some vague thoughts about a thing that i find very interesting in Akane-Banashi, which is the way it manages illustrate the importance of idgf-ers in a story soooo caught up in legacy.
what i mean is that we have the Hikaru-Akane-Karashi rivalry, which is crucial for Akane's growth as a character because they're her peers who started their journeys into professional rakugo at more or less the same time as her. Hikaru and Karashi are both (in different ways) more intense in their rivalry—both with each other and with Akane—than Akane is with them. this ties into the kind of rakugo that they do: both Karashi and Hikaru are modern rakugo performers.
they incorporate elements from other disciplines or play with narratives in a way Akane does not. this is talked about more re: Karashi, but Hikaru's background as a voice actor very much informs her rakugo, and it's a rakugo that would be deeply frowned upon in a more conservative narrative. they're shaking up the world of rakugo in a way that Akane, who had been steeped in it since an early age simply cannot. and,
they aren't burdened by the huge legacies of their schools, neither of them feels any kind of (additional, emotionally-loaded) obligation to their masters and they're very much just taking everything they learn and making it their own, something Akane struggles with just by the nature of her relationship with all the performers she interacts with (it's not an accident that the only people we meet through their rakugo first are Hikaru, Karashi and Kaisei—her rivals. all of the people she learns from we first see in interpersonal settings. her relationships with them are very loaded in ways her rivalries are not. also, Issho needs his own post on this topic, but some other time.)
So Hikaru and Karashi are there to keep Akane in check and challenge the scope of her rakugo, even though they cannot compete with the depth of her rakugo—neither in immersion in the art, nor in the emotional investment.
this is where Kaisei is waiting for her.
Kaisei is the only person of Akane's peers* who has both the deep emotional investment in rakugo, and the life-long entanglement with the artform. This is a level on which Karashi and Hikaru simply cannot match her.**
but the thing is, without people to push her from the sides, Akane would simply get lost in the heavy, emotionally-loaded traditional rakugo. without Hikaru and Karashi, Akane would get swallowed by the weight of Shiguma's legacy and fall over. Hikaru and Karashi don't care about that. They don't know about it, and they'd brush it off at best, mercilessly mock it at worst if they did. i think even Akane herself isn't aware just how much she's gaining from Hikaru and Karashi's presence in her life.
*i use "peers" loosely here, he's her senior but considering that AkaBan works on a scale of people up to over 90 years of age, the ~two year difference in their debuts is nothing
**this is also something that Kaisei seems to have clocked in on almost immediately, while Akane is still a bit suffering from "can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees"-ness and doesn't fully recognize him as her true match and the person she's actually chasing. like. rakugo is a life-long commitment. there's a 50-50 chance that Issho will drop dead of old age before she gets her "revenge". Kaisei's sticking around for a while.
