[Ten] I Love You

Have you ever been greeted with a smile so radiant that you think to yourself, “Maybe, just maybe, the world’s a good place after all”?

Perhaps “love” isn’t the right word to use here but since the opportunity to use this wonderfully loaded title came up, I couldn’t help but take it. Watanabe You holds a special place in my heart for oh so many reasons; enough for me to have chosen her to personify both my blog and Twitter presence for over half of their lifetimes. It’s not a romantic love (obviously) or even one as passionate as to measure up to the affection and dedication of most other You-fans, but if I had to describe my feelings for this uniform-obsessed-Genki-girl I’d say that they were ones of admiration and resonance.

As much as I adore her character design, her singing voice, her voice actress and so and so forth, You’s character traits have always been the stand out for me. Her unabashed enthusiasm and optimism in the face of adversity, her unwavering love for her hobbies and her close ones, and her immediate instinctual response to act as a support for those in need around her, are traits that I find to be amazing and important, and traits that I’d like to see in myself more. She’s something like an ideal to me, with all the flaws and failings that come with such an ideal – the biggest being the impossibility of maintaining it all.

The You that I see is a blindingly bright pillar of support and positivity, one that is not so perfectly held together, but one that persists and persists arduously. My interpretation of You may be a little far off from the character in canon, but the beauty in fiction and certainly a precedent in Love Live is that layers of depth can be found and realized in the characters outside the intentions of the creators.

Their capability to grow beyond the boundaries of the official material alongside the fans is what gives these characters an almost infinite capacity to be loved. It’s part of the reason why I’ve become so attached to the series and definitely a part of the reason why I’ve become so enamored with this character.

This is the You I love.

Thanks for reading,

Carriage

 

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This is my third of twelve posts that I’ll be publishing as part of the 12 days of Anime event. Be sure to check out all other amazing writers that are participating in this year’s event here.