#if it wasn’t for mikage and ruka pushing/enabling/manipulating her into lashing out

[palms-upturned]

If Ruka wanted to help Juri and actually inspire her to free herself from Shiori, he did it in all the wrong ways and he seems to think her gayness is a disease he needs to free her of. I think Ruka is interesting, but what he did was never charitable and it reeked of corrective assault. Getting Juri to hate him wasn't even necessary, he could've been a good friend ti her and helped her reexamine her feelings for someone who kept hurting her. He seems like a jealous and homophobic bully.

Yeah I think the thing w Ruka is that he’s motivated entirely by entitlement… he’s got feelings for Juri and that makes him entitled to her lol. The fact that she’s gay just enables him further to correctively assault her like u said “for her own good.” Not to mention all the truly awful shit he does to Shiori just for cruelty’s sake…

I do think he’s interesting in the sense of like… that specific brand of homophobia where he genuinely sees himself as a tragic figure. I feel like we all know some friend or family member who thinks they’re a martyr for trying to “steer us right” only for us to react in an angry and hateful way or cut them out entirely. But the truth is they just feel entitled to telling us what to do and how to live so that we can live up to the idealized version of ourselves that they’ve invented. I feel like that’s absolutely what’s going on w Ruka and his talk of how Shiori holds Juri back from her full potential, w an extra helping of jealousy and entitlement to Juri’s romantic feelings.