Poster of #8 here. I was 'outed' on page 1, so I'm not bothering to reply anonymously. And God, I am glad I'm not alone.
This may be a personal thing, but I feel that Ken's childhood was pretty rotten, all things considered, and I feel it's almost more affecting for being, at least up until Kase got involved, messed up in an utterly ordinary way. His issues are small-scale, entirely domestic, affect nobody but himself and - again, this is his early childhod I'm talking about, not the Kase stuff - they aren't actually anybody's fault. Things like that just happen sometimes and there's nobody to blame and nothing anybody can do about it. It just happens.
I really hate it when people give Ken a Mary-Sue-Riffic abusive past. It's pretty obvious from the Drama CDs that his family cared for him. He wouldn't have the issues he does if he'd been abused.
If fangirls just thought about it they'd realize how goddamn awful what Kase did to him was. Nobody gets that good at any sport without effectively devoting their life to it. His life was utterly destroyed by someone he thought he could trust. That, to me, is worse than what happened to Aya. At least Aya knows who to blame for what happened to his family and never believed him to be anything other but Evil with a capital EVIL. Ken trusted Kase. His past is easily as messed up as Aya's if not more so - but because he's not emotastically wallowing in misery he's somehow got it easy? Excuse me, fandom, but WHAT.
Re: 8
This may be a personal thing, but I feel that Ken's childhood was pretty rotten, all things considered, and I feel it's almost more affecting for being, at least up until Kase got involved, messed up in an utterly ordinary way. His issues are small-scale, entirely domestic, affect nobody but himself and - again, this is his early childhod I'm talking about, not the Kase stuff - they aren't actually anybody's fault. Things like that just happen sometimes and there's nobody to blame and nothing anybody can do about it. It just happens.
I really hate it when people give Ken a Mary-Sue-Riffic abusive past. It's pretty obvious from the Drama CDs that his family cared for him. He wouldn't have the issues he does if he'd been abused.
If fangirls just thought about it they'd realize how goddamn awful what Kase did to him was. Nobody gets that good at any sport without effectively devoting their life to it. His life was utterly destroyed by someone he thought he could trust. That, to me, is worse than what happened to Aya. At least Aya knows who to blame for what happened to his family and never believed him to be anything other but Evil with a capital EVIL. Ken trusted Kase. His past is easily as messed up as Aya's if not more so - but because he's not emotastically wallowing in misery he's somehow got it easy? Excuse me, fandom, but WHAT.