[MaskedRiderAsakura]

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Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Complaining about him being selfish is exactly what I meant by complaining about him acting like a person, and I just explained there's more to it that just (I can only be so delusional, that IS clearly a big part of it) "oh look, Onari's doing something wacky again."

Except Onari's never shown himself to be selfish before. Utterly and irredeemably annoying? Sure. But in the earlier episodes he at least tried to be semi-useful. Then all of a sudden he does something that's crazy selfish that the other characters just totally brush off.

And there's other ways to get across Onari's feelings of inadequacy without having him act like a prick. Akari went through pretty much the same sort of feelings without being a detriment to the group. So did Mach in Drive, and even Alain for a brief period of time.

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Her followup to that being because "we're a team". She's not telling him he's super useful (because he isn't), she's saying they care about him regardless.

She still told him that Takeru "needs him" even though it's clear as day to the audience that no, he really doesn't. He's "moral support", which is basically the same as saying "You serve no practical function on this team but at least you can be a victory cigar or something".

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They don't need to mention it because it drives most of his actions anyway. That guilt is exactly why he's such a generic sidekick character in the first place. Makoto has played far too big a role in the plot to be considered just another person fawning over Takeru. He's THE person fawning over Takeru. And Alain, for that matter.

Just because it's his reason for being a generic sidekick character doesn't mean that he's not a generic sidekick character anymore, and being generic is generally a bad thing.

Really now, it sounds like you're making excuses for why things are bad in this show. Him being a generic sidekick character because of his guilt doesn't make him any more interesting of a character and that's precisely what the problem is.

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Trust me, he was kind of a drama queen in those episodes. Takeru and Kanon even mention how it feels like he's "forcing himself" to act how he does. He's really not himself when we first meet him.

But there's still no evidence to support your argument. Nothing in the show suggests that the Ganma World wasn't totally a living Hell from him, other than the fact that we see it later and it's not so bad. Normally, I could accept this as solid evidence, but the show doesn't even acknowledge the huge discrepancy between what Makoto said and what the world is actually like, which leads me to believe that it's a case of writers having the characters say and do things and just totally forgetting about it once the plot goes in a different direction, which seems to be an overall trend for Ghost.