#s.eiji is not immune from this either his obsession with n.atsumi is super weird and ages poorly too

[bells-of-black-sunday]

Let me ramble about S.pirit H.unter under the cut, because I am going to be adding muses from it soon™. I'm currently replaying my favorite game of the series to refresh myself on the story :nodding:

While I do think N.G has the strongest story of the franchise, how it handles H.azuki leaves a lot to be desired and at times can be outright uncomfortable to me.

Even going into it again after not playing it for 3 years and thinking to myself "Why didn't I like her when I played? She's not that bad, just kind of slightly annoying." to being violently reminded of why I didn't like her so much and would actively complain to my friend who I was playing with that we had to bring her and not S.eiji for certain encounters was a trip.

So for context, the game has a sort of "relationship" mechanic where you can react positively or negatively to certain things instead of having a list of responses to choose from, the reactions generally have no impact on the story and only effect unlocks for your spirit files and such as far as I know. Generally its just one off lines about how "you seem excited", happy, or don't care either way about the point of conversation. Generally this run I've been reacting super positively to everything S.eiji says, because I want his full spirit file, so I don't have to keep reading the wiki and before I only had 2 pages of it.

This also effects H.azuki as a "love interest", I say that vaguely, because as far as I know even if you do react positively to her advances you still don't really end up together, it's mostly just flirting. Generally my gripe with any kind of romance in anything is a lot of it is as bland as watching white paint dry, because most of the time forced romance like this has absolutely no chemistry. Now I could absolutely be wrong as I've never reacted positively to her advances and they could develop chemistry, but to me H.azuki and A.kira would never be friends if K.akuya hadn't inadvertently brought them together.

They don't even have platonic chemistry.

This becomes a bigger issue as the game goes on, because regardless of how you react to her it repeatedly tries to push this romance regardless of if you like it or not. This becomes a major issue when towards the end of Chapter 3 H.azuki asks A.kira to strip naked, so she can write the H.eart S.utra on his body and me being me who does not really care for the romance suvplot, I was like "what the fuck, no" and she proceeds to sexually assault A.kira saying that hes "just being embarrassed" as she forcibly tries to strip him of his clothes after being told no multiple times.

Granted, this game came out in 2018 far before when assault on men was treated with the seriousness it deserves and I have to give that cultural context that even to this day things like that are "jokes" in media even if they're extremely uncomfortable. So I know what the scene was meant as, but it still makes anyone who I've played the game with have an extremely negative view on her in general and I don't think that's fair to her character, but I cannot blame people, because that's how the story handles her.

It won't let her and A.kira be friends, it won't let them develop any sort of chemistry, she honestly feels like an outsider between him and S.eiji who have known each other since they were 8. H.azuki doesn't have nearly the same easy banter between A.kira or S.eiji and kind of gets boiled down to just being a weird girl who only is interested in being around either of them, because of the spirits and wanting A.mi home safe.

Granted I'm going to play the game through again, but that feeling of rolling my eyes so fucking hard and groaning whenever I have to take H.azuki over S.eiji is already returning purely, because of that scene, because the scene only gets worse with time and how culture around those topics shift. Which honestly kind of sucks, because I was hoping it was going to be another M.el situation for me where I once found her pretty boring to thinking shes super interesting once I started noticing stuff I hadn't before. But man.... that scene sure does exist....