This article contains spoilers through Given: To the Sea (2024).
Some people think before they act.
Some people feel before they think.
And some people — like Ritsuka Uenoyama — have already acted before either of those things had a chance to happen.
He is impulsive. Awkward with feelings. Terrible at romance.
And yet, somehow, impossible to look away from.
New to Given? Start here first: ✅ What Is Given? — A Story About Music, Loss, and the Feelings We Can’t Put Into Words
“This Is Jealousy” — The Moment He Finally Named What He Felt
When Mafuyu first tells Ritsuka about Yuki, something shifts inside Ritsuka.
He can’t quite name it at first.
A vague discomfort. A heaviness he didn’t expect. Something that sits wrong and won’t move.
And then, quietly, it arrives:
This is jealousy.
This moment matters more than it might seem.
Ritsuka had already been noticing Mafuyu — pulling him into the band, thinking about his voice, finding himself distracted in ways he wasn’t used to. But he hadn’t connected any of it to a feeling he recognised.
The emotion was already there. It just didn’t have a name yet.
When “jealousy” finally clicked into place, something else clicked with it: the realisation that he had fallen for Mafuyu without ever deciding to.
Ritsuka is genuinely inexperienced when it comes to love. Not because he doesn’t feel things — but because he feels things so fully that he doesn’t know what to do with them.
That gap — between the depth of the feeling and the inability to handle it — is where so much of Ritsuka’s character lives.
For the full story of what Mafuyu was carrying before Ritsuka found him: ✅ Mafuyu Sato from Given: What His Silence Is Actually Made Of
He Kissed Him. Then Panicked. Then Thought About It Later.
After the band’s first live performance with Mafuyu as vocalist, something happened backstage.
Mafuyu had barely made it through the set. He had been frozen with fear right up until the moment he sang. And when it was over — when the tension finally broke — he started to fall apart.
Ritsuka kissed him.
Not as a declaration. Not as a strategy. More like: you did it. I’m so glad you did it. A feeling too big for words, expressed the only way his body knew how in that moment.
And then, later, the reality of what he had done caught up with him.
What did I just do.
This scene is somehow both funny and deeply moving at the same time.
Because the impulse was completely real. The feeling behind it was completely real. He just had absolutely no plan for what came after.
That is Ritsuka. The feeling arrives first. Everything else — the words, the explanation, the consequences — trails behind, trying to keep up.
Strong Enough to Pull All-Nighters. Undone by One Unanswered Message.
Ritsuka is serious about music.
He practises relentlessly. He loses track of time when he’s working on something. He holds himself and his bandmates to a high standard. Music is the thing he has always been most sure of.
And then Mafuyu doesn’t reply to a message.
And Ritsuka deflates.
This contrast — the intensity he brings to music versus the complete helplessness he feels around Mafuyu — is one of the most quietly endearing things about him.
He can sustain focus through exhaustion. He can push through difficulty without complaint.
But one unreturned message from the person he likes, and he’s lost.
Mafuyu had become the one place where Ritsuka’s competence didn’t protect him.
That’s not weakness. That’s what it looks like when someone actually matters to you.
He Doesn’t Always Get It Right. He Never Stops Trying.
Ritsuka is not someone things come easily to — at least not outside of music.
Convincing Mafuyu to join the band took more than one attempt. Figuring out how to be with Mafuyu — how to hold space for someone carrying that much grief — wasn’t something he knew how to do instinctively.
He got it wrong sometimes. He moved too fast, or didn’t know what to say, or acted before he understood the full situation.
But he never walked away from the difficulty.
Every time something got complicated, Ritsuka stayed in it. He thought it through — not gracefully, not quickly, but genuinely — and he kept moving forward.
There is a kind of strength that doesn’t look impressive from the outside. It doesn’t arrive smoothly or confidently. It just keeps showing up, keeps trying, keeps refusing to give up on the person in front of it.
That is Ritsuka’s kind of strength.
The Song He Didn’t Want to Finish — and Finished Anyway
In Given: To the Sea, Ritsuka is asked to complete a song that Yuki — Mafuyu’s first love — had left unfinished.
A song written for Mafuyu. By someone Mafuyu had loved deeply. That never got to be delivered.
Ritsuka’s first response was honest: he didn’t want to do it.
He felt the weight of it. The strangeness of it. The particular pain of being asked to carry, in your own hands, the proof of how deeply your partner once loved someone else.
But then he listened to the song.
He heard how much Yuki had wanted to reach Mafuyu. He felt what it meant that those feelings had never arrived.
And something shifted.
Not the disappearance of his own pain. Not the erasure of the jealousy or the difficulty.
But the arrival of something that mattered more:
This has to reach him.
Japanese storytelling has a long tradition of portraying love not through declaration, but through action — through what someone chooses to carry, quietly, even when it costs them something. Ritsuka’s choice here is one of the clearest examples of that in the entire series.
He completed the song. He said nothing grand about it. He simply did it.
And when that song reached Mafuyu on stage — through Shu’s voice, through everything Ritsuka had quietly carried — it arrived as something more than music.
It arrived as the most honest thing Ritsuka had ever said.
For a deeper look at what that moment meant — and the four kinds of love that converged in it: ✅ When Your Partner Finishes Their Ex’s Love Song — What Given: To the Sea Understands About Love
What Ritsuka Leaves You With
Ritsuka Uenoyama is not a perfect character.
He acts before he thinks. He panics after. He doesn’t always know what to say, or when to say it, or how to handle the size of what he feels.
But he keeps showing up. He keeps trying to understand. He keeps choosing to stay in the difficulty rather than step away from it.
Impulsive, clumsy, completely sincere.
That combination — the mess of it alongside the genuineness of it — is what makes him so hard to forget.
He didn’t love Mafuyu elegantly.
He loved him honestly.
And in the end, that turned out to be exactly enough.
If Ritsuka’s story stayed with you, these go deeper:
✅ Mafuyu Sato from Given: What His Silence Is Actually Made Of
✅ When Your Partner Finishes Their Ex’s Love Song — What Given: To the Sea Understands About Love
✅ What Is Given? — Where to start if you’re new to the series
