"How does one become such a great artist?" — "How do you define great?" — "To stand the test of time." — "I wonder if forever exists."

Artistic, pensive, beautifully crafted, and unique in its cinematographic ways—‘Wakatte Ite mo: The Shapes of Love’ explores the vulnerability of struggling, waiting, hoping, and loving. It perfectly portrays the essence of human nature and captures love in its many different shapes under a refreshingly realistic light. It represents these themes through art in a mature and abstract manner, much like the concept of humanity and love itself.

In a world where "there is nothing more uncertain than a person's heart," the story follows the lives of artists who create art driven by their inspiration and their desire to create their own sense of forever. They are ready to put aside their usual composure and values in order to seek the heart of their loved one. For example, Kosaka Ren, the male lead, wants forever but acts in the opposite manner; however, his constant changes in girlfriends are his way of experiencing it and surrounding himself with the beauty of new beginnings. Another lead, Osakabe, thinks it's bad to act on lust, yet his world melts the second he sees his crush’s smile. Lastly, there is Ikushima Ruki, who wants to be with his crush but lets her be with another if it means gaining her trust and friendship first.

Ultimately, the series perfectly encapsulated the original webteeon’s overall message, reinforcing it with scenes and lines that portray its message more explicitly instead of requiring heavy analyses like it was for the webtoon’s Korean adaptation; ‘Nevertheless,’. The shortened run time allowed the leads’ journey to be explored more thoroughly without weighing down the whole series with its heaviness. Additionally, the poetic and inspirational narration made it easier to grasp its concept and allowed for a more direct interpretation of the webtoon’s work—keeping its core themes but casting aside tropes that don’t add to its main focal point.

Through Hamasaki Miu’s eyes, the female lead, Ren is the butterfly—beautiful, attractive, light, and seemingly free—giving her the illusion that he has it easy. The series adds a new meaning to the significance of butterflies: they are thought to be a symbol of freedom, but actually, they just fly the same paths over and over. Maybe the best thing they can do is just enjoy the ride. This goes for both of them because they are both like butterflies, or at least, they both try to carry the essence of butterflies by capturing their fleeting beauty through art. When Ren finds Miu, he wishes to metaphorically capture her, who is like a butterfly to him, but one who hasn't opened its wings yet.

Ren wants to approach her, mostly out of self-interest, but also because of a certain fate-like pull that builds up following their many coincidental meetings. However, he is a playboy by nature—flirty and manipulative. He seems more curious about how far he himself is willing to go or devote to her rather than the other way around, not caring about her reactions and staying consistent in his devotion of attention that he borrows to her.

His push and pull plays with her emotions; his stance in his affection towards her grounded in unsteady terrain, teetering her back and forth into the territory of hopefulness and then desperation. This constant shift in Miu’s emotions highlights the overall theme of the series, which is that she can't help but hope even if she knows things will come to an end or leave a scar. Nevertheless, Ren constantly ignites these feelings of hope within her, making her want to reach out and seal the faith of their relationship—an impulsive act that mirrors his own tendency to act on impulse.

Kosaka Ren is a rather peculiar character. Since he is not good at sharing his feelings, he uses art to communicate them. Even we, as viewers, don't know him quite well and have been misguided by him many times with deceptions based on what we do see from him. For example, we don't know if whenever he picks up a call, it's his girlfriend. He never clarifies misunderstandings.

He’s essentially a canvas of however one sees him, having different versions of himself through different pairs of eyes, like a piece of art. Like someone interpreting a sculpture, Miu, as well as everyone else, can interpret him, what he says, his actions, and what is and isn’t known about him in their own way. Through Ren, who is like a sculpture, Miu hopes to find her forever. And through her, he sees yet again another chance to find his true meaning and define who he really is despite his traumas and past experiences in life. This is essentially why he leads on and makes so many people try to fall in love with him—because he wants to find the one, his true self, and his forever.

It is said by Miu’s toxic ex boyfriend that the female lead's wings are tied down, leaving only her thoughts to wander. However, there’s another interpretation suggested in the series: that her wings are rather too heavy to go forward—not tied down by external forces and submitted to others, as her ex had suggested through his sculptures of her falling to the ground and begging him to stay—but perhaps heavy because of the weight of their worth and hope, waiting for their reason to take flight in a world that keeps letting her down. The female lead, whose name means "beautiful wings," beautifully encapsulates this struggle of waiting for hope; hope that ultimately introduces itself in her life through the male lead.

From the very beginning of the series, during their first encounter, Ren recognizes this wait for hope of hers through her pleas for her boyfriend to stay. Instead of perceiving her pleas as a desperate and hopeless attempt of begging for something long gone, he sees that all she wants is to hold a promise of a future with someone, and that she has hope for something more than what she already has.

There are a lot of similarities that the female and male lead share—their fear of abandonment, their wish to freeze a loved one’s heart in time and gain a forever happy side by side with them, and their struggles in finding what they want in life. Though Ren doesn’t express his struggles and desires aloud like Miu does, he addresses them through his fiery art, which tells another story from the nonchalant version of himself that is presented through his character and the aloof image that he lets on—reserved, quiet, and who lets other people make things up and narrate his life.

Despite their seemingly stark contrast, both faces of himself that he puts out into the world stem from the thoughts and emotions. His art paints a strong image of resilience, longing desire, and determination in pursuing one’s desires—emotions that give him the impression of being lost and left with nothing but wavering emotions. In real life, these feelings of his manifest through his calm composure that radiates a sense of aloofness and indifference.

This overwhelming desire to find the key to freedom and his true self drives him to act like the playboy type, not knowing who to love or dedicate himself to. His art, on the other hand, portrays his sense of lostness as something fiery and bright and that drives him to maddening lengths, putting him in a fight against society’s typical representation of love and relationships, and forcing him to confront his true feelings.

Ren, in a way, relates to Miu and sees himself in the scene before his eyes, where he sees her for the first time. Through his eyes, witnessing her meltdown opens a window of opportunity. Ren likes to capture that happiness in the brief flutter of color in his world, like a butterfly, so he’s drawn to her strong personality and wants to capture the beauty that lies in the most beautiful and intense human emotion, which is love. From that moment on, he tries to draw that emotion out of her by making her fall for him. He does the same for other girls when he flirts, all to satisfy his somewhat selfish desires to only have a portrait of pairs of loving gazes around him so that he’s surrounded by beauty. At the same time, through this tactic of his, he gets attention from the opposite gender, mirroring his mom’s absence in his life.

Even if Ren’s actions can be perceived as stemming out of selfishness, his supposed attraction to her is also beneficial to Miu because he wants to awaken this strong, powerful, and beautiful feeling of love within her. He wants to make her wings flutter and for her beauty to be set free by expressing her emotions instead of restraining them and staying tied to the past that she’s stuck in. This is vividly illustrated when he guides her to smash the sculpture where she’s begging for her ex to stay. But her perspective of it contradicts his own: he sees her beauty through that sculpture; nothing bad and submissive about it, but instead, brave for not being scared to reach out and try to grasp what she truly wanted—something he doesn’t know how to dedicate himself to doing.

Similarly, just like how Miu struggled to be freed from her painful last moments with her toxic ex that had been frozen in time both metaphorically and literally, Ren also wishes to be freed from his own struggles. For him, the butterfly doesn't represent something light and nonchalant and non-troubled as Miu had suggested, but is rather representative of a small precious thing that tries to navigate through the harsh and turbulent-winded world with its colorful yet light-weighed wings. His desire for freedom and his little efforts to cast a ray of colour in the world manifests itself through his obsession with butterflies. These insects are a recurring motif throughout the series, not only symbolizing change and growth but of which are also a statement of the short-lived but beautiful flutters that can be seen when one pushes through hardships and keeps on flying.

Furthermore, butterflies aren’t the only metaphorical symbol that has been included to better convey the story’s message to viewers. One of Ren’s characterics is the way rainstorms always follow him. These scenes in the rain with Miu hold a greater meaning than just being a rainy day. Despite his messiness, he serves as something stable in Miu’s life, like an anchor among the countless possibilities she has to navigate and the decisions she has to make as she enters adulthood. Since she feels like she doesn't really know herself and has trouble finding the answer to anything when it comes to being subjective, this inevitable journey she’ll have to face stresses her out. Ren’s strong attraction for her never ceases in its intensity, and in this, she finds a harbor in her life.

By diving into the complexities of human emotions, relationships, and the unpredictability of attraction, the series conveys the message that some things just can't be helped. The leads’ imperfect relationship is threaded with flaws and raw with hidden insecurities. The magic in their chemistry lies in the delicate yet profound interactions they share, and the space between them constantly grows wider and smaller, full of hidden meaning and unspoken words. ‘Wakatte Ite mo: The Shapes of Love’ portrays romance as something realistically hurtful and messy, and exemplifies how love is not something that is bound to be constrained to limits. It is everything but simple or straight out of a fairytale. Instead, it is a love story using its own words—not sticking to convenience for the sake of its principal aspect of romance despite the numerous physically intimate scenes.

The show’s beauty lies in its unique perspective and outlook on life that it sheds through this window of two young adults trying their best to navigate their lives. Even though we may lie to ourselves or convince ourselves otherwise, nevertheless is a word that defines us all. Our overbearing desire to act freely against others’ rules and against our own will is the human nature of our essence here on earth. "If you just label yourself as something, it'll just restrict you." is a line pulled from the series that encapsulates its essence, defining how there is beauty to be found in the unknown. As the title suggests, the shape of love looks different for everyone, just like one emotion can be represented through many different sculptures and hold different interpretations through each individual's eyes.