[inhales] okay everyone let's talk Goryou Yuuto. unrelated to his 4*, I've just been thinking a lot about him and how he's a rly good example of what I love about BanDori's and by extension ARGONAVIS's writing.

yes it's another one of THOSE posts. and yes I still have important things to do and no I'm still not doing them. anyway,

so there's a lot of things about Yuuto that make him him, but imo his most important trait is that once he sets his mind toward something, he has a very hard time letting that go and considering other options unless actively called out on it (and even then it takes quite a bit to get him out of that sometimes).

a positive example of this: scouting Ren. it's only because Yuu was so persistent that he ever got him to join. if it hadn't been for that, Argonavis (and ARGONAVIS) wouldn't exist. to an extent, also scouting Rio, though Wataru was the one who brought him down from that (only for Ren to go back).

a negative example of this: DesFes. Nayuta called him out on that pride of his getting in his way, and that's exactly what happened. I can completely understand where he was coming from, but he was throwing away an opportunity that ended up benefitting the band greatly because of his strong principles.

and what showcases this the best I think is the Ryuuseiu episode and all of his self-confidence issues wrt getting kicked out of the band by Nayuta.

being disrespected by Nayuta (as is common for him ... poor guy ...) led directly to him believing that he wasn't good enough, and when he saw how good the rest of Argonavis were and how far they were able to go, that belief is what made him figure he would only drag them down and want to quit. he wanted to QUIT. his OWN BAND. that HE WENT THROUGH ALL THAT TROUBLE OF MAKING. because he wasn't good enough for Nayuta, so he won't be good enough for these people, either. and he continued to believe that, despite everyone else obviously thnking that he was wrong and they wanted him around (well minus Banri, who's a lot more pragmatic about these things, but who also cared). it was only when they reached out to him with Ryuuseiu and SPECFICALLY when Ren reached out to him that he realised he was wrong.

and it's really important that it was Ren who did that. at first I thought maybe it should have been Wataru instead, but thinking more about it, especially knowing the way the story evolved after that, it could only have been Ren. because Ren & Nayuta are very much mirror images, and their personalities are polar opposites, but their feelings toward music are the same. Nayuta was the one who rejected Yuuto, so Ren had to be the one to accept him and ask him to come back. only then would Yuuto truly understand - maybe only subconsciously.

it's really funny that after everything that happened with Nayuta, Yuuto somehow managed to scout the one person Nayuta would end up considering his equal. but it's a testament to how much more pleasant of a person Ren is that it worked out for him this time lol

Yuuto is a super interesting character because in many ways he IS the typical high-energy extrovert leader type, but he has a lot more depth than that, AND (this one rly stands out to me) it's not so much that he hides his insecurity issues under a persona, but that he doesn't think of them until reminded, and that's when they really come crashing down. he's simultaneously super stable and somewhat unstable in that regard. Hyuusuke once called him a surprisingly human character and while I could give that attribute to just about any character in both branches of BanDori, Yuuto is one that exemplifies it incredibly well.

BanDori does this thing where they write complex characters without having to lean into their Tragic Backstories super hard (although some of them have obviously been through some hard stuff and continue to suffer now). Nayuta is a good example of this as well; he has a lot of stuff going on in his past, but for me it's his particular brand of Serious About What He Does To A Fault that makes him so compelling, with everything that happened and continues to happen to him only feeding into that. heck, continuing with Yuuto, we haven't even seen anything really about his family issues, which is only gonna serve to explain and expand all of him even further.

I've said this in conversation before, but BanDori's writing reminds me SO MUCH of the best of Kyoto Animation's character-driven works. the downside of that is that in the same way people could consider KyoAni shows boring or bland, they could see BanDori's characters and think they have nothing to offer. which I couldn't disagree more with, but it's a kind of writing that you've gotta be used to, I think.

BanDori s1, my start into the franchise, was a solid 6.5/10 for me at first. looking back it's SO much better than I remember it being ... that's why I usually don't recommend people who wanna get into BanDori to start with the anime lol. get invested in the franchise & characters first via the game, then watch it for backstory & character expansion. or just read the ingame ch0. actually, just do that.

tl;dr BanDori writing good and I'm pretty sure I've had this exact tl;dr once before