Momo has a funny quirk in Dan Da Dan, where she refuses to call Okarun by his real name, which is Ken Takakura. And I think this quirk sustains a certain balance in their slowly developing romance.
Ken Takakura is also the name of a real-life celebrity from Japan, and Momo has a big infatuation with him, to such an extent that merely uttering the name or attaching it to Okarun flusters her to the point of debilitation. And so to keep her sanity intact, she gave Okarun the nickname that all of us know and love.
And the reason this matters on a narrative level is because it generates a kind of symmetry in Momo’s relationship to Okarun. Okarun is an awkward fellow, after all, and his social identity as the school outcast prevents him from seeing himself as a potential romantic counterpart to Momo. For a long time he even struggles to see himself as a friend because his self-esteem is so low.
And so when you combine Okarun’s low self-esteem together with Momo’s fear of his real name, you get this very compelling will-they-won’t-they tension between them. Both of them need to suppress any public sign that they might have feelings with one another merely in order to function. But because they’re also young and immature, this also messes with their ability to interpret their own emotions. And so when they actually do develop those romantic feelings, they supress them; they deny them.
And it’s only when they cast headlong into some kind of supernatural danger that they’re both able to escape this confusion and achieve some clarity about how much they care about each other — because whenever somebody that you’re growing to love finds themselves in imminent mortal danger, that kind of situation has a way of removing all your mental blocks and heightening your instincts, so that you’ll do anything you can to save this person that you need in your life.
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