#the fandom's tendency to do tenma kanade just. bothers me.

[icedroppedinparasolcider]

so, i've been thinking about this kinda a lot lately, since my post about kanade and tsukasa running into each other during their trips to the hospital to visit their respective family, but for how common the headcanons of Tenma Kanade are, i don't think they're accurate to her, or even the tenmas', character. in fact, i feel like they do a disservice to kanade.

first, i want to talk about why i think this happened in the first place, pulling from why toya is a tenma. there's a lot of parallels between toya and kanade, from how their stories present themselves to the journeys they take to how the fandom treats them, but that's a topic for a completely different post. but, the importance the tenmas hold in toya's story, and the core reason of why he was taken in by them, tells us a lot about why kanade is often put in the same collective.

aoyagis are close to the tenmas, this is why they met in the first place. toya would be taken to the tenmas so he could learn piano from their mother, a piano teacher, whenever harumichi was too busy to teach toya himself, or simply felt like she would do a better job since she's a professional at teaching piano. through this, toya met tsukasa, and rather quickly the three children became close friends, with tsukasa canonically looking to toya like a little brother. they often include him in family activities, and especially after toya had run away from classical would do whatever they could manage to give him a safe space at their home.

and it's that last point that makes their relationship so important. harumichi is not a good father, this is common knowledge, and from the way they interact toya's mother isn't very close to him or particularly hands-on; she calls him "toya-san" during Find a Way Out and that's very not normal for a parent to call their child. this lack of connection to his family is likely a big factor behind toya's formality when talking, the fact he's still yet to convert to referring to kohane and an by their personal names. akito is irreplaceably important to him (and akito probably got annoyed really early on at toya calling him "shinonome-san" and insisted that, as partners, they shouldn't call each other by their family names), and while the vivids are unquestionably important by this point, i don't think toya's thought about it. because his mother, his own mother, calls him "toya-san". traditional and typical ways of talking to people aren't things he's used to.

but the tenmas gave toya that normality. they gave him a family, whether he thinks of them with that phrase or not, that he can have a normal life with, rather than what the aoyagis have given him. the desire to be normal is such an important for him that it fuelled his escape from classical, as we see in The First Concerto. which, if we take a moment to look at someone else in a similar familial dynamic of being faced with impossible and unhealthy expectations by a family you love dearly, we can take a little bit from mafuyu's story and the way she never even considered getting out to be an option before mizuki put it in front of her in Our Escape For Survival. it's possible, and in my opinion quite likely, that toya only considered his life with the aoyagis to be "not normal" because of his dynamic with the tenmas. they are normal, the way they talk to each other and love each other is normal. they give that to him. his family did not.

the tenmas are toya's safe place from the aoyagis, something that akito and vivid street would come to share. they gave someone a family who didn't know what family meant.

so back to kanade, this leads to the question of whether this dynamic and relationship would work for her. and, without even thinking about it for very long, the answer is no. kanade isn't lacking a loving family, she lost that family. she had it, and now it's gone. toya never had one before the tenmas. and given the importance of memories and her family to kanade's story and growth (every kanade unit event being connected to her past, Let's Enjoy Together! Spojoy Park having a flashback to her father teaching her how to throw, both her colourful festival and bloom festival cards being tied to her memories, the entire reason she makes music being because she wants to be like her father), it feels unfair to try and take the yoisaki out of kanade. and while i'm not saying that's what the tenmas would do, that's what kanade would feel is happening were she to be taken in the same way toya was. she's not looking for a new family, there isn't an absence of love; those who gave it are now gone, but the entire point of kanade's story has been the understanding that the love she remembers can be enough to move her forward.

none of this is to say i don't want kanade to interact with and get close to the tenmas, outside of more content for the relationships she does have, all three tenmas are really high on my list of characters i want kanade to have prolonged interaction with. i think the tenmas could teach a lot to kanade that she needs to learn, all three of them have different lessons that i think kanade needs carved into her soul to be able to complete her journey of healing. but what kanade needs is to open herself up to a new type of love. she doesn't need a new family, she doesn't want a new family; her mother and father, the kindness and care and love that they provided her, shaped kanade into the person she is today, she knows this unquestionably, and is actively trying to learn new things from the way they raised her and the memory of how they interacted with each other. what kanade needs is to open herself up to love beyond them, something she's slowly doing (Standing Next to the Kind and Gentle You is the biggest example of this in action, while The Tone that Played on That Day is the actual realisation of what she needs).

to make kanade part of the tenmas, in the same way toya is, goes against the progression of her story and what family means to her. the tenmas provide a family to those who don't have one; kanade does. she has a family that is impossibly and irreplacably important to her, even if they're no longer with her. toya didn't understand what love was before meeting the tenmas, but kanade was raised in it. love exists at the very core of her entire character, serving as the motivation to why she made 25ji Nightcord de. and why she works so hard to help its members. she wants to give to the world what her parents gave to her through her music. and i'm certain that all three of the tenmas would recognise that the moment they hear one of her songs.