Aebebanreb21 - KyanKyan

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Damn, Zayne's getting roasted out here

Puppy Man™️

No one:

Me: *stuffs Rei entirely in my mouth*

Sylus in the background watching me cannibalize the entire same man for the 77394729th time: what the fuck

I think you or someone else discussed how Inuyasha is most likely demisexual because of his lack of interest in nudity until he formed an emotional bond. I was just thinking how the anti’s claimed Inuyasha settled for Kagome, but all evidence points to him loving her *despite* her resemblance to Kikyo. Not hating on Kikyo, just pointing out how Inuyasha kept saying it’s his fault she died because he didn’t trust her, even though trust has to go both ways but whatever, so if he was settling then Kagome would be a daily reminder that he failed Kikyo. Which would sound like hell considering his repeated claims of his fault.

But clearly in the past discussion of Inuyasha being demisexual, we all know he isn’t shallow or ”settling”.

I might have mentioned Inuyasha being demisexual once or twice, but I don't remember posting something that specific. Maybe someone else did and I reblogged it?

I'm glad you brought up the "Inuyasha settled for Kagome" terrible take, though, because you make great points and boy do I have something to say about it.

First, I love that you mentioned trust has to go both ways despite Inuyasha blaming Kikyo's death solely on his lack of trust on her. It always bothered me how quickily and sincerely he owned up to the role he played on her fate when there was zero reciprocity from Kikyo.

He went as far as taking responsability for things that have never really happened and that would be completely out of his control if they had, such as Kikyo "dying to follow after him" even though he didn't ask for it and never would.

The irony is that, between the two of them, Kikyo was actually the one more equipped to realize they were being played and yet, not only she falls for the same trap, but never really acknowledges that her lack of trust on Inuyasha was just as detrimental to their downfall.

Naraku's entire plan was based on both of them doubting each other. If either one had been more trusting, it'd have failed. Inuyasha recognizes this and regrets not trusting Kikyo, immediately treating her like the victim that she is and never once blaming her.

But he is a victim himself and she never extends the same courtesy to him, still thinking her actions were justified because he should have trusted her — not the other way around — and so she never bothers easing his guilt. On the contrary, she purposely adds to it.

The thing about the love triangle — for lack of a better term — is that Inuyasha and Kagome are constantly pushing their feelings aside to empathize with each other's and Kikyo's pain, while Kikyo acts like she's the only one who's hurting.

Which is to be expected at first because she is the one who died and was brought back against her will, but as the story progressed, I kept waiting for Kikyo to see a little bit of herself on the ordinary girl who was entrusted the weight of the world upon her shoulders, had her shoes to fill and the mess she left behind to clean up.

I kept waiting for her to show some sympathy for the boy who lost fifty years of his life because she misjudged him and was willing to die for a debt she manipulated and guilt-tripped him into thinking he had, a boy she supposedly loves.

None of it came, at least not in a way that felt organic or satisfying. That's my main issue with how Kikyo was written. You can't paint her as a complex character and then gloss over her flaws. You can't sell her as gray character and then pretend the bad things she did never happened.

Takahashi wanted her to reap all of the rewards that come with a redemption arc without really bothering to make her go through one, because that would mean having Kikyo face her mistakes for what they were — including her distrust on Inuyasha — and then apologizing or making up for it, a feat that rarely happened in canon, if at all.

Instead, she abruptly stops acting as vicious, so everything can be conveniently forgiven and forgotten because "she isn't like that anymore." The lack of explanation about what motivated this change makes harder for the audience to connect with her and results in many plot inconsistencies.

And the lack of accountability regarding Kikyo's actions keeps her from growing and reaching her full potential as a character, indirectly regressing or preventing the development of the characters around her as well, which I believe is a huge part of why the story feels repetitive and stagnant at times.

Now, you're definitely onto something when you argue that all evidence actually points to Inuyasha falling in love with Kagome despite her resemblance to Kikyo. I've actually talked about it here and here.

While it's true that Inuyasha mistook Kagome for Kikyo when they first met, it would've been unreasonable to expect anything different. Their looks and scents are similar, he had just woken up from a fifty years long spell and up until then he had no reason to believe otherwise, but Inuyasha actually caught up in a decent amount of time.

After that, as much as he still refused to call Kagome by name, he was also very aware she wasn't Kikyo, to the point that it took seeing her with complete priestess attire on for him to even make that correlation again.

And yet, Inuyasha still doesn't go back into thinking they're the same person, but rather that Kagome's a girl who resembles Kikyo. Only ebentually, even this starts to change the more time they spend together and suddenly, when Inuyasha has a nightmare about Kikyo, is Kagome he sees first.

Mind you, he has only seen Kagome in priestess clothes once. Kikyo wore those her entire life. It'd be understandable for him to confuse Kagome for Kikyo and yet Kagome was his first thought here when, by logic, she shouldn't have been. From them on, he doesn't even see any resemblance between the two girls at all anymore.

Which makes sense, because even if Inuyasha had tried to use Kagome as a replacement — something he never did — he couldn't possibly have succeded, since both girls are polar opposites — a creative choice that was done completely on purpose — and Kagome wasn't slightly interested on being anyone but herself, making her into the worst Kikyo replacement ever.

That's why it got easier for Inuyasha to distinguish one girl from the other with time. Their distinct personalities make up for completely different dynamics and bring completely different feelings out of Inuyasha, because they represent completely different things to him and, again: this is done absolutely on purpose.

In the manga, this is better illustrated by two very specific panels. In the first one, Kikyo is smiling sadly but genuinely at Inuyasha — which we don't see her do often — and he admitted later on that the exchange made him feel guilty, like he had done something wrong, since he had just been rude to her.

In the second one, Kagome is smiling brightly at Inuyasha, which she does constantly, then we immediately see him blush and think to himself how relieved he is to see that smile

Of course those are very different contexts, but they pretty much set the tone for both relationships and if the arrangement of those panels wasn't a conscious choice — which I doubt — then Takahashi is insanely lucky. It's also worth noting that Inuyasha felt relieved to see Kagome smiling because it was farther confirmation that even after Kikyo's resurrection, she was still Kagome.

So I think it's safe to say the physical resemblance actually slowed the romantic process down, considering that the staged betrayal made Inuyasha build his walls even taller than they were when he met Kikyo. This becomes even more clear when you compare their respective first "amicable" conversations.

With Kikyo, even though he was reluctant about her approach and suspicious of her intentions, there was still a part of him that obviously wanted it to be true, so he was at least open to what she had to say.

With Kagome, he was visibly more aggressive and closed off because he has been burned before and she was the reincarnation of the woman who did the burning, which makes her managing to get his trust so quickly that much more remarkable, since she apparently did in less time and in worse circumstances, what Kikyo couldn't.

And Kagome did it precisely because she never acted like Kikyo. She actually took the time to know Inuyasha, to give him her trust and to earn his, to build a solid relationship, based on honesty and real acceptance.

I like to think that, while Kikyo found a crack on Inuyasha's defense she could slip in, Kagome slowly smashed his walls to the ground, therefore leaving an ever lasting impact on him that she couldn't have made by being anyone but herself.

When Inuyasha starts to pursue Kagome romantically, he does so after concluding that there's absolutely no resemblance between the two girls at all and after going through an entire arc where Kagome cried for his sake and trusted him blindly, none of which has anything to do with Kikyo.

People argue that Inuyasha was actually trying to kiss Kikyo here, but why would he do that when he still thinks she betrayed him? And if this was really the case, then why has he never willingly kissed or tried to kiss Kikyo until their final goodbye, Sunrise additions excluded?

At this point, it makes more sense to me that he was avoiding to look at Kagome not because she looks like Kikyo — he has been looking at her just fine before —, but because he has started to catch feelings for her despite his efforts not to and doesn't know how to act. In fact, when he had the chance to kiss Kikyo soon after, this is what we got instead:

And then he hugs her — something the anime cut out — but the important thing is that Inuyasha had this and many other opportunities to rekindle his relationship with Kikyo and simply didn't.

In this particular occasion, he even go as far as to ask Kikyo to return the piece of soul that keeps her "alive" to Kagome knowing full well what the consequences were.

Why would Inuyasha settle for a "replacement" when he could have the real thing instead? Even if you believe resurrected Kikyo to be nothing more than a malicious replica of the original, she's still more Kikyo than kagome could or would ever be.

I dislike this notion because if it's true and there's not an ounce of Kikyo there, why should the audience or the characters care if she "lives" or "dies"? If she gets a redemption arc or not? It feels like a cop out to only consider her the real Kikyo when she does good things.

That being said, save for maybe one scene at the beginning where Inuyasha shoved a bow and some arrows at Kagome because Kikyo was a master archer, he never expected her to behave like Kikyo, never tried to change her so she would and never acted frustrated or disappointed at the fact that she was her own person.

Inuyasha has his flaws — as any good main character should — but he always respected the inviduality of both girls, which is more than I can say about the people who insist on this baseless take.

To wrongly paint Inuyasha as someone who settled for Kagome because she looks like Kikyo gets especially icky when even Naraku, the villain who was obsessed with her, never redirected said obsession to Kagome.

It's such a common trope that I was actually expecting it, but I'm glad it didn't happen because it's a subtle and yet effective way of sedimenting both girls as separate individuals instead of going for the cheapest option.

And ironically, the only character who treated Kagome as if she was Kikyo was Kikyo herself, but even that was very early on and she only seemed to do it as a way of belittling Kagome, because while mentioning her to other people — or by the end of the story — Kikyo had no trouble referring to Kagome as a different being.

Sunrise's adaptation made very questionable choices but something they were pretty consistent on was making clear Kagome and Kikyo aren't the same.

Besides, something fundamentally wrong with this argument is that Inuyasha comes off as shallow and Kikyo as disposeable. Shallow because it suggests physical appearance is all that matters — which goes against everything his character stands for in canon — and the soul is just a seal of approval.

Disposeable because it hints Kikyo's personality is so forgettable and unimportant that it played absolutely no part on sparkling Inuyasha's interest. She's so easily replaceable that even someone who had opposite world views, thoughts, feelings, temperament and mannerisms could do the trick. The memories they made are so generic that it wouldn't have make a difference if any other character was in her place.

Why do people even like those characters, why do they even ship them together if they truly believe that? That's why I don't buy that they actually do.

You see, considering how huge Kagome's soul is, Kikyo technically has got to be someone else's reincarnation too, but I've never seen anyone making the case that she is anyone but herself or that her predecessor is also the love of Inuyasha's life.

The reason they try to do this with Kagome is so that they can pretend Inuyasha and Kikyo somehow ended up together to cope with the fact that they didn't. And that's the exact same reason they pretend he setled for Kagome as well.

Which is funny because what exactly was Inuyasha settling for? Like, in the great scheem of things, what was Kikyo able to give him that he couldn't get a thousand times better from Kagome with no strings and just had to make his peace with it?

It seems to me like it was the other way around: Kagome managed to accomplish everything Kikyo failed to do, so if anything Inuyasha was settling for Kikyo, resigned to spend the rest of his life as human — something he hated to be — just to get "accepted" or to die for something he didn't do just to appease her.

Finally, to say inuyasha settled implies he had no other choice but to marry Kagome. He had: staying single, because now that he has friends and wasn't alone anymore, he doesn't need a lover to fill that empty space in his life if he doesn't want one.

Plus, Kagome wasn't entitled to his love. She jumped trought that well knowing that three years is a long time, that people and feelings change and that what waited foe her on the other side was a mystery, but she did it anyway because all she ever wanted from him was to stay by his side and for him to be honest with her.

Kagome would've been fine with a platonic relationship because even though she obviously wanted more, she was ready to accept whatever Inuyasha was willing to give her, but he wanted her to return so he could give her everything, which he couldn't before because he felt in debt with Kikyo. That's the whole point.

Inuyasha was the one who iniciated every romantic moment they had early on: the first hug, both almost kisses, etc. And it was clear that the things Kagome made him feel, such as that sense of peace, of belonging, of unadultered happiness, were very new to him, so the idea that Inuyasha was settling for her is laughable when this is the character in question:

I know a lot of those scenes were deleted or changed by Sunrise but I watched the anime without reading the manga beforehand and reached the exact same conclusions, so I'm still of the opinion that the people who convinced themselves Kagome was a consolation prize either didn't pay attention or have an agenda of their own that won't change by reading the original material.

TLDR; one does not simply "settle" for their soulmate. They come home to them.

these two have taken over my entire brain

@inuvember​: day 1

inuyasha

He's too cute 🤭

Hello!

Fellow inukagger here *shakes your hand* I noticed your tags on an inuyasha video edit post where you stated inuyasha was seeing kagome during their almost first-kiss. I want to believe this soo badly, but I have actually made a post where I argue the opposite bc that’s (unfortunately) my interpretation.

I would genuinely love to hear why you think this as I’m more than happy to be convinced 🥺❤️ If you’ve posted about it before, apologies that I haven’t seen it; please kindly drop a link.

Thank you very much! (It’s all 🫶🏼 and interest in civil discussion, certainly not looking to start anything otherwise)

Sure thing! I think there's a lot of misconception firstly because Kagome herself says this. That he hates her for looking like Kikyou, but when he looked at her in that moment, it looked loving, so she herself put two and two together that he must still be seeing her as Kikyou, but therefore have been in love with Kikyou. Which is partially true in that we know he did have feelings for her back when she was alive. (I have my own InuKik-critical perception on this, but that's a whole other rant and probably not what you're asking.) But I think it's VERY important to keep in mind that Kagome is an Unreliable Narrator in her own story here, particularly where it comes to interpreting Inuyasha's feelings at times. This holds true for pretty much the entire story, but particularly early on, when she doesn't know him as well. First off, I'm going to fast-forward slightly to give examples of Inuyasha himself making it clear he does NOT see Kagome as Kikyou, to prove my point that he's not lying when he tells her so at the almost-kiss. Keep in mind a lot of these are only available in the source material and the anime DID cut them to fuel love triangle drama. The manga is the original intended canon, so that's what I'll be going with for this entire conversation.

(Let it be said that as far as Japanese subtleties are concerned, he is asking Kagome to date him, here.)

For the sake of argument, let's look back at this "very beginning" he mentions, and how long it took him to realize Kagome LOOKED a bit like Kikyou, but was not Kikyou:

Well that was quick. He does compare them a few times after this, but it's always about how different they are. (Usually to be rude, but let's face it, this is early Inuyasha.)

(I include this "comparison" just because he's RELIEVED here at Kagome NOT being Kikyou. It's the first explicit indication that he likes her for her and would be heartbroken if the girls got switched.)

(Then he proceeds to make it even more explicit, and even Kaede spells it out.)

He completely stops comparing them in any capacity after this, and the way he does it says to me that he sees and values them very differently IN SPITE of the slight physical resemblance, not BECAUSE they look alike.

"But Kit!" I hear you say, "These examples are meaningless because they are AFTER he tried to kiss her!" Well I disagree his feelings would have changed that drastically in the small amount of time given the context, but let's still look at all InuKag have been through at this point. I'll just do a montage of Inuyasha feeling pride or affection for Kagome in said arcs because I am self-indulgent like that, lol.

(My boy did not need to protect her, here. If she was gone, he'd be free of the beads and thus free to just take the Jewel. He did it purely out of valuing her life in some capacity.)

(Knowing her scent already? Lending her your only armor just so she won't get hurt? Why Inuyasha, that's not extremely intimate at all!)

(I find him saying her name significant not just because of differentiating her from Kikyou in his mind, but in that Inuyasha doesn't say ANYONE'S name unless they are important to him. Exceptions.)

("I refuse to get involved!" *Kagome's in trouble, immediately gets involved*)

(I love this arc overall SO MUCH cuz they not only have their first friendly pouty BFFs spat, but Inuyasha then immediately comes running to save her after smelling her blood THROUGH SPACE AND TIME, and is so desperate to be relied on cuz it makes him feel good to protect her and he's realizing that.)

(Lest we forget he had SOMETHING TO TELL HER right before threading their fingers extremely intimately.)

(Inu wasn't in this arc much but he WAS very worried and impressed with her.)

(I could honestly put the WHOLE spider head arc in here and gush about every detail of their character development, but we all know the highlight and I think Rumiko put it best in the Profiles Book that Inuyasha had never encountered or thought of anyone who would be saddened by his death before. I truly believe this is when he decided to open up and give his budding feelings for her a chance to bloom. And more importantly for this particular argument, decides NOT TO LIE to her again.)

And it's at this point we come to him trying to kiss her. It's true Inuyasha's emotions are slightly volatile from Kikyou being brought up. It's a definite sore spot, which even Kagome picks up on. Kagome asks point blank if he still sees her as Kikyou and hates her for it. To which he says she has it all wrong.

Considering her previous statement was if he HATES her, we can pretty easily infer that he's answering that directly, here. As in, no, he does not. Reading into context clues and what we see before and after this moment, I'd go so far as to say he's implying he LOVES her, here. Or at least is beginning to realize he likes her much more than as a friend. The last arc was huge for him, let's not forget that. He'd never ever been vulnerable like that with anyone: both in letting them know his night of weakness, and emotionally. All signs point to him having realized he's fallen for Kagome pretty hard and is ready to finally LET himself fall. (Though clearly Kagome's not quite ready herself, yet.) I'd argue that Kikyou's resurrection arc and the arcs following shortly after that I linked moments from earlier are there to just cement that he doesn't see her as Kikyou to any viewers who are still skeptical. In the manga anyway, we're never shown Inuyasha pining for Kikyou or wishing she was back to life. Quite the opposite, he only wishes her to rest in peace and reach Nirvana, which he has said to her more than once. The closest we get is this line right after the resurrection arc comes to an end and Kikyou's presumed dead from the cliff:

Which I personally interpret as him still being heartbroken, yes, but the fact he brings up the idea of falling for another woman tells me he's still mulling over how he has romantic feelings for Kagome, and his trauma regarding romance making him wonder if he should backpedal on that or give up his initial goal that was a symptom of his heartbreak in the first place. (As in, he immediately stole the Jewel after Kikyou betrayed him essentially to make the hurt go away as soon as possible. Also note this is AFTER the almost-kiss, right before Miroku makes his appearance.) So I have a pretty hard time believing that he suddenly decided to lie to Kagome right after his entire breakthrough night of vulnerability with her, and how that affected him. Also keep in mind that Kagome doesn't have concrete feelings for Inuyasha yet, so there is no jealousy or lack of confidence where Kikyou is concerned at the point of time in question. One could (shakily imo) argue that he might lie to protect her feelings later on, when he's worried about her becoming angry or jealous, but he has no such reason to lie, here. Therefore I believe he's being extremely genuine, and probably the most genuine he's been so far since he decided to abandon his previous lie about disliking her scent. I truly think he wanted to find out what kissing was like with this spitfire girl who'd run away with his heart already and made him feel and share things he'd never felt or shared with anyone. I hope this at least elaborated on why I see that scene the way I do! If you have questions or want me to discuss an aspect of it further, don't hesitate to hit up my inbox again! I'm happy to share my thoughts on the series and especially InuKag!