narihira:

imagine that you have one person, just one person in the whole world, that you love and adore. you look up to this person and care for this person and the only thing that would make you happy would be for this person to pay some attention to you.

now imagine that this person doesn’t have time to be with you because all of their time is spent on someone else. well, this isn’t really a problem since you like that other person, too. as long as your important person is happy, it doesn’t matter. shouldn’t matter. you continue to work hard and hope that one day you’ll be recognized for the efforts you’ve put in since you can’t change the fact that you weren’t chosen.

however, over the years, you observe that the other person doesn’t appreciate your important person at all. they run from their responsibilities, spend their time on inconsequential things, and are lazy, constantly trying to escape their reality—even though their reality is what you’ve always dreamed of.

and yet your important person still won’t look at you. even though that other person only ever makes them cry.

you start to wonder why that other person was chosen in the first place. you start to resent them. why can’t they appreciate what they’ve been given, what was never given to you? if you were in their place, you wouldn’t make your important person sad…! it becomes more and more difficult to keep up your hard work, invisible and unacknowledged as you are.

now imagine that in your whole life, the only people you can possibly interact with are these two people. you have no way of escaping. day after day, you just watch them and envy them while they continue to ignore you. you begin to feel more and more useless and resentful.

over the years, this twists into a bitter hatred both towards the person your important person loves and towards your important person for not recognizing your efforts and constantly chasing after someone who will never appreciate them. it becomes a madness and you would do almost anything to invert the triangular relationship between you.

if you can identify at all with feeling left behind, with feeling jealous, with feeling powerless… if you can remember a time when you felt so hurt that you lashed out with all your might and then regretted the awful consequences…

then to simply dismiss reiji as a “douchebag” is doing his character—and you—a great disservice.