Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2025
- Messages
- 3,588
The other side of it is he's, like, 15. And when it all happened to him he was barely into his adolescence, right at the time when the brain's only just starting to sort itself out and figure out how to deal with things that go beyond "how many bugs will I find before sunset"
His being this hard on himself is understandable. It's a bit weird that he's deep in the martyrdom complex phase while his peers who know what's up are actually telling him to knock it off, but like you said - he's the one suffering under the "self-sacrificial" ethos that pervades Japan, and they aren't, so.
Keeping that in mind makes it more bearable, as well as remembering this is an arc that's there for the MC to grow through and come out the other end a better person.
That said, I do think part of the issue is that it was only hinted at, for an extended period of time, and all we saw was his behavior sans context, and the IRL release schedule of the story means that we the readers sit with our impressions and presumptions for far longer a time period than exists in the timeline of the plot itself.
So those discrepancies just add to any frustrations some readers will feel, as the time spent waiting and all the hinting-via-dramatic-behavior & narration gets so built up that whatever actually happened might pale in comparison to "the hype", as it were.
So what he's going through in-story is understandable, and is something meant to be worked through; but the reality of how the story's being consumed and how it's being presented, runs the risk of the eventual reveal being underwhelming compared to the setup.
Last edited:
