TL;CR MEME

[retellers]

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.

Comments

[exercisms]

I loved Izumo. It was very fun for me to thread with someone who was a little harsh with him, and Izumo was a joy. I also loved that the developed respect for each other and became friends - I wish I'd had time to continue to deepen that CR because I felt like they surprisingly really vibed!

Anyway. Mob came from a canon point where he was a little inclined to be distrustful of people, whether anyone believes that or not. His way of being distrustful is to be perfectly polite and kind to people but quietly feel unsure. Izumo is someone he was unsure of. Their first conversation she was a little harsh to him, and she criticized him for trying to reassure her. He acknowledged she wasn't wrong, but also felt wary.

But that actually led to him thinking very highly of her, because when she met Yuki, she was immediately so kind and gentle, and concerned about her well-being. Yuki at that point was not even necessarily a real living cat to him, but more of a symbol of the type of terrible thing that can happen when people are cruel or untrustworthy. People's reactions to her, their decisions to be kind to her, was very important early on in how he saw them as people. And for Izumo, it was especially important because he'd taken the 'people can be cruel, be wary of them sometimes' lesson and applied it to her, and she wasn't an awful Minori person at all, but just a blunt girl who is kind to animals. It made him feel ashamed for distrusting her and able to evaluate their conversation in a new light. I think between those two interactions, he very quickly pegged her as essentially a good person who holds others and herself to high standards because she's been let down before.

Knowing that, he appreciated her a lot. He likes people who are willing to scold him or push him to grow. He knows he has a tendency to be passive and just go along with things if he doesn't actively push himself outside of his comfort zone. A lot of people in this game were very kind to him, but wanted to preserve his feelings at the expense of pushing him. He developed a lot of fondness for the people who weren't willing to do that.

Seeing her memories only reinforced that opinion. He saw that she was consistently hurt by others, but that she was the person she could rely on. He's been able to avoid being hurt because he had people to depend on, but she's been doing it on her own and protecting her sister as well. To a kid like him, who has a lot of guilt and shame about the fact that his own brother has needed to be so aware of his emotions and manage how dangerous he can be, he felt a little jealous of her strength even though he knows he's lucky to have had lived the kind of life where no one has made him become that strong.

By the time of her CYOA, he thought extremely highly of her and a had a lot of trust in her. For everyone else, he felt like he had to talk them into agreeing to give up their wish. But for her, he felt like that would be sort of insulting - she would know even better than he did the importance of taking responsibility and doing what needed to be done even if it was painful, so he wasn't about to lecture her. He was willing to just trust in her, that she would understand the choice and make the right one no matter how painful it was. It's sad, but he also admires her a lot for who she is.