Forum - View topicAn Ode to Kikyo: In Defense of one of Takahashi's Most Hated Characters
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7240 |
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People hated Kikyo!?
Damn and here I’am indifferent to Kagome. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1585 |
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Even though I was very invested in Inuyasha and Kagome as a couple, I loved his doomed romance with Kikyo and I always appreciated when the story went back to that well. I don't think Takahashi has ever written a better love triangle.
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meiam
Posts: 3686 |
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Yeah this is all news to me, maybe it makes more sense in the manga vs the anime (which is all I watched). But Kikyo was easily my favorite part of the story, I would easily trade the entire anime for a 12/24 episodes show that was just the Inuyasha x Kikyo backstory (a la Kenshi flashback arc).
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Optera
Posts: 2 |
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Hating Kikyo!?
She's by far the most fascinating character in InuYasha. After she moved on from being just a vengeful spirit, I started rooting for her to find closure, spoiler[which she thankfully managed.] |
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DQBunny
 Posts: 69 Location: Mechanicsburg, PA |
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... seriously?
I've been a fan of Inuyasha for well over 20 years, and it's Kagome that's gotten all the online hate, not Kikyo. Hell, even the anime creators hated Kagome. They flanderized her her character in the anime, as well as cut/changed scenes that added a lot of nuance to her relationship with Inuyasha. Then they put her through the BS she went through in that trashy "sequel" Yashahime. Justice for Kagome! (Note: I don't hate Kikyo. She's a great character. I think she got treated far better in the anime, including fleshed out side plots and back story, than she did in the manga) |
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hops
Posts: 10 |
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I mean, no? She also did get a lot, but that's part of the point of the article (female characters couldn't escape getting hated on no matter what). The degree to which anyone experienced specific characters getting flamed to character assassination hell and back depends on the circles you ran in. Also at the time hatefic was more prominent (idk if there's an actual name for this but like...an author writing with a clear agenda of didactically ripping a character to shreds and probably also having them get stabbed a lot), and I'm real glad that if that trend's still active I haven't seen it in my spaces these days. Anyway not to come at you specifically I just think saying anyone got *all* the hate is kinda silly when hoo boy was there enough to go around on forums fansites and ff.net. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19157 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I heartily agree that Kikyo is the most interesting character in Inuyasha and at least one of the most complex characters in any of Takahashi's works, and I think I always have, and Kennedy lays out pretty well why I've thought that. "The Tragic Love Song of Love and Destiny" (episodes 147-148), which both summarizes and fleshes out the Inuyasha/Kikyo relationship, would be my pick for the best two-episode run in the entire franchise, and one of my two favorite lines of dialog in the whole series (along with Miroku's effective proposal to Sango) was Kikyo's line relatively early on where she says (and I may be paraphrasing here) "I'm finally free. Free to love, and to hate." No line in the series more embodies one of its characters than that.
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1630 |
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The problem with Kikyo is that she’s got a great story in the past, but not in the present. I mentioned in response to another Takahashi talkback here that I thought InuYasha’s biggest weakness was its inability to really change up the story — it’s always chasing Naraku, all the time. Would things have been better if the overall narrative were divided into more discrete arcs, with different antagonists? I think so.
And — crucially — the first character that comes to mind as a potential antagonist for an arc, before even Sesshomaru… is Kikyo. The narrative we’ve got kind of flirts with how she’s affected by being an animated corpse consuming the souls of others to perpetuate herself, but it doesn’t really explore that idea much. Kikyo’s seldom more than a minor background character, occasionally popping by to very briefly help or hinder the heroes before leaving. Would’ve been very interesting, I think, to see her and the “gang” in more direct conflict, without the mutual threat of Naraku to incentivize their cooperation. |
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tintor2
 Posts: 2726 |
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My problem wasn't exactly Kikyo but more exactly the love triangle as a whole. It kept being a subplot that is repeated over and over like back in Ranma but that manga was a comedy. Inuyasha was more serious and the protagonist never actually said he wanted Kikyo or Kagome. Kagome refused to hear his answer back in the day btw.
It reminds me to how blind are some people with dumb male characters like Vegeta who cause genocide in the Buu arc and his wife comes across as dumb as heck when choosing the guy regardless of being nearly killed in the process. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 818 Location: PA / USA |
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I would argue that it's Kikyo's presence in the story that provided the hook that kept the show interesting for me. To this day, having a character that was supposed to be a beacon of good & hope in the world, be brought back just to be filled with such disdain and conflict because simply existing undermines what she worked towards.... I don't think I've seen such a rich/well-written turn like that from any other series, particularly as her disdain for everything is deserved. If Naraku was the carrot that the cast was constantly chasing off in the distance, it always felt like Kikyo was the rolling boulder behind them (particularly to Inuyasha and Kagome). Without Kikyo setting the tone that "simply just finishing the journey might not make things better", it adds a bit of teeth to a story that would have otherwise been lacking, were you to remove Kikyo. Notice that word up there? Contradictory? I've noticed that unseasoned/immature readers/viewers/players have trouble navigating that word, especially if they're hoping to min/max the best possible outcome for the character they're rooting for. It was something I recall causing a lot of controversy back when Critical Role first started (and I imagine it still does) - when your favorite character is given a bad roll, doesn't get the gold, or someone elses' character snaps it up instead, they feel like something was taken from them, something they inherently deserved - Kikyo more than any other character in Inuyasha embodies a lot of that sort of focus, I think. The thing is, if your story/game/whatever is only filled with wins and victories, it's going to be a very flat and bland story. Experiencing a loss and the process of learning from it can often be much richer and more interesting than constantly-winning or landing positive results in storytelling.
I've seen a lot of discussion and potential evidence that something happened with the production of Naruto - that the production staff for the anime preferred a Naruto+Sakura pairing early on, and focus on Hinata was either cut down or removed. The same as Sakura is mentioned, I wonder if some part of the perceived dislike for some of these characters, isn't the production staff's meddling seeping into the show's messaging to viewers, if even subconsciously. |
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TJ_Kat
Posts: 896 Location: Saskatoon, Canada |
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My problem with Kikyo was that after her first few appearance, it felt like every time she showed up she completely derailed the story. No matter what the gang was doing, when Kikyo showed up, all of a sudden the narrative was all about her and how she confused InuYasha. Most of her appearances either felt like a way to add conflict when things seemed like they were going too well, or as a device to pad out the story's run time. And it was always the same. Through the vast majority of the story that subplot never progressed or changed. It also didn't help that every time she showed up it acted like a giant reset button on Kagome and InuYasha's relationship. This part isn't even so much "getting in the way of the other ship", but rather it felt like large parts of the story were being rewound or outright erased. The fact that that subplot never changed made it incredibly annoying that every time Kikyo showed up, things went back to the same reset point over and over and over again.
Later in the story this largely gets resolved as InuYasha sorts out his feelings and commits to Kagome, but by then the damage was done. Kikyo's presence in the story always felt annoying and intrusive - even when it wasn't - and in the story itself, Kagome couldn't trust InuYasha when it came to Kikyo, even when there was no reason for her not to anymore. |
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Midnight-Moon6
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She was better off staying dead, but she's not the worst Inuyasha character. I think that Shippo, and Naraku are the worst. Shippo's sooo annoying, and Naraku is a villain-sue who just causes the plot to drag onnnn, and onnnn. I think that the early Inuyasha episodes before Naraku was introduce to the story were better. Naraku was the worst thing to happen to the story. One of the many reasons that I like Yashahime better is because it has wayyy better villains than Inuyasha does.
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MFrontier
Posts: 20109 |
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Honestly didn't really need to see Kikyo defended as someone who read Inuyasha via the manga, but fascinating stuff!
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pikabot
Posts: 190 |
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Very amusing to see the character name, Inuyasha, consistently stylized like the trademarked series name, InuYasha throughout the article. I assume there was some sort of edit gone wrong.
Even as someone who was never very into InuYasha, Kikyo hatred was something I had heard about. I didn’t understand it at all…at first. But then as I kept reading, there kept being completely satisfying off-ramps for her to exit the story, and the author kept not taking them, and everything about her started to get very repetitive (a problem with the whole series, mind you)…I started to get it. And that’s without involving deranged ship wars. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7240 |
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Miroku the sexual harassment monk wasn’t any better. |
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