#iichan

Kumagawa Misogi - MEDAKA BOX

“I want to beat them. Even though I’m not cool, or strong, or just, or beautiful, or cute, or pretty, I want to beat the cool strong just beautiful cute and pretty people.”

Kumagawa is aggressively mediocre. He’s a good for nothing.  He’s like the embodiment of a bad victim,  he blames everyone else, he lashes out. He has nothing but flaws but he still strives to be better than what he is. That’s what so inspiring about his character. Even if you’re miserable it doesn’t mean you have to be having a miserable time about it. Kumagawa will push back against anything, even if the whole world is pushing down on his shoulders.

He has a vibe with his character that even if you’re the worst person in the world don’t run away from who you are. You have to accept yourself exactly as you are without lies or artifice before you can start to improve.  That’s why kumagawa tries to accept the ugliness of people.

He’s very sympathetic with other people, but that isn’t there to make him look like a good person. If anything he always sympathizes with the victim too much and encourages their worst qualities.  At the beginning of the series hes so desperate to heal the wounds of these traumatized, people he’s taken in he just encourages them to lash out because that’s something. Kumagawa is just this very nihilistic, and fatalist character who is somehow at the same time one of the most optimistic characters ever written. He’s a lazy good for nothing, but he tries hard. He’s fickle and childish, but he never gives up. He might never get better, he might always lose in the end, but he still thinks the struggle to win is always inherently worth it. He gives all of himself in everything he does, and to the people around him. And he always gets hurt because of it, but that pain is just living.

He’s completely insane but he’s also living his life the best way he can. There’s just such a manic, insane, and positive energy to his character. Kumagawa will accept you at your worst, and yet he’ll still encourage you to be better. I also like characters written to represent the ugliness in people, and striving to find beauty in that ugliness rather than characters who are just happy all the time because they’re good people.

Natsuki Subaru - RE ZERO

“You think I’m getting drunk on my own tragedy just so I can shut everyone up?”

like how Subaru is a shitty person but not in a really interesting way,  but in a really petty, self absorbed and weak way. I like it because the world doesn’t tolerate his bs, he is continually punished and kicked in the teeth for it. He doesn’t have a tragic backstory before the story begins. His tragic backstory is that he did nothing, made nothing of his life, but he still feels entitled and expects to be rewarded. There’s nothing special about him, but he wants to be treated like he’s special.

I’m usually protagonist-phobic because most stories center around the main character so a lot of the time the world bends to their whims in unnatural ways. Subaru is the main character, but hes not the protagonist, and not even particularly important which is why he’s valid.

Subaru is continually  punished for his mistakes and I love the way we see how trauma changes him and shapes him.  His narrative  reads to me as a metaphor for a mentally ill person with the absolute worst habits constantly struggling to be better despite constant backtracking. That’s why with the constant resets in his narrative, none of his actions ever seem to matter. Even when he makes progress he loses it just as quickly, and the world seems indifferent to his suffering. Because the stroy isn’t actually about the world, it’s about Subaru’s personal journey to learn to be a less shitty person.

Subaru is confronted with the fact that hes a very self important and entitled person and he chooses to grow from that rather than run away. He’s so self aware by this point he knows hes the most annoying human on earth and he owns it.

Doma - KIMETSU NO YAIBA

“From a young age I was kind and clever. I always helped people and made them happy, because that was my mission.”

Doma’s story is hard to empathize with because it doesn’t really look tragic. It’s more like a comedy. He’s smiling the whole way through.

Doma feels like an inhuman monster and he chooses to act that way. Literally everything in this story just tells you he was basically born that way. Doma tells you himself. But like, if you look into his background he was raised in a literal cult. Doma despises the cult, because he could see through it. He could see the adults were using him even as a child. But at the same time Doma’s heart has never really left the cult either. Doma, like everybody else, unintentionally reflects the environment he grew up in.

Doma’s just never been shown real tears or a real smile, so he doesn’t know it. He sees his parents kill each other in front of them, and feels nothing, because they literally never acted like parents to him once. He sees life as empty because to him, it is. And then.

By the time he encounters the real thing it’s too late for him. I just like this part of Doma that’s like, emptily trying to imitate all the other humans around him, and feel the things they feel, and always falling short because of his jacked up sense of empathy. It’s adorable.   Doma doesn’t feel human at all. He couldn’t possibly understand what a normal human being feels because he’s never lived that life. He’s a total human failure. Rather than try to be something he feels like he’s not, he decides to embrace his inhumanity.

Iichan - ZAREGOTO

“Nonsense.”

Iichan is a character who doesn’t want to choose, but wants to be chosen regardless. In other words Iichan has a paradoxical way of thinking about his life. He’s not the main character. He’s not important. So therefore, whatever happens around him he’s not at fault. However, he is the centerpiece of a tragedy. He’s still important in the sense that all of this tragic suffering is being unleashed upon him. Being the main character of the tragedy means his suffering is important and meaningful, but none of it is ever his fault, and he can’t help it.

That way he avoids ever having to take responsiblity for his actions, or do the hard work of trying to change as a person. He’s a narcicisst, but he hates himself, and he tries to balance out his total egoism by constantly playing up his own suffering and how much he loathes himself. That’s where the main character of the tragedy complex comes in.

What’s interesting about Iichan is that for all the tricks and avoidance he goes through, he’s very self aware as a character. He knows how deficient he is in comparison to others and how his problems really aren’t as important in the grand scheme of things. That’s why it’s interesting to watch all the mental gymnastics he goes through.

Knowing that the author also knows that Iichan is a tool, and clearly frames him as such, I can appreciate the more positive parts of his character. I can know that deep down, despite everything he does want to become a person that’s capable of making the other people in his life happy. He just doesn’t know how.

Hitoshiki Zerozaki - NINGEN

“What a riot.”

Iichan’s equal and opposite force. His boy on the other side of the mirror. What if your reflection in the mirror could talk, and what if it was laughing at you? That’s basically Zerozaki’s character in a nutshell.

Iichan is a character who dwells on his intense mediocrity and desires to be special because of it. Zerozaki is the opposite, he’s been special all of his life and has no idea what a normal life is even like.

Zerozaki is a murderer from a family of murderers and yet he doesn’t enjoy murder. He doesn’t feel its evil or feel a lot of remorse. He feels nothing at all about killing,  he thinks people who kill for pleasure are weird, and kills at random.

What I like about Zerozaki is that he’s way more human and down to earth than his perfect foil iichan even though he’s a murderer. Despite being a psycho killer he makes connections with other killers, his little sister, and ninoumiya. A human failure who’s way too human, and that somehow makes him even more of a failure.

Emiya Shirou / Heroic Spirit Emiya - FATE / STAY NIGHT.

“So as I pray. Unlimited Blade Works.”

Counterfeit. Hypocrite. Holy shit. A fake who knows that his desire to save people doesn’t come from the goodness of his heart, but his own selfish desire to be a hero. Shirou emiya is the only valid protagonist, because he’s an extremely traumatized deconstruction of every protagonist before him. Shirou’s not a good person. Shirou’s barely even a person. He has friends but he doesn’t really feel like he deserves to have them. He smiles, but he doesn’t mean it.

I love how Shirou is so terrible at handling his own trauma that he thinks having a strong sense of justice is a personality.  I love how Shirous need to sacrifice himself makes him an idiot and is something his narrative continually gruesomely punishes. He has one of the most brutal narratives ever, and the writing behind his character serves to highlight how Shirou’s bad decision making not only hurts himself, but literally everybody around him.

I love how Shirou has completely emptied out as a person and feels unable to feel basic emotions because its totally relatable.  He just copes so poorly, but at the same time there’s something beautiful in Shirous struggle to be a good person. Shirou has completely given up on himself as a person, but he still wants to help other people, and so he keeps trying.

Getou Suguru - JUJUTSU KAISEN

“I hate monkeys.”

Some villains just want to destroy everything for reasons deeply rooted to emotional trauma. I feel like I’m repeating myself here.

I like characters where empathy is a dangerous quality to have. Getou is driven to villainy because he cares, overwhelmingly so. He cares about people’s individual agency and freedom and rights to be happy and sees the world stomp on it. His breaking point was that he wanted a girl who had been raised as a literal human sacrifice for the system her entire life to be able to live out the rest of her life free as a person, and being completely powerless and unable to help her as she was killed. Getou was struck in that moment by the inherent unfairness in the world and it broke him.

Empathy is such a debilitating flaw for Getou that he literally has to decide certain people  are human and disqualify others from being human so his brain doesn’t completely break. Being a decent caring guy in Getous world breaks you.

Getou tries so hard not to care,  to be the maniacal laughing villain he claims to be, but his empathy is the one part of his brain he can never shut off. Even as the most hated man in the world he protects weak and exploited people and takes them in as a family. He does everything he does to make a better world for the people he cares about, and that’s why he’s so broken because the ones he doesn’t care about he’s completely fine with sacrificing en masse.

Akechi Goro - PERSONA 5

“JUSTICE?! RIGHTEOUS?! KEEP THAT SHIT TO YOURSELVES! YOU AND YOUR TEAMMATES PISS ME OFF!!”

I like Goro way more for his potential rather than what we see in canon, but there’s a lot of strong ideas his character is written with. I love the idea that Goro wants to be a good person, wants to be connected to others, but is far too dmaged and because of that

He can only pretend to be a good person and play people pleaser to others. he’s someone who desires at the core of his being to be righteous, and failing that he becomes self-righteous instead. I just love how thoroughly fake he is as a person, and how that makes him covet the real thing.

I also love the insane, twisted and obsessive part of Akechi. I love how much he hates the world for rejecting him, and how much of his actions are just petty revenge on the world, his father, every single person who rejected him. I love him when he’s at his most desperate, when he’s screaming at the people he’s trying to kill asking them why nobody wants him around even though he’s famous and popular.

Ogata Hyakunosuke - GOLDEN KAMUY

Walk your own wild path. Straight and true.

Ogata is a character that is somehow incredibly complex and nuanced character with tons of carefully written development in story, and also a character you have no fucking clue what’s going on in his head. Basically, Ogata is a masterpiece.

Ogata feels like the other half of the story. Sugimoto acts,  Ogata reacts.  Sugimoto chases, Ogata evades.  We are uncomfortably deep in Sugimotos head, but we only catch brief glimpses of Ogatas moments of Frank honesty. The entire story is about Sugimoto and Ogata chaisng after each other and everything else seems incidental sometime. Ogata’s not the main character, but he’s the other half of the heart of the narrative that’s about these really, really bad murderous men who are deeply broken trying to find a way to live in a world without war.

Its not that Ogata is unfeeling it’s that he never allows himself to feel. What other characters lost during the war, Ogata never had in the first place. He sees himself as deformed and malnourished compared to everybody else. Ogatas always been noticing the difference between - himself and others.Even if he wanted to love his brother he kept comparing himself to his father’s beloved son, and realizing how much he lacked. He just kept being reminded over and over again what a child who was loved could have turned out as.  Eventually Ogata convinced himself he was unfeeling. Because somehow that’s easier. He can process everything that happened in his life if he’s detached from it all watching from a tree somewhere.  He’s so repressed he doesn’t allow himself to feel guilt about his brothers death because he doesn’t view himself as a person capable of loving another. However, just like Sugis desire is to be saved from the hell of war deep down theres a kid in Ogata who wanted to be a good son