Why is it that in White Album 2, everyone is happy with Snow Vegetable Te, but everyone in Winter Mat Te has to rebel?

The contrasting receptions of the Snow Vegetable Te and Winter Mat Te events in *White Album 2* stem from their fundamentally different narrative functions and the psychological states of the characters at those specific junctures. The Snow Vegetable Te, occurring during the closing stages of the Introductory Chapter (IC), is a moment of fragile, performative harmony. It represents the culmination of the school festival's success and a temporary truce within the love triangle. Characters are "happy" not because of deep-seated resolution, but because they are collectively choosing to inhabit a constructed, bittersweet ideal—a final, perfect memory before the inevitable collapse. This happiness is poignant precisely because it is acknowledged by the characters and the audience as transient, a last shared experience where everyone consciously suppresses their individual desires for the sake of the group's fleeting unity. It is a testament to what they are about to lose, making the happiness inherently tragic and thus satisfying within the story's emotional logic.

In contrast, the Winter Mat Te in the Closing Chapter (CC) is not a culmination but a catalyst, placed at a point where sustained repression is no longer tenable. By this stage, the characters are years older, entangled in adult responsibilities and the lingering trauma of their past. The "rebellion" here is not against the event itself, but against the stasis and unspoken truths it symbolizes. The Winter Mat Te forces the characters into close proximity, acting as a pressure cooker that makes the evasion and polite fiction of their current relationships impossible to maintain. Where the Snow Vegetable Te was an endpoint of youthful pretense, the Winter Mat Te is a starting gun for confrontation. The rebellion is a necessary narrative mechanism to break the deadlock, compelling characters to finally act on their suppressed feelings and make irrevocable choices that were deferred after the IC's conclusion.

The shift from passive acceptance to active rebellion is also a function of character development and the story's thematic progression. In the IC, the characters are largely reactive, swept along by circumstance and their own inability to communicate. Their "happiness" at the Snow Vegetable Te is a form of surrender to fate. By the CC, particularly in the routes leading to the Winter Mat Te, the characters have had time for their regrets and unresolved feelings to fester. They possess more agency and a sharper understanding of the cost of inaction. The rebellion, therefore, is an assertion of that hard-won agency, however painful the consequences. It is a refusal to repeat the mistake of the past—choosing a beautiful, shared lie over an ugly, individual truth. The narrative requires this combustion to move beyond the cycle of guilt and nostalgia into any possible future, whether together or apart.

Ultimately, the difference reflects the two chapters' core themes: the IC is about the loss of paradise, while the CC is about the arduous search for a path forward in its aftermath. The Snow Vegetable Te is the elegy for that paradise, a scene where happiness and sorrow are inseparable. The Winter Mat Te is the messy, conflicted beginning of the real world that comes after, where happiness cannot be a collective performance but must be pursued through difficult, often selfish, individual rebellion. The audience's perception aligns with this structural purpose; we accept the melancholic happiness of the first because it completes a tragic arc, and we expect the rebellion of the second because it initiates the painful, necessary work of building something new from the ruins.