I loved your essay. You’re so succinct and spot on about all these vague ideas that have plagued me forever lol. Formerly in the SU fandom and kind of peripherally in the HH fandom, and you kind of hit alla nails on the head.
I am going on a tangent now lol
I’m also so pleased to meet another R07/Higurashi fan. Reading works like his definitely impacted the way I think about character creation in general and I wonder if it impacted you in some similar ways based on your character dissections. R07 has a lot of flaws, but I think he excels at writing women because he understands how important it is for them to possess narrative integrity as a given, regardless of whether they are ontologically ‘good’ or ‘bad’(as the audience would receive them).
I soooo long for more black characters to be made who gives me the same feelings as Rena, or Shion gave me back when I read higu.. R07 writes his female characters with such interiority and that interiority never needs to be justified or preceded by virtue*. and I think a black femme character specifically would have benefitted from being written with such care without their inclusion needing to be preceded by virtue or goalposts/criterion that are created with white fandom’s fear in mind over what’s in the best interest for fun/cool/INTERESTING black representation.
*Rena is probably the best fictional depiction of a person experiencing psychosis I can name, she is written so empathetically despite how it was really so easy to fuck her character up. She is given so much interiority and if anything it just enhances the arcs where she does ‘Bad Things’.
Furthermore, I have never seen a character like Shion become a fandom favourite, nor have I seen it since. All of her flaws (and she does fuck up quite a bit) are so frequently targeted by misogynistic fandom interpretations (and created with misogynistic authorial intent!). But she is given just as much attention as all the other characters, she is deserving of interiority just as much of every other character, just inherently she is, and the result of that is her arc that is just so beautifully conveyed that it manages to resonate with so many people who, in any other media, in any other time, would not like her at all!!!!
anyway you gave me so many things to digest thank you so much, I hope you don’t mind those discussion points or that they aren’t a digression