes, she feels safe at her parents’ house, but as a person, Retsuko won’t be happy if she stays holed up in her parents’ house forever. It’s completely understandable that she takes some time to deal with what happened with her. But eventually, self-care in that sense becomes self-harm. Part of the healing process is going back out into the world and learning to feel safe in those spaces again. And doing so is monumentally easier with someone by your side who is there to offer you that support. Haida taking Retsuko’s hand and telling her that he will punch the world with her—a.k.a., it’s not Retsuko versus the world, she’s not alone, she has an ally—is Haida offering her the support she needs. He’s not saying, “Get back to work!” and throwing her into the deep end of the pool by herself. He’s taking her hand and saying he’ll walk into the water with her. And that’s something that she honestly needs. Retsuko can’t heal completely if she stays in her childhood bedroom all day every day, hiding from the world. She has to get back out there and face it. Haida is offering her the helping hand she needs to do that. While the way he offered it is unconventional, so is Retsuko herself. That she was able to go back to work after that scene with him shows that it was the help that Retsuko needed, even if it wasn’t the help that she (at the time) wanted.

Just like the ending of season one, whether Retsuko and Haida are dating right now is ambiguous. Personally, I don’t think they are. Again, though Haida showed her the dating app results, what he was really offering in the karaoke room was a supportive hand to help her feel safe out in the world again. Plus, Retsuko didn’t say anything in the karaoke room that suggested she wanted to date him. So I think that, in season four, we’ll open with them still just friends—but closer friends than before. And perhaps by the end of season four, they’ll end up dating.

But either way, the main takeaways here are:

Haida does like Retsuko for who she is, she’s just let him see very little of her true self, and

While unconventional, what Haida did in the karaoke room was ultimately what was best for Retsuko, especially since they never tell us how much time has passed since the attack and the scene in the karaoke room (meaning that it’s likely much longer than it seems to us, the viewers).