To The Unsung Heroes: Asahi Kobe
Of all the characters who deserve their own spin-off yet somehow never got one, this dude would absolutely be one such character.
Asahi Kobe is one of the main characters of Happy Sugar Life, and becomes probably the most major antagonist in the story by the end. As the main protagonist of this story is a terrible person who still has her nuances and decent qualities, it figures that Asahi is someone fundamentally decent who wants so badly to be a Good Guy but has darker qualities than he'd like to see in himself given his upbringing. As for why he and Satou would come into conflict with each other? Well, he's the big brother of Shio Kobe, the 8 year old kid Satou took in off the streets and is grooming to be her one true love. Yeah.
The firstborn child of Yuuna Kobe, born from when she got raped by his abhorrent, abusive louse of a father, Asahi hated seeing his mother suffer under his father's abuse and wanted to protect his baby sister from the worst of it, so he enabled his mother and sister to flee the house while he stayed there for five years, enduring routine emotional abuse and brutal physical torture from his father. One day he returns home to find his father dead from poisoning, and immediately after adjusts his goal to getting his family back together by finding Shio, who he learns from his mother that she'd left on her own when she began to fear she wasn't worthy of raising her, and also hopefully keeping his mother from getting sent to prison for murder, as it turns out she was the one who poisoined her husband.
What we see in the present day narrative of the series is continued suffering, misery, and failure for this poor kid. Despite his best efforts to locate his sister, despite his unwavering faith that his family can recover and he can at least find peace and love and true happiness with them, and despite his utter commitment to being a kind, strong, self-sufficient person, he ends up losing everything to a warped black hole called Satou Matsuzaka. Shouko Hida, who develops feelings of compassion and love for him and who he comes to cherish as well, is murdered by Satou after trying to help Asahi by taking photographic evidence that Satou has Shio staying in her apartment to send to his phone. Taiyou Mitsuboshi, the guy he initially believes might be an ally, turns out to not be that, and Asahi throws his own moral values to the wayside by physically torturing him and abandoning him at the mercy of another sexual abuser. When he confronts Satou and tries to take Shio back with him, Shio firmly chooses Satou over her own blood family. Even after Satou has died and there's nothing left standing between him and Shio, Shio proclaims to his face that he has all the love and happiness she needs just from carrying Satou's spirit and the memory of the "Happy Sugar Life" they had together inside her heart, leaving her family once more to go live for herself. To put it plainly, Asahi gambled terribly and in the end, he lost it all.
This sounds like just a miserable story of trauma and hardship and loss for a character so undeserving of it. But the thing is, when you look at everything in a larger narrative context and in the context of how different characters relate to one another, Asahi actually kind of did deserve to fail in the end. He was putting so much extra weight on his shoulders and pressing forward in his endeavor under very naive, fallacious, unrealistic thinking that Shio being his blood-related sister and their mother’s daughter, plus his due dilligence towards his family members and unwavering faith in a “happy family” outcome, and how much he endures while searching for her, was to be all the justification needed for Shio going with him back to their mother. Ignoring that this mother had traumatized Shio by emotionally and even (once) physically abusing her, abandoning her out on the streets in the rain, and making her think she was unloved and unwanted, so no amount of “but she’s a victim too who had good reasons for doing what she did!” from Asahi was going to make Shio want to go back to living a hellish life with that person, nor should it. While neither Yuuna or Asahi were ever close to the same level of abusive as the late, demonic Mr. Kobe, their own love for Shio was, in a way, another form of abuse for her. They put her on an impossibility high pedestal, exalting her for her purity, viewing her as their happiness, their hope, their shining "moon". Asahi saw her as the key to bringing the broken Kobe family back together and securing happiness for them, and was intent on bringing her with them whether she wanted it or not, too intent on placing way too much on his little sister’s tiny shoulders, all to relieve much of the burden for his mother he'd chosen to shoulder himself. He obsessively valued what his little sister was to him rather than who she was in general, something that Satou had learned to move beyond by the time she and Asahi had their big confrontation, which makes Shio choosing Satou over Asahi, to the point where Satou gets to have the last laugh even after dying, completely unsurprising. Asahi's quest was, in the end, the very definition of "ill-fated."
And yet, through all of that, Asahi nurses his wounds, keeps himself on his feet, and endures. How durable this kid is, physically, emotionally, and mentally, despite all the pain and trauma he's had to suffer through, is the most incredible thing about him. He's like a sugar jar that cracks a whole lot and even breaks a little, but never shatters. Similarly to Satou, he grew up in the worst environment, he would go to extreme lengths and even kill someone if he knew it would allow him to save Shio or Yuuna and do right by them. In spite of everything on the outside that burdens him, he is able to persevere in his constant internal struggle against all the trauma and inner pain his father’s abuse inflicted upon him, even after moments in which he lapses into that darkness within him and shows that he can behave in ways uncomfortably similar to his father. When he has to threaten someone, or even hurt them, Asahi is very much his father's son. But the fundamental difference between them: Asahi recognizes when he steps wrong. He becomes aware, pulls away, shows disgust, shame and remorse for having had that lapse, and makes a desparate assertion that he’s not like that monster, that he will not be like him. Such awareness of what he does and empathetic concern for the pain of the victim is something that was far beyond the late Mr. Kobe, but Asahi proves that his conscience still functions and guides him away from the path to becoming a cruel abuser like his father was.
Asahi's just a fantastic character who deserves more appreciation. And I gotta say, I prefer the way things at the end with him were handled in the anime compared to the manga, as it's given more ambiguity on how much time passed, Asahi’s tone when asking Shio to come meet with their mom outside and live with the family again is much more pleasant and less desperate, and we're not at any point shown Asahi still wandering the streets like a homeless bum, just looking out for lost animals that might end up like the sister he lost.
