Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny
Confessing what exactly and ruining what event? The way you portray her sounds like she could be bunk mates with Yuno from Mirai Nikki. Sorry, I just don't see her as some fragile little ball of mental mess that is on the verge of going full throttle insane...
All the characters have some sort of a character flaw. Not sure why she gets singled out all the time...?
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Most of the viewer character perceptions are a result of a framing problem - the easiest to understand if you think of the author as someone filming a movie or taking a photo; This person can see everything but only some of what they see is in the frame while other stuff is still there but isn't captured in the photo.
Author's original intent is to have all characters be critically flawed (and thus be why they have have few friends) but that collectively their flaws would balance/cancel each other out and thus allow the members of the group to find a place where they could develop friendships etc.
The easiest examples of this to understand are of course Yozora & Sena / Kobato & Maria, but to a lesser extent its also true of Kodaka & Sena / Kodaka & Yozora / Kodaka & Rika / Yozora & Maria.
The problem however, is their flaws are not uniformly displayed
Because most of the event focus is constrained to within the Neighbours Club you only see those parts of the frame and not what else is happening. These end up being the primary influence in how people view the characters;
e.g. Yozora and Maria's dynamic - and though it was hinted at Maria also being unpleasant,
it was only properly shown in Episode 12 / Haganai Collect (or was it Universe?) that Yozora was originally nice to Maria while she was rude to her etc.
Though this may have been known to the author and is particularly relevant to perception of both characterisations and relationship dynamics, its all outside the frame until the viewer/reader is made aware of it.
Additionally Sena hinted at actually being extremely unpleasant to be around (and how she views and treats everyone else around her, e.g. "everyone else is below me"/ male slaves / stepping on people / "you can lick my shoe as a reward", etc etc etc) — is mentioned right at the beginning of the story and referenced at several points but is only really shown during the Swimming pool visit / guys hitting on her incident.
The full scale of her behaviours though are again outside of the frame to viewers/readers because she is in a different class to Kodaka & Yozora and very little of her own class has been shown (except Yusa Aoi briefly in vol 7).
What we do see of Sena 'in-frame' of the Neighbours Club are not her original character breaking flaws (for which Yozora is meant to be her foil) but instead her moe fake "flaws" which are designed to be appealing to target anime/novel demographics such as
- - playing gale/eroge
- - yuri loli-obsession with Kobato
...Both of which aren't exactly considered negatives to this demographic, are played off as comedy, and are tamed by Kodaka & Yozora in any case. This can also be applied to Rika and her perversions and fujoshi traits shown while in the club in that they aren't actually "flaws" as far as target demographic is concerned and are again nerfed by Kodaka & Yozora, while her 'character breaking flaw' is separation from people (and that occurs outside of the club).
- Yozara gets singled out because her flaws are the only ones that are persistently 'in frame', as she as much as Kodaka is central to cancelling out/nerfing the flaws of the other characters in the Neighbours club and their events are always in the frame of the story.
ugh -as my first post this was supposed to be much shorter so I'm gonna cut it here - hopefully the general message of what I wanted to say got through though. May say something about the implications of Kodaka ending up with each of the girls / something about Rika being officially friend-zoned if Vol 8 rumours are true but tbh thats probably worth saving for other posts when I am less tired...
====ANSWER FOR TL;DR CROWD====
The window to the world is limited and what it focuses on is what most affects perceptions of characters.
all of the characters are flawed and should be viewed as so - this is intentional and was supposed to balance out their dynamics between each other and balance out fan perception of all the characters but isn't working as intended because not everyones flaws are getting equal focus.