Insightful take that changes how I read this story tbh, thanks for this.I do like the idea that Genma's seemingly universal and undirected benevolence is just a byproduct of her lack of the usual human moral compunctions.
It's usually very tricky to have a likeable alien that isn't reducible to "secretly has a quirky endearing humanlike trait". To be a character requires their motives and personality to be legible - but she isn't a character: she's a demon wearing character skin, and her role within the storyline is similarly mobile. She doesn't need to cooperate with the surrounding narrative frame. I want to elaborate on this but it's too early in the story to say whether this will be a defining aspect of how arcs are structured and resolved.
It’s hard to tell because we have a sample size of two, but Genma also seems to have a shallower depth of emotion than other demons. The rooster-thing in chapter 2 mocks her out of spite and this bug demon is deeply resentful of both human rejection and Genma’s pity. Genma isn’t unaffected by rejection — she’s reassured by Kawashiro saying he knows and doesn’t care that there’s something weird about her — but all her emotional responses so far have had a lightness to them. She can pick up and move on and let the feeling fall away just like that.I do like the idea that Genma's seemingly universal and undirected benevolence is just a byproduct of her lack of the usual human moral compunctions.
It's usually very tricky to have a likeable alien that isn't reducible to "secretly has a quirky endearing humanlike trait". To be a character requires their motives and personality to be legible - but she isn't a character: she's a demon wearing character skin, and her role within the storyline is similarly mobile. She doesn't need to cooperate with the surrounding narrative frame. I want to elaborate on this but it's too early in the story to say whether this will be a defining aspect of how arcs are structured and resolved.