#i just love giving my opinions on kimitodo

[cherimaho]

omg id love to hear ur thoughts on kazehaya being the superior shoujo ml bc i feel that way but i struggle to articulate why.. ur so right abt shiina not relying on trauma to create sympathy for him

thank you for asking!

i think what makes kazehaya so charming and different than the rest of the male leads of his time (early 2000s and before) is that, from beginning to end, he is a genuinely good person.

he is introduced as a kind guy who is sociable and easy to get along with. he's not extraordinarily handsome or super talented or rich. he is refreshing and popular but at the same time he is Just Some Guy.

it's kind of hard to talk about how good he is without comparing him to other male leads of the 90s/00s. in a time where mostly distant and aloof and emotionally constipated male leads with a traumatic past were on the rise, kazehaya stood out for his emotional availability and overall normalcy.

for measure, a character similar to kazehaya from the 90s would be arima from kare kano. just like kazehaya, he is introduced as a kind guy who is popular among his peers and who is from the beginning nice to his love interest. however, all of that is thrown out of the window as soon as his backstory is starting to unveil.

i personally find how 'boring' kazehaya (supposedly) is, a positive. a lot of people say they feel his development lacks in comparison to other characters in the series and while a lot of times this is said by people who have not read the manga, they're not far off.

but his development lacks not in a "bad writing" kind of way, but in the sense that there's not much he needs to develop, as far as his personality goes. while other male leads needed to learn to be civilized people by getting together with the protagonist, kazehaya's main struggle was communication with his loved ones —mainly with sawako, and later on, with his dad— and he works on it until the very end of the series.

by no means does this mean his development is insignificant or nonexistent; it's just not as big of change to him as a person as it is to how he navigates his relationships.

i would also like to mention that his little need for change and the lack of unecessary tragic backstory gave so much space for other characters to get the spotlight. it's not inherently bad for the male lead to get as much screentime as the protagonist; sometimes it's necessary, and it's great, if done correctly.

however, kimi ni todoke, in my opinion, succeeded in giving almost everyone, besides the protagonist, their own time to shine and i think kazehaya not having a thousand issues to solve helped with that.

at the end of the day, you like kazehaya because he's nice to sawako, he's nice to everyone. you understand he sometimes struggles with communicating his feelings. sometimes he makes mistakes. even then, you know he is a good person. you don't need a backstory to excuse his every misbehavior and you don't need a backstory to know that he's a good person.

i hope this doesn't sound like i think characters with trauma are inferior or automatically bad writing; there are good ways to do that (karuho did it in kimi ni todoke already with another character). but i do think some authors rely too much on it when writing their male leads.

#kimi ni todoke #i hope this makes sense ... im not good at articulating myself either 💔 #i just love giving my opinions on kimitodo