I’m Going To Elaborate On A Recent Reblog Of Mine Here And Say That The “hot Take” That Kou Is

I’m going to elaborate on a recent reblog of mine here and say that the “hot take” that Kou is Nene’s best friend instead of Aoi is merely a headcanon, it has no grounding in canon. It holds about as much weight as saying that Teru is Aoi’s best friend instead of Akane, or that Hanako is Kou’s best friend instead of Yokoo and Satou

It’s perfectly fine to have headcanons, I have a ton of them. But it becomes a reading comprehension issue when fanon begins to distort your interpretation of canon. Nene and Kou’s friendship is very beloved in fanon, which leads many fans to overlook any flaws they have in canon (which used to happen with Aoinene a lot). There is also an issue of fans failing to understand that multiple things can be true at once. They recognize that Aoi and Nene’s friendship has faults, and so they characterize their entire dynamic as bad rather than looking at the full scope of things and seeing that their friendship has a lot of good factors too. From what I’ve seen, most fandom analysts seem to be capable of seeing all sides of Aoinene’s dynamic, but the fans who don’t do a lot of analyzing take those points out of context and end up misinterpreting the manga

Let me point out some canon things about both of these dynamics to better explain my point:

• Aoi and Nene have known each other since junior high, Kou and Nene have known each other a couple months at most

• Kou and Nene have been through a lot together because they’re both main characters, and so we see them paired up often. They hang out together after school and team up when a threat appears

• Nene and Aoi also hang out after school for gardening club

• Many of Nene’s character motivations are driven by wanting to protect Aoi. Chasing after her during the Misaki Stairs arc and during the Grim Reaper arc, trying to get her back during the Severance arc, etc. Aoi’s motives are also largely driven by her fear of losing Nene

• Kou’s motives center largely around protecting Nene, but we don’t really see her express that same concern for him. Whereas Aoi and Nene are both somewhat driven by each other, Kou’s desire to protect Nene is largely one-sided (keep in mind that for all three of these characters, their main goals are driven by their love interests so the friendship stuff will take somewhat of a backseat)

• Nene consistently refers to Aoi as her best friend, but never Kou

• Nene overlooks things about both Aoi and Kou. From Nene’s pov, Aoi is this perfect popular girl. Also from Nene’s pov, Kou is her awkward friend. Neither Aoi nor Kou are given much depth until we see things from their pov rather than Nene’s (note- this happens much sooner for Kou since he’s our tritagonist)

• Nene and Aoi are mentioned to hang out together outside of school. They go to the beach every summer and in the karaoke chapter it was mentioned that they’ve done karaoke together. We don’t really see Kou and Nene hang out on their own much unless they’re pushed together by the plot, Hanako is almost always with them (aside from the donut chapter where they hanging out together was still done for Hanako’s benefit)

• Nene notices things about Aoi that no one else does, like that she doesn’t talk about herself much and that she puts a lot of effort into gardening

• Aoi buys snacks to share with Nene at school

So like, if we look at the canon material, it is very obvious that Aoi and Nene are meant to be “best” friends, whereas Kou and Nene are just good friends. Ofc those labels are a bit silly, I feel kinda dumb having to argue this, but for some reason a lot of fans are very insistent on Kou being Nene’s BFF instead of Aoi. I get why fans are more attached to Kou and Nene’s dynamic, as I said they get wayyyy more screen time than Nene and Aoi. But it’s still weird to me that fans use them to downplay Aoinene’s friendship. Both those duos have good and bad sides to their relationships, and it does them both a disservice to portray one as 100% good and the other as 100% bad or less than

And also why are some of ya’ll so pressed that Nene’s best friend is a woman instead of a man. What do ya’ll have against female friendship