"Rather than Shinkai Kanata, i'm Ryusei Blue now"

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About Me

♪ My name is Shirogane, but everyone just shortens it to Shiro

♪ I’m 17

♪ I live in the UK

♪ She/her pronouns~

♪ KanataP first human second

♪ Quite possible the world’s laziest writer

♪ Self-studying Japanese but honestly my language skills end there

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Before you follow...

♪ My account is mostly shameless Kanata lovemail. For your own sanity, if you dislike him in any way, do not follow me.

♪ This really extends to the rest of ryuseitai as well. I love them! If you don't, that's okay, but we might end up annoying each other.

♪ I find interacting with my mutuals really hard. I do love all my mutals though, and if we interact frequently enough I probably already consider you my friend, so please be patient with me if i'm finding coversations difficult!

♪ My language filter isn't great and so I swear a lot, especially on my priv and in DMs

♪ I always sb to break the mutual but I don't mind if you dont

♪ I use she/her pronouns for Arashi whenever I talk about her. I literally do not care what you use but I won't have any arguments about this.

Don't follow if...

♪ You're racist, sexist, homophobic, or anything else under that umbrella. I have no tolerance for it.

♪ You publically get involved with fandom drama/will put fandom drama on my tl.

♪ You don't like my friends or my favourite characters and will bring up that dislike in my presence.

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Contacts

• My AO3 account

• Private twitter (mutuals only!)

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Why I love Kanata

Warning: this is extremely embarrassing and sappy and I really don't know why you'd read it but I Love Him

So... here it is... my stupid declaration of love for a fictional anime boy... wow...
Kanata is a good boy though and it’s been a while since I’ve gotten so attached to a fictional character, so I suppose I have to suck it up and fight the embarrassment. Do it for him... do it for Kanata... okay let’s go let’s do this

• click here to avoid the essay!

• click here for Kanata's birthday letter

I’ve been putting off doing this for ages, because whenever I tried to sit down and explain where my strange affection for this boy comes from, I’m stumped. I just... feel really soft and fluffy when I think about him and I don’t really know why??? Maybe it’s simply that he has a comforting aura, because he definitely does, but somehow that doesn’t quite do it justice. There’s no ‘one thing’ that I love about Kanata, I love everything! And there’s so much there to love that whenever I try to think about it, it overwhelms me. But I feel like it wouldn’t be doing him justice not to try. He’s honestly such a perfect boy, in my eyes, and I want to try and show anyone reading this what I see when I look at him! So I suppose that’s what this is, rather than a formulated list of things I like and why I like them... it’s a little window into my mind and a little insight on my pathetic love for a blue anime boy.

I suppose I should start from the beginning. When I first started playing enstars, I actually wasn’t a big fan of Kanata. I can’t even imagine saying that now tbh... But it’s true, I think originally he was probably my least favourite of Ryuseitai, not because I didn’t like him, just because I was totally neutral on him. I didn’t invest in learning much about my boys in ryuseitai past the part they played in the main story (waaay back when I was an enstars newbie), and so I didn’t know much about Kanata aside from that he was certainly deserving of his title as an oddball and also that he had very fluffy hair. I still think Kanata has fluffy hair, btw. Originally I didn’t really like it, but as I started to like Kanata as a character I started to enjoy his design as well (now it’s my favourite in the game... oops...). But yeah, he has very nice hair. It’s really soft looking, and cute. It flicks out a lot to the sides, and gets messier the more he moves around, so it’s a bit like a gauge of how much energy he’s used up, and to that extent how happy he is... or at least that’s how I see it. A bit of his fringe untucks from behind his ears whenever he works really hard... that’s my favourite Kanata, the Kanata with his hair untucked, because when it’s untucked he’s always smiling, and when he smiles it makes everyone feel better!

Thinking about that makes me think of his bloomed Piratefes Card! This was my first Kanata 4*, and I was so happy to have him home, smiling like that. It took me just under a month to max out that cards affection, because I literally didn’t take it out of my team for a second... when I read the story and got context for it, it made me feel even happier! In piratefes, Kanata gets to go to the sea with Ryuseitai, and they all do a beach live! Kanata loves the beach a lot, and the other members of Ryuseitai are worried to let him go near the ocean, because he can’t swim... even so, he’s clearly enjoying himself. I doubt he ever went on holiday with friends like that before. I think he’d always kept himself too distant from ‘humans’ to be able to enjoy such trivial things like going to the beach and sharing the things you love with people close to you. That’s another thing I love about Kanata. Throughout the year, he stops being whatever emotionless alien everyone thought he was in the past. Despite whatever happened then, he finds a new place to belong and moves on with life. He lives, and becomes more human. He starts smiling more. He becomes happier, and that’s something really obvious across the stories I’ve read.

The point is... Kanata smiles lots when he’s with Ryuseitai! When he performs with them, his smile is as bright as any shooting star! When he’s with Ryuseitai, he’s home. You can see it in his expressions and hear it in his voice. He doesn’t need to worry about anything else anymore, the oddballs, his household, or if he truly can survive living on earth with everyone else. Chiaki found him in the ocean, and pulled him on land under the sun, and suddenly he has a purpose again! To make Chiaki’s dream come true, and to help Midori, Tetora and Shinobu grow into themselves. He’s grateful to Ryuseitai, because they taught him he doesn’t need to be the emotionless god he was raised to be, he can be a hero with everyone else!

But you know, you can’t have happiness without sadness, and any kind of emotional growth needs to come from some sort of bad place... even though I know it all ends well, I get really sad when I read the earlier stories (or even some of the later ones, I guess) and see Kanata worrying, or being upset. Feeling alone, and feeling like he doesn’t deserve to be in Ryuseitai... at first I had never considered someone so relaxed and airheaded to carry such dark thoughts around with them. So I was really surprised to read supernova, and I started to think maybe Kanata wasn’t as simple as I had originally thought. There’s quite a lot going on in his head!
There’s a part that sticks out to me, where Chiaki is handing out the plan for their hero show/live, and as he gives out sheets to all the first years Kanata asks if he can have one as well...
Chiaki is kind of surprised because, yeah, of course you can have one! You’re a member of Ryuseitai too, aren’t you?
Kanata was also surprised when he heard that, I think because he’d never been very involved with his unit before them, but more than anything he was happy. Supernova is my favourite event story because there are a couple of scenes like that in it. Kanata has been really distant with his unit back then and strongly believes the first years don’t really like him. However he actually spends time with them here, and realises that... maybe they’re only scared of him because he never gave them a chance to warm up to him. He sees that he does have a place with ryuseitai, and he’s not as unwanted there as he thinks. He helps the first years practice their routine, and finds out that they really respect him! And he helps Midori on stage, and realised that he has a responsibility to look out for these little kids alongside Chiaki, and become a reliable Senpai they can look up to. After all, ‘they’re sheltered between the warm ocean and the burning, life giving sun’, and they need both of those things to survive! Without the sun, they may get cold and drown, but if the ocean isn’t there they’ll burn up!

Whenever I read a ryuseitai story set before supernova, I instantly have to read supernova again afterwards. Because reading stuff from before Kanata grows to love ryuseitai kind of makes me sad. In wisteria festival, he says that he doesn’t want to go to ryuseitai practice because he feels he doesn’t belong there. And in the later timeline, it’s obvious he finds ryuseitai to be a second home, saying things like ‘together the five of us can do anything’. So before that... what did he have? Obviously he has Souma and Kaoru, but they’re his friends. Not his family. His unbloomed wisteria festival 5* makes a lot of sense, then. He looks like he’s considering leaving everything behind and just... returning into the sea. I sort of understand. Just as he had come to love humans and being with them, they turn against him and he and his friends are shunned. There may be individual people who he cares for, but at this point I don’t think he truly understood how much they cared for him, and he didn’t feel he had an ‘anchor’, a home to keep him from leaving his new life.
Later, though, he says to Chiaki that he would not have stayed around if he didn’t want to, and that he would stay on land forever. That’s the end of supernova. He’s not lonely anymore, he’s changing. That’s because of ryuseitai, I think. Ryuseitai changed him, and that’s why he thinks of it as the place he can belong, because they’re what anchors him to the land and stops him drifting away again.

Sure, he wasn’t always alone before ryuseitai. Even though he met Chiaki first, Chiaki avoided him for a lot of the second year. So I think the first people who stopped him feeling lonely must have been the oddballs. In fact, I know it, I know they were the first step he made to becoming the person he is today. Even when you compare him with people like Rei, a former ‘demon king’ who is now like an old man, and Chiaki, the fearless hero of justice who used to be a shy little crybaby, Kanata has changed the most out of all the characters, in my opinion. After meteor impact came out, everyone could see that Kanata used to be very ‘alien’ and almost empty in his second year, like he was hardly recognisable as a human. Separate from others and detached from his feelings, not even knowing what loneliness is and granting wishes to everyone without feeling anything for them... Of course, that’s nothing like the Kanata we know now! He’s very kind and looks after the people around him, and he gives good advice! He wants to get involved with the affairs of other people and help them rather than staying away from them (although he refuses to burden anyone else with his own problems... sigh... please, let them help you...) and seems to care more about other people’s happiness than his own (see: Aquarium). I wonder what changed him so much... from someone Eichi probably found it very easy to demonise to the kind person he is now... obviously, Chiaki and Ryuseitai played a big part, because they taught him to be happier and to love the world and enjoy being there, but before that, I’m pretty sure it was the oddballs. They helped him get to the point where he could properly change, and become more loving, and discover that he can, if he wants, be a hero like Chiaki! I think, even if he finds it hard, he tries to do that with everything he has. He does a really good job, in the end. I’m proud of him... yeah, I really am.

See, in a weird way, I’ve always admired how Kanata has been able to change himself and make his life better for himself. That’s not an easy thing to do, and something I personally wish I could do. That was what made me truly love him, I think. He sort of gives me the sense that it’ll be alright. You can find a place to belong, and find people who love you, no matter what you’ve been like in the past. In him, I think he carries the certainty that that’s the truth, and maybe that’s why he’s so relaxed, and why he relaxes others around him? Not just me, but the other characters too (Midori and Kaoru are the ones that spring to mind instantly) agree that he’s really calming. Maybe I shouldn’t be so emotionally dependent on fictional characters, but if I feel I’m about to have a breakdown, and life has gone to shit and I can’t stop stressing and crying, I can play ryuseitai songs to make myself feel better. Kanata has a very nice voice... it suits him perfectly and every time I hear him in a song I just can’t stop myself smiling. It goes without saying, then, that marine blue rendezvous is one of my favourite songs... I can’t feel properly sad when I listen to it, and even now I can’t really explain why. It just... makes me very happy. Kanata sounds really at peace with himself when he sings, and that must rub off on me, I guess. It’s weird, since ryuseitai as a concept isn’t exactly something he ‘gets’. He’s said lots of times that he doesn’t really think he can be a hero, and that he sympathises more with the villains than the hero’s he is now trying to replicate. You’d think someone thinking about all that sort of complicated stuff would find it hard to sing happily - I know I would. I can’t sing at all when there’s anything on my mind, no matter how tiny it is. Well, I think Kanata probably doesn’t have much on his mind when he sings, because even though he doesn’t understand ryuseitai as a concept much, he understands ryuseitai as a group of people he loves to be with.

The other members of Ryuseitai are like a family for Kanata. He obviously cares for them so deeply and selflessly... in comic world he says something along the lines of ‘wanting to be a hero because Chiaki will praise me for it’ when he saves Kaoru’s surfboard from the roof. From that can we assume he does most of what he does for the sake of Ryuseitai, and getting closer to them? A part of me thinks that’s true, even just a little bit. Kanata is very selfless, even if he does it for selfish reasons? Does that make sense? In my head, it makes sense. I feel like I understand that bit of Kanata, even if most of him is a mystery. And if that’s the case for Chiaki and Kaoru... maybe he thinks similar things about other people, like the ryuseitai first years or the oddballs? He looks out for people and extends kindness to basically everyone, in his own way. Like how he gives saltwater fish plushies out to people casually, and how he gave Midori that little plushie phone charm. And how he keeps inviting people to join the marine biology club. If I could, I’d definitely join the marine biology club. It’s really sweet how much Kanata loves all the little fish he keeps there, and how excited he gets over new ones. And how he names them, stuff like ‘pond turtle-san’ rather than an actual name... not only that, but all the enthusiasm he has can be really funny at times! I really want a side story where the Marine biology club go to the aquarium properly, or to the beach together. I think it’d be great. If they did go to the beach I can imagine Kanata taking all the freaky looking stuff out of rock pools and waving it around in front of a horrified Kaoru... even though Kaoru doesn’t like deep sea fish much, Kanata is determined to change his opinion, and seems to think with enough exposure to scary fish Kaoru will warm up to them. I hope at some point Kaoru at least pretends to like the creepy eels or whatever, just because I think it’d make Kanata really happy. I bet he and Souma both have huge piles of sea plushies at their houses, since Kanata seems to have an unending supply of them to give away...
That’s really cute. Although, it’s also sort of sad, when you think about it.

Not sad that he has all the plushies. Sad as in, he’s clearly someone who wants to be loved by others, and he’s started making more of an effort to get along with them... so last year must’ve hurt to have everyone turn against him. In fact, it’s clear that it did. Reading ryuseitai’s reminiscence story... it made my heart ache. There’s no specific scene... just, all of it, you know? It was painful to watch. Kanata... he’d always felt lonely and lost before, but he’d always been surrounded by people. He’d always been admired. He’d never really felt hatred. That was probably why Kanata was the trickiest oddball for Eichi to defeat. As long as he had his followers, he was surrounded by people and couldn’t be reached. That made him untouchable. To kill a god, you must first take away his powers... and Kanata’s powers lay in the people who never left his side. All at once, he was isolated and stripped of the people who he constantly worked to make happy and grant their wishes... he was alone, and hurting... and the only people who could help him were hurting as well.

The oddballs were the first people he felt understood him - the first people he even saw as the same species as him - and he had to watch them suffer alongside him. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night, because he's just so full of love and affection, he didn't deserve any of that!

So given all of this, I think that the ‘five oddballs’ as a concept means the most to Kanata over anyone. Like... he does love them. Eccentric is another of my favourite stories because seeing him with the oddballs was adorable... he says he wants them to see him as just ‘Kanata Shinkai’ rather than ‘the child of his household’. The oddballs know more about him than anyone else, I think, since he hasn’t told Chiaki about his home life yet, aside from the story of his family, of course. Maybe that’s why the oddballs are so important to him? They know who he is, who he really is, and they still love him and offer to give him piggyback rides and buy him drinks... in the oddballs official art Kanata also has his hair untucked, you know? He’s smiling like he does with Ryuseitai. Even if he’s not with them now, the other oddballs were his first home, his first family... they drifted apart, but he still loves them. I get the impression Kanata is quite a loyal friend, from that. All of the oddballs still love each other dearly and talk about each other a lot... I don’t think I’ve read all the event stories, but of the ones I have read, Kanata talks about them the most, which is part of why I think they’re so important to him.

I suppose now I’m gonna really go into the emotional trauma I was dealt by Ryusei Bonfire as an event as a whole... since when I talk about Kanata and the oddballs, it’s so prominent in my mind for so many reasons... also I just really wanna talk about it...
I’d been waiting for a reminiscence event really since I started producing ryuseitai in the end of 2018... I think they’d been my favourite unit before that but I don’t like changing faves and was in denial (I entered 2019 looking at a picture of Kanata though so that was when I truly accepted my fate lmao)... but because it had been my Ultimate Goal™ for so long it didn’t even feel like a real thing... I kind of never thought it would happen... but it did, oh boy it fucking did. I woke up for the event announcement and I can’t even explain the feeling when I saw the banner in my app... it was just like ‘oh god it’s finally happening oh god oh fuck oh god’ and my brain short circuited and I made noises like a dying whale... then I saw the cards and oh god I might’ve passed out for a few seconds... Kanata had long hair??? Long hair characters are my weakness hehe but that aside I had never thought Kanata could be made any more beautiful... but they made him more beautiful I deadass astral projected... there was so much crying you guys don’t understand... the unbloomed looked soft and made me feel safe and the bloomed invoked an emotion in me I didn’t even know existed... there was just so much emotion in it... he looked so... idk, intense? It was a Kanata I’d never seen before and I just... i imploded. If people talk about falling in love for a second time, this is definitely what they mean. Needless to say, I went a little insane for 10 days to get him... I got to 5.5m points on I think the 7th day of the event and I genuinely started crying in the waiting line to the cinema because he was home, he was here and I could give him a hug...

I wanted to give him a hug more than ever at this point, because the event story heavily implies Chiaki was the first person to ever hug Kanata - and he was 16 years old at the time. That’s... that’s almost my age. Kanata... he lived most of my life and never got hugged.
I had feared the worst for Kanata’s story... I had many questions about his family and I knew they’d all hurt me when they were answered but... wow.
I think it made me understand a lot about Kanata that I didn’t before. He really is... he really spends his whole time learning. He was so awkward with the new first years, with ryuseitai, with anyone really... because this was his first time trying to just be ‘human’. He got raised in a completely sheltered family, he was objectified and treated as something else, something that wasn't human, much less a small child. His only purpose was to grant wishes, and as a result he didn’t really get a proper childhood, or even an understanding of what that was... not being able to recognise humans as individuals until he started at yumenosaki, not being able to understand the differences between Chiaki having a ‘dream’ and a ‘wish’, not understanding Madara in the slightest - to this day he doesn’t get along with Madara and I firmly believe this is because he can’t deal with the really complicated emotions Madara has about him and his family because he didn’t start to learn about ‘emotions’ properly until recently...
uh, the point of all that is that Kanata was objectified awfully and in a way it feels like he had his chance to live a normal life taken from him... I can understand why Madara wanted the two of them to run away together... he wanted Kanata to be a normal child. At the time, Kanata didn’t realise it, but he wanted to be a normal child as well. That’s why now he’s trying to distance himself from the idea of being a ‘living god’. Not only because that’s important for him to move on in the future, but because I don’t think he’d want to hold onto that part of his past. I can almost feel it myself, the hollow ache that he must’ve felt when he sat wondering why Kaoru talking about ‘loneliness’ resonated so strongly with him, and the frustration at not understand that emotion. He didn’t even get a chance to understand himself, and he was alienated from everyone else by being convinced he wasn’t even a human. He got placed up on a pedestal and was distanced from everyone around him, he was treated as something previous and not to be touched lest it break and shatter... no wonder he’s lonely. He could reach out, but he’s too far away from everyone else to touch them. Look at Chiaki, someone who Kanata just thought hated him... but Chiaki didn’t hate him, Chiaki just felt Kanata was so far above him that he didn’t even deserve to speak to him.

If Kanata were to wish to come down from that pedestal, if he were to dream to stop being something precious... I wouldn’t be surprised. The reason the oddballs were able to become Kanata’s first friends is because all of them were held up on the same lonely pedestal, and treated as gods themselves. Wish granters and knowledge givers, things more than human. They were all held together above the rest of the world, and because of that they were close enough to touch. And if you can touch others... you’re not alone. Before the fall of the oddballs, the five of them were together - Kanata was part of a ‘together’ - and for all of them, but for the ever-so-lonely Kanata especially, that must’ve been a nice feeling. Maybe it was when he started to change, to feel happy.

He did change, as we can see. I’m very proud of him for that... he reached out for his dream and took it in his own two hands, which is... a really strong thing to do. If I thought I couldn’t love Kanata more, finally learning his mystery as one of the oddballs and getting clarification on his family... yeah, I love him much more. I’m pretty sure every time I read about him or find out something new I just start loving him even more.

We did know a little bit about Kanata before reminiscence happened, but not much. Aquarium was the first story, at least in my timeline of reading things, that really hinted at anything about Kanata’s life outside of school at all.
Aquarium is probably the last event I’ll talk about fully - for now at least - because really, that was the last nail in my coffin when it came to Kanata. Reading that event condemned me to hell. There’s a lot to process, but I guess I’ll start with the happy stuff?
The aquarium 5* card makes me smile... it’s actually probably my favourite cg I’ve seen in an enstars story...
I guess there are lots of ways to interpret it. Personally... I think it shows all the good parts of that story rather than the bad ones. Firstly, Kanata!!! Is!!!! In the fish tank?!?!!?!? I died a little when I saw it, honestly... I kind of did a little 'what?!' when i first read it, I could completly understand how shocked Kaoru was feeling... but even though he was in there as a punishment, he looked really happy! Kanata loves fish a lot, and it’s adorable, I love it... he’s definitely made me like fish more, too...
The point is, he looks so peaceful there, surrounded by his aquatic friends. Kanata belongs with the sea, and in the water... another of his little quirks is that he tries to climb into every body of water he sees... even if he wasn’t being forced into it, I think he probably would’ve gone into the aquarium tank at some point anyway...
He’s even got a starfish on his head. Sea animals like Kanata a lot, you see! I trust that animals, and by that extent fish, are good judges of character, and so that means Kanata is definitely doing something right...

The second thing about his aquarium card... the other thing I think might make him happy... is that Kaoru came to look for him. The marine bio club have a very cute relationship and they’re definitely my favourite club... Kaoru cares for Kanata a lot and if Kanata didn’t know that before, he definitely does now. He even gets offended when Kanata says Ryuseitai is the only place he can really belong...
But yeah... I don’t know for certain that Kanata understands properly how much others care about him. Especially in Ryuseitai, since he remarks often that he doesn’t know how to deal with the children when Chiaki isn’t there. This goes away towards the end of the year, but around the time of Aquarium, I think he was still a tiny bit on the awkward side...

Yeah, Aquarium was a really good event for me. Of course, it wasn’t all happy, necessarily... dumb as it is to worry over a fictional character, I do worry about Kanata when you hear about what his family is like. It sounds like he deals with a lot of stuff by himself because nobody else wants to get involved. That also must feel lonely, but it’s also part of what I love about Kanata! He looks very innocent and dreamlike, but he’s really strong! There seems to be a lot on his plate, but he’s handling it and keeping it under control, always looking out for others - especially Chiaki - and trying to stop them from getting involved in his problems. Of course, everyone wants to help him, especially Kaoru and the marine biology club. Maybe Kanata just didn’t want to burden them? I think he just doesn’t want to ask for help, yet. He’s waiting for the day he can cry out ‘Save me, Hero!’ And have Chiaki run to help him. Chiaki will definitely come when Kanata calls for him. They’re partners, after all!

Usually I’m good at understanding characters, but reading this mess back I’m realising that, maybe I’m not. Kanata is definitely a mystery... he keeps a lot of secrets, especially when compared to other enstars characters....
It’s frustrating, sort of, but also good. Countless thoughts about Kanata and Ryuseitai pass through my head daily, far more than I could ever put on this page. I’m forcibly cutting this essay short because I know I could keep going forever and ever and never end, and this website would just crash from the raw volumes of Kanata love it was being forced to hold. Kanata is a very interesting character in which I can think about him all day and still feel like I don’t understand him, or that there’s something else below the surface. He’s a mystery, as hard to grasp onto as the ocean waves. Or maybe I’m just an idiot?
Given that I’ve spent this long writing non-stop about an anime boy, I think I’m probably just an idiot. But you know... of all the anime boys to write about, Kanata is a good one.

He’s a kind, innocent person who wants to be loved by those around him, and despite what he used to be and what people think of him, he’s human! He’s very human, and he feels emotions and sadness and joy just like everyone else does! He’s quirky, and airheaded, but he’s still shrewd and I respect that a lot. He’s not an idiot, he’s surprisingly perceptive and intelligent, and I feel like he’s probably really reliable. I want to hug him, but I also feel I could cry all my problems out to him and he could help me. For whatever reason, I think he’d give good advice. Or at least be a calming person to be with. He’s a very wonderful boy! My bad writing doesn’t do him justice at all, and I couldn’t ever hope to get the thoughts that cram my head to the brim out onto this page... my half-jumbled musings and thoughts as they get sidetracked constantly properly seem meaningless... but you know... they’re really all I have.

I guess the point of this was to try and get across why I love Kanata so much... and even if I didn’t for anyone else, I did so for myself. Perhaps even for Kanata himself... obviously he’s only fictional and can’t read this, but if I could ever convey even a fraction of how much he means to me to him, I would never wish for anything else again. He may not be a god who can grant wishes, but he is, without a shadow of a doubt, a human who can help show wonderful dreams to the world. Not just to me, but to the rest of ryuseitai, to his friends and family, to anyone he touches, if that’s what he chooses to do. So from my boring, everyday life, I will continue to cheer on this blue meteoranger quietly and haphazardly, but with love and confidence all the same. Stupidly enough, he's made my life shamefully bright and beautiful, when perhaps otherwise it wouldn't be.
Thank you, Hero. For absolutely everything.

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