The characters

I can certainly see where you are coming from, and I agree in terms of actual people. However, with these characters, there is the repeated promise of growth, but that promise hasn’t been held to by the author. From my perspective, it’s a kind of betrayal of trust on the author’s part. We read to connect with the characters, to change with the characters. We change, we broaden our perspectives, but the characters keep reliving the same story. There are myriad issues that can and do arise in relationships, but this author isn’t exploring them. This author isn’t developing the characters to encounter new issues in different ways by learning from past experiences, but rather new issues with the same ways that have failed repeatedly. To me, the characters don’t have a journey. If you take away the references to the past in each installment, you would be left with alternate versions of the same story. The characters are frozen, either because the author doesn’t know how to develop them or the author is uninterested, having found something successful the first time. It is disheartening, because I don’t want to keep reliving the same pain and angst repeatedly with the same characters. That removes the life from the characters and destroys the spell of reading in the first place.

That being said, the black haired dude should take a long walk off a short pier. I think that he’s in love with his cousin, and harbors resentment and jealousy toward Takashi for having his cousin and “ruining his life “ whatever that’s supposed to mean.