Anime Discussion Thread - Page 5405

I'm not sure if you talking about Kanbaru here or not, going to assume so. Don't play the pronoun game dammit!

Kanbaru is an interesting case. She kind of embodies the feelings of a teenage girl in an unrequited love situation. She's idolized Hitagi for many years. I don't doubt that she's spent countless nights imagining their lives together, their wedding day, their little children running around the house, growing old together, having the grandchildren visit etc. Then she got so deeply hurt when she was unable to help this person she loves so dearly and gets pushed further away from him. Que in Koyomi. This guys comes out of nowhere, manages to do what Kanbaru could never do and now this cold hitagi is in love with him while slowly starting to become a more whole person. At first Kanbaru thinks how wonderful this all is and now maybe her dreams will come to be but as time goes on there's that festering that it'll never happen. That small dark thought that this Koyomi guy has stolen the love of her life from her. Now she's in turmoil. She wants to be happy for Hitagi but at the same time this thought keeps building. It turns to envy then to anger at Koyomi but she's conflicted because he did help save Hitagi. This conflict inside herself keeps eating away. Normally a girl/guy will just sit with these feelings until they learn to deal with them but in Kanbaru's case she has the devils paw which makes her avoid dealing with her own feelings and instead use it to lash out. At this point she isn't rational, her emotions have taken over and she doesn't think how her actions will hurt Hitagi. All she thinks about is removing this object of her envy/anger/wrath.

I'm not sure if you finished the arc so I won't say more. You have to understand where she's coming from. I'm sure there's guys in this thread or that you know that have had to deal with this kind of situation before. It's perfectly normal reaction. You don't want to hate that guy but you can't help yourself. Don't be too harsh on the poor girl.

I think you put it together quite perfectly and I realised almost all of that. The only thing I didn't realise, which I thought is an interesting aspect, is the fact that she didn't learn to deal with her feelings because of her paw. That's something I didn't consider and I might forgive her because of that.
What "disgusted" me was that she didn't only use her paw in the fight against Araragi. She used her other appendages as well, much to the surprise of Araragi. This was a part she could have controlled if she had the willpower to do so.

I agree that you can't control your emotions in that particular situation. However, I think you can control them passively, at least partly, by deliberating on your own actions/situation beforehand. I was in kind of a similar situation at least once before, where the girl I loved and turned me down confessed to one of my best friends a week later and they ended up together. That was ~9 years ago. It was hard, especially in the beginning, I'm not going to deny that. It was to the point, where I asked them whether I acted unfair/mean towards him because I envied him so much and wasn't able to analyse my actions rationally at that point. The answer was a definitive "no". Our friendship never broke or declined since then.

I also expect me to be in a similar, but much harder compared to my first one, situation in a not so distant future so I'm preparing myself for that already. I might fail though and maybe that will change my view of Kanbaru. Or it will make me hating myself. Or both. I don't know.

In the end, these are just the thoughts of an idealistic fool who tries to talk himself into believing that love is a non-egoistacal emotion while it's obviously not.

She obviously acted wrong but I do think a lot of it had to do with the paw kind of cheating her out of the situation. Most people like you mention just deal with the situation eventually. Either they break the friendship or they learn to live with it. What would happen if we had this mythical wish granting device at arms length? That's what Kanbaru faces. Her whole body was fighting him because at the core of their being she both hated him and liked him. In that moment her hatred for him was too much to handle and it took over.

Look I'm not saying what she did was right, merely that I can understand where she's coming from and why she did what she did. A lot of Monogatari is about people dealing with the extreme feelings a lot of us feel in a world where there are these magical manifestations.

Personally I've had moments where I wanted to kill someone with all of my being but then it passes. What would happen if I had a devils paw next to me in that moment? It honestly scares me to think about that. What we are capable of doing in our moments of emotional distress is terrifying.