This chapter was set up at the very start of the manga and I was somewhat concerned it was going to be not very palatable, but honestly, I'm fine. It works pretty effectively, and the reaction of the crowd really comes off to me as more shocked than instantly torches and pitchforks, the way Eirth perceives it is just magnified because it's *the entirety of his complexes and guilt for trying to grow past them* being tossed at him from every direction and him literally being surrounded by the whispers. It's contrasted with all the people close to him being legitimately spooked, perturbed, or actively rushing towards him in concern to try and contain this.
In general, Eirth definitely feels as if he has multiple sides to him, and complexities to his issues, but there are multiple sides to the people around him too. His friends and his parents, they all looked sincerely surprised to learn that he was feeling so trapped when he actually started to talk about his feelings. It's telling, I think. It doesn't excuse the way his dad has been so blind to the stress his son was under while feeding it all the while, but judging from his sincerity when he answered Eirth's question before, I feel like... their temperaments are just a genuinely terrible match, and he never went out of his way to change his approach because he didn't realize his son was taking it so badly. His mom seems absent too, with Sadith being the most consistent older supportive figure in his life... other than the demon king now, which is its own can of worms. But vitally, he's been written off by people who could have helped him and trained him, who he would have welcomed doing that, and laden with expectations by others even though there isn't a pressing need or crisis that actually demands he figure things out on his own.
And it's interesting and unfortunate that, like, Eirth, Rival and Fiancie are ALL suffering from some critical emotional myopia. Eirth in particular, as our protagonists, has some genuinely sympathetic but obvious blindspots, and we see this cause problems *right now* because, it wasn't as if the technique he used was awful in itself. He dropped his guard and was feeling so high on needing to prove himself he used it when he wasn't ready for it. And the comic has been fairly comedic, but it's still been asserted that the war was some pretty serious business with legitimate atrocities committed on both sides, so you can't exactly blame most people for being fearful of a technique the demon king famously used to great effect in RECENT LIVING MEMORY.
So this chapter is all of these rough edges and Eirth's understandably blasted emotional state finally coming to a head in a bit of a disaster. I'm genuinely curious where it's going to go from here.
