I like the parallel of HJG being the romanticised prince ideal while Zhao is more of a prince in practice: someone who inherits his power, someone trained with all the funds/time possible to be Excellent, but is desperately lonely and dreams of literally being Anyone Else

you have a bit more sympathy for him because 1) he's like, a crime prince, not a royal prince, and 2) you witness how big of a construction his persona/reputation is for the sake of being the head of the Liumang and how it weighs on him!!

one of the smaller themes in Y7 is about reputation/face, the constructions you make for your position as a leader, the construction you make for others, and what you look like underneath it all at your truest heart

Ichi regularly gets in trouble with this (Arakawa and Hoshino) because he basically doesn't have one! He TRIES early on but he's just not able to do it, and kinda just gives up to be his rawest, true self and THAT is what gets him access into the deeper hearts of everyone

towards the end you see that Ichi truly learns how a reputation is something people live and die by, hence how he's the one who plans out the final setup at the end of the story - really understanding something also means being able to manipulate it

As it happens, it's Ichi's empathy for others that leads him to this understanding - he appreciates how difficult it is to be, say, a leader of an organization or a woman isolated from her family and being unable to connect with them meaningfully anymore

you tell him "I have to act like this because of these reasons"

his response is "I believe you"

But he takes it a step further - he believes you, yes, & he can see where it hurts you, where you paper over the holes in your heart with the easier choices of constructing more walls & telling yourself "it is what it is" or "I'm the only one who can do this" & says you're wrong

yeah he's got dumb ideas a lot or no solutions at all, but his ability to cut through self-imposed falsehoods to reach out honestly even if maybe it's overstepping is exceptional - because it's all rooted in his desire to stand by someone, to forgive them, to help them forward

the fact that they wrote this while avoiding a martyr complex is fuckin great

people have subzero expectations on him, he's gutter trash, and he KNOWS people have a low opinion of him but he doesn't! care! and he wants nothing, NOTHING back from them except to see them happy

lmao i started this thread mulling over zhao/hjg and it just turned into a spiel about ichi