Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4436931-20190311030429/@comment-38207693-20190319014209

i mean, youre not wrong. i also dont think sakuma should've made it over atsuya (maaaaybe aphrodi, but not atsuya) and he's definitely a character who got brought back cause he got popular in part cause he was pretty or whatever. it did feel random that he came back to IJ in the original inazuma, especially since they seemed like they had more they wanted to do with midorikawa, but then they gave midorikawa the boot and brought back sakuma and never turned back. i guess by then since hiroto's story was done and fudou and kidou's story still had loose ends, they had no need for hiroto's satellite character when they could birng back kidou and fudou's satellite character. i dont know what it is about sakuma that makes him so hit or miss for the western fans but so popular with japanese fans, so much so that he was even top 4 (or top 3, if goujou wasnt #1 lmfao) for a while in that recent animate poll (which makes it even weirder that he barely made top 5/6 in the representatives voting thing). like...does his lines get lost in translation so its easy for fans to ignore his development? is it cause he's not known for his power? is he just plain unlikeable? is it his whiney shrill voice with the lisp that puts people off? idk.

i wouldnt say he's popular exclusively for his relationship to kidou, though. if anything, like kozomaru, he got a lot of crap for being "kidou's stalker" or "kidou's fanboy." even the anime staff made fun of him calling him "kidou's wife who's only there to listen to his problems" "kidou's goldfish poop" (lmao) and "the jealous girl in the fudou-kidou-sakuma triangle." like, he definitely got propelled to popularity in part because of his relationship to kidou, but its not like hino left it at that and never did anything with the character. he really only got pouplar until after shin teikoku, and shin teikoku was basically just a display of sakuma's flaws: envious, vindictive, weak minded, petty, bitter. and these were flaws that carried over to the ffi with his treatment of fudou, so its not like fans like him just cause he's always standing next to kidou looking pretty and not for his good mix of good and bad traits. he was the one who fixed koutei penguin 3, which was pretty good for his character considering he's just an average player who fixed something two geniuses like kidou and fudou couldnt make work. in ares and orion he got pretty good development for an OG character. hell, in this last episode, he got more development in a 30 second scene than shirou/kiyama/fudou/kazemaru did in 19 episodes.

i think bringing back characters just cause you feel bad for them is just as silly as bringing back characters just cause theyre popular.

and about kozoumaru... i dont dislike him, but tbh i still dont know if i like him or am meh to him. he really is fat gouenji without the charisma. fat gouenji with fudou's voice. i like him MUCH MUCH more than no-flaws-mizukamiya, though, but i still think both him and mizu should make it. yes, even more than sakuma.

tl;dr, youre not wrong but i wouldnt say sakuma is popular only cause of kidou.

InazumAzure wrote: This is the reason why I want some of the characters represent other countries instead of Japan like Ichinose and Domon did. I don't want them to be "in the closet" for so long... i really need to shup up about sakuma but i would like to see him ("teikoku's musketeer") doing something related to france.