Be The Most Loved Character!
Be Arata in Yuki Suegtsugu's mind
- Love your grandfather
- Love Karuta
- Be very poor
- Move from Fuku to Tokyo because your parents force you
- Get bullied at school because of your dialect
- Be lonely for months
- Make the first two friends of your entire life
- Say a sudden goodbye to them to take care of your grandfather with dementia
- Take care of your grandfather for years, watching him deteriorate day by day without even remembering who you are
- Be traumatized for years by his death
- Be completely ignored in the narrative until the end of the manga
- Never get a full Arc
- Start playing Karuta again because of a visit from the woman you love, but keep living far away
- Avoid contacting her because you think she’s dating your “friend” (even though only you think of him as a friend), respecting both of them
- Give her time and space to grow as a person throughout the entire series
- Train like a maniac for a decade, only to be labeled as "talented" by fans of a character who is: popular, rich, handsome, intelligent, and used to bully you
- Only appear in tournaments, where the woman you love is always cheering against you
- Confess your feelings and receive a "soft-reject" (which would be clear if Chihaya actually understood her own emotions, but that was not the case) without even realizing it
- Keep waiting for an answer
- Work hard to move back to Tokyo to be by her side
- Create a team to better understand the person you love
- Play against her team
- Lose to her and completely disappear from her thoughts until the end of the manga
- Find out you were nothing more than an obstacle for her to overcome
- Be altruistic and help the woman you love whenever she needs you (but only if sensei lets you show up)
- Be kind to everyone who needs help throughout the entire manga, especially the elderly
- Watch as the character who bullied you gets a redemption arc, while you are left without one for your own emotional struggles
- Become Meijin while your "friend" still resents/envies you during the whole tournament
- Se your friend redemption and have a hug as reward
- Find out in a single page, by pure chance, that the woman you love is dating your friend
- Reduce 15 years of narrative disrespect towards your character to an unfunny joke
- Appear in an extra chapter just to be portrayed as someone suffering from loneliness
- Never find love or any resolution to your romantic feelings
- In 13 chapters of the spin-off, appear only once, for 2 pages
- Go from being the initial protagonist to an irrelevant side character
- Be remembered by the woman you loved for 10-12 years as nothing more than a Karuta God and an object of admiration
- Have your entire existence reduced to Karuta, as if you had no emotions, dreams, or desires beyond the game
- Make love with your Meijin title, because that's all you ever gonna have
EDIT: I am aware that Arata achieved his goal by resolving the situation with his grandfather and achieving the title of Meijin. This post was written in a deliberately dramatic way for those who were expecting some romantic resolution for him, not necessarily with Chihaya or anyone, but at least addressing his feelings and how he felt about the rejection (yes, I read the extra-chapter) in a slightly deeper way considering its importance in the series. Since we will never have any of that, I just thought it would be funny to list the events that moved him from the role of MC to a secondary character when considering the original romantic triangle of the series and how all the other characters with romantic dilemmas had their resolution except for him. Even Sumire is dealing with her feelings for Taichi now in the spin-off but Arata became a Karuta demon and had his romantic emotions left completely open or inexplored and swept aside by the author.