#my three favs are kyoya mori and kaoru

[mossiestpiglet]

“And then there’s Kaoru and Kyoya. One of them is also unaware of his feelings.”

I adore how vaguely Honey says this because this is also why these are two of my three favorite characters. Doylian explanation: it’s to avoid saying specifically which one it is and then being committed to dealing with how that’s going to affect the plot. But on a Watsonian level it also works so well because Kaoru and Kyoya have the shared narrative trait of viewing Haruhi through another character’s interest in her, and this could both cause either of them to not realize their own feelings and for it to be harder for Honey to perceive them too.

Just like his interest in the club and its other members comes from his interest in Tamaki, Kyoya believes he only is interested in Haruhi in so much as she serves the club and Tamaki is enjoying having her around. He is blindsided every time their relationship develops at all because to him, they aren’t supposed to have a relationship. She’s supposed to be there for the other club members (especially Tamaki) to enjoy and him to make a profit off of, not to make him think new things about life. If he has feelings for her the same way Tamaki and Hikaru do he would be unaware of them because he is so attached to this idea of himself as detached that he himself can’t see the truth.

Kaoru on the other hand started his relationship with Haruhi in the same position and on the same page as Hikaru, but their personality differences shifted things over time. Because Kaoru thinks things through just a teensy bit more and is slightly more perceptive, he ends up more cognizant of their behavior. That thinking leads him to look at and focus on Hikaru, while Hikaru is too busy just doing stuff to think such meta things. So Kaoru then notices Hikaru’s feelings and this shifts his relationship to Haruhi because Hikaru will always take precedence for him. Even though he has his own direct relationship to her, he also has one through Hikaru and that would form a barrier in his mind to ever trying to think about whether he also had those same kinds of feelings.