Flight

They are both incredibly possessive but whereas Kazutora would rather kill someone before they have the chance to leave him, Mikey lets them go (this is mostly in reference to his relationship with Baji, but also can also be applicable to Takemichi right before the Manila timeline) because their agency and happiness and personhood are more important to him than his own selfish desires.

The audience’s first impression of them consists of them being overtly familiar with Takemichi despite being strangers and getting all up in his space as a power move. However, whereas Mikey just did it to scare Takemichi because he thought it would be funny to do so, Kazutora coming up to Takemichi and hugging him comes off as a thinly veiled threat because he is immediately established afterwards (due to the broken legs of his “most trusted guys”) to be dangerous and volatile. Either way they are both asserting their dominance over Takemichi in a way that is supposed to be “friendly” but in reality, ESPECIALLY with Kazutora… it is not.

Furthermore! In a lot of ways, Kazutora as a character is inherently written to push Mikey to snap at his breaking point, and not just because he killed his older brother (though that is a pretty big part).

— because whereas Mikey is established to be a good listener and communicator (which is primarily shown through his conflict with Peh and how he’s consistently trying to get on his friend’s level and understand where he’s coming from), Kazutora completely and utterly refuses to be communicated with at all.

Whereas Mikey really does his best to avoid conflict with his loved ones (which is actively shown WITH Kazutora actually in which he tries to understand why Kazutora views him as an enemy), Kazutora is constantly instigating a fight.

Whereas Mikey values honor in combat, (and just honor in general), Kazutora relies on underhanded methods (weapons & ganging up on Mikey) in order to win.

Whereas Baji’s sacrifice allows for Kazutora to repent and become better, the death of a close friend is one of the many, many reasons why Mikey consistently devolves in each timeline due to such an integral loss to his support system.

Whereas Mikey starts wiping out the original Toman members in the Bad Toman Timeline because he no longer trusts them, Kazutora trusts Takemichi (someone he doesn’t even like and views as failing Chifuyu for years) to help him save Toman.

(To add onto ur message sitting in my inbox —which I will get around to answering I just need to formulate my thoughts,) the way that Mikey and Kazutora narratively play off each other is really interesting considering how Baji narratively plays off of each of them(!!!), and I can go on about the parallelism between Mikey, Kazutora and Baji for hours.

Draken and Mikey's conflict during the Moebius Arc is largely centered around the fact that Mikey doesn't want to accept the fact that Pah turned himself in for stabbing Osanai, and it takes Takemichi yelling at both of them for Mikey to respect the fact. And even then, the major motivator behind why Mikey put Kisaki into a formal position of power within Toman so fast was that Kisaki promised him that he could get Pah out of prison in exchange for the 3rd Division Captain position. Something which Mitsuya, Draken, and Baji were initially all against, but ultimately 2/3 of them relented.

Baji's dialogue when he announces his departure from Toman implies that Baji had been actively trying to get himself fired and that his coming to a meeting he was banned from and attacking Takemichi wasn't his first attempt at getting kicked out. And even when Baji quits regardless, Mikey does demand that Takemichi bring him back to Toman, and the goal of dragging Baji back into Toman is a big part of why they accepted Valhalla's provocations, despite Mikey admitting they don't really have anything to gain from fighting Valhalla. Although in this case I think you could probably make an argument that his unwillingness to let Baji go is intrinsically tied to his anger over the fact that he felt like Baji was taking Kazutora's side. (The fact Mikey says he's forgiven Baji for his role in what happened to Shinichiro but that he can't forgive him for 'siding with Kazutora' does put his behavior towards Baji in an interesting light imo, but I don't have a lot of articulate thoughts about it.)

It takes Draken and Mitsuya imploring him to the point of getting on their knees for him to let Takemichi go in the Manila timeline.

So, while he most definitely has more respect for people's autonomy than Kazutora does, I do think his base instinct is to try and keep them around until actively pushed into letting them go.

This one I had to sit with for a while, but I'm also not entirely sure Kazutora's the best example to use for Mikey actively trying to avoid conflict with his loved ones. Largely because, well...Mikey did plan on killing him as soon as he got out of juvie, and according to Mikey, the reason he didn't go through with it was Baji repeatedly trying to explain what was going on inside Kazutora's head to him. Now, I do think that that's not the entire truth, because I think even throughout this entire mess there was still a part of Mikey that considered Kazutora his and cared about him — I doubt Mikey would have testified on Kazutora's behalf if there had been an immediate loss of love between them. But for me, while it may be a bit pedantic, Mikey questioning why Kazutora thinks Mikey is his enemy reads less like Mikey trying to avoid conflict and more like him trying to decide why he should. If he can't square the reasoning Baji gave him with what Kazutora actually says, then why shouldn't he forsake whatever love he still has for the other boy?

This all kind of ties into what the major difference in how Mikey and Kazutora deal with things with regard to loss/abandonment I was thinking about when I wrote the original post. When I think about it, I always come back to Mikey's flashbacks during the final arc where it's shown that his goal to make Toman the largest gang in Japan is tied to how he (doesn't) cope with Shinichiro's death. Initially, he thought to achieve his dreams of a new era he just needed to have the strongest guys he knew around, but after Shinichiro died it morphed into the need to create a gang so large it could reach his brother.

I.e. where Kazutora's solution was to drive other people out and adopt an extremely rigid worldview and moral system that he refused to be challenged on, Mikey's, at least up until the point where he fully internalized the idea that everything bad that's ever happened was his own fault, was to try and fill the void/fix his listlessness by surrounding himself with other people and relying on them to guide him in navigating things.