Tomoya did a good job of having enough personality to be interesting without distracting from the other characters.
I’ve always weirdly liked Riki. But I think that’s just because he’s the kind of male character that most people reading these visual novels would hate and I find that satisfying.
I haven’t read/watched all the key series they are out there, so my opinion might change in the future. but i must say Tomoya is my favorite protagonist i have encountered so far. The reason is pretty simple; his personality is complex enough, that you will see him different ways through the routes, and change your opinion about him. For instance, i thought he was an asshole after reading baseball, but i changed my mind after reading tomoyo’s route. and you might say, that changing the way you see a character is pretty common with a VN; and I agree. The fantastic part about Tomoya’s character is that he remains consistent throughout those routes. His personality doesn’t change really; you just learn more about the reasons behind his behavior. Also, the diversity of the situations the author put him through plays in his favor, because it allows him to show multiple facets of his personality that could have easily been ignored if the story had always been similar in every route.
All in all, I thing he is a pretty well rounded, charismatic and consistent character.
I picked Rei
Unlike the other Key protagonist, Rei has a goal in life to better himself from the very beginning. Thst’s something the other protagonists lacks.
From what I saw from the screenshots from Harmonia, Rei can also easily clarify things such as how Tipi and Shiona felt. Unlike the other dense key protagonists who don’t understand situations. Not all the time, but for the majority of the time. Of course, we haven’t read Harmonia yet, so I don’t necessarily know if its was just a one-time thing, or legit.
Anyways. Other then Rei, I also like Hinata. The best friend who will always have your back.
At the beginning of Rewrite, Kotarou says this:
(…I’ll do it all over.) (And I’ll do it better this time…)
where he sets a goal to make him and his life better.
I’m not saying you have to like Kotarou, but he doesn’t lack “a goal in life”.
If you think about it, he’s only bettering the world and not himself. He has no flaws but his outcasted-personality is what he tries changing, to better himself, yet the thing he doesn’t understand is that he already had people who didn’t outcast him.
Kotarou’s goals to better his life is more by doing whatever he thinks is exciting, instead of beneficial.
Plus, we all know that since Kotarou didn’t have his memories in the next route, that goal isnt really a goal he could reach and remember. Something you want to do, and somthing you CAN do, is different.
Until he got his memories in moon of course
I honestly think it’s pretty dumb to pick a character on the basis of a short plot point that may or may not even represent the character. For all we know, he doesn’t even care about learning emotions!
This poll (like everything else on the forum) is something we take seriously, so it’d be more helpful if you took your thoughts seriously and digged deep down to find a protagonist you like the most. Not only would it be productive to discuss, but it is also disrespectful if you don’t do this, considering we all did this.
That’s contradictory, so I’m not quite sure what you mean…
That may be true in the common route, but in the prologue, Kotarou says:
“It’s wonderful, it’s unknowing, and it’s terrifying.”
in reference to “youth”. Following the flow of dialogue backwards, we see that he then equates youth to happiness, and happiness to his “earnest wish”, which was to “do it all over”. Him trying to achieve his wish is not something exciting, rather something he would avoid. This is his earliest attempt at his goal of making his life, his youth, better.
Everything below that was irrelevant to my argument.
There are many things wrong here. I will not invalidate your favorite character as it is, of course, a subjective opinion. However, the reasoning just did not make sense. I guess you like the protagonists specifically having the goal of bettering themselves? That’s a little confusing to me seeing as we have not had the opportunity to see the entire game, and with it, the entire development of Rei’s character. But anyways, you also said that it was from the beginning. That, to the extent of my knowledge, is baseless speculation. The game does have screenshots and stuff but it does not make it clear that it was from the very beginning. But anyways, I completely respect your opinion, even if I don’t fully understand it.
So I haven’t actually posted in this thread yet, I chose my favorite as Tomoya, but Okyakusama the Junker is in a very close second. I think I might have a slight bias towards Tomoya just because Nagisa and Ushio.. Tomoya, while he does not have a clear goal at first, shows himself as very human in the beginning. He’s made his mistakes and still makes mistakes but he uses whatever he can to help his family in After Story an Tomoyo After, which I think is a very noble goal.
On the other hand, I also like the Junker. He represents how the world has changed from Yumemi’s time. The way he fits with Yumemi just makes so much sense and I love how he develops over the course of the novel, including how he ends up in Hoshi no Hito. Also the Junker, to my knowledge, is not dense at all. He might be dense compared to what Yumemi thinks, but Yumemi has not changed with the times.
Oh that was longer than I thought. Please excuse any misspellings because I wrote this on my phone
I think I originally voted for Hinata… but thinking about it recently that doesnt actually make much sense. While he is an extremely cool bro, and I sure hope he gets alllllll the time he deserves through the VN and rest of HD, I dont think I can call him my actual favorite.
Tomoya and Kotarou are both really cool dudes, and I love them both to bits.
For some reason, Ive always found Tomoya to be extremely relatable: his problems are those of relationships with family and friends (ones that everyone has to deal with), his development just makes so much sense to me, and I love to dig into his personality.
Kotarou, conversely, is not written to be relatable. He has problems that no reader will ever deal with. Tanaka writes his thoughts so poetically, though, that he becomes so interesting to listen to. Yet it seems to be written as a metaphor for real-life problems. And one the greatest messages Ive taken out of Rewrite is the way he deals with his confusion and making choices in life that are really hard and sometimes dont make sense.
However, neither of them take the cake in this poll for me. I gotta still go with Riki. Riki is so normal, to the point of the game making fun of it internally. He’s a nice kid, he’s a rational kid, and boy does he ever have to deal with a lot of shit.
Lots of people see him as weak, but Riki’s strength may be the topic Ive written about most on this forum (or at least thought about writing about). He is incredibly reliable, and he is able to do some things that I have thought about deeply, and have determined that I probably could not have made the same choices.
One of my favorite things about Riki, though, is how I can easily see why so many people want to be around him, to help him, to be his friend, to love him. So often, this is a humungous problem with protagonists: people seem to flock to them for no ascertainable reason, girls fall in love with them “just cuz”; its all just for plot convenience.
Riki sure is surrounded by some amazing people. A whole team of them. It would be easy to say that Riki is only cool because of the cool people around him. But they all love Riki for a reason, and I think that reason, while very complex (as all human interaction indeed is), can be simplified to the fact and the strength of his love back for his friends.
I’m still voting for kotarou. But not just because he is the funniest key protagonist in a common route. (Of course he is.)
What I like about Kotarou is that you get to see so many sides of his personality. He has a different goal in every route and different things he wants to protect and achive. Sometimes he wants to get strong to reach his goal and sometimes he wants to stay normal. Sometimes he fights hard because he thinks thats right and sometimes he trys to avoid fights because he thinks thats right. And everytime he does something it fits to the goal he wants to achive. Even if it is stupid or it makes no sense for other people. He decides on something that he wants to do and he goes through with it.
I just changed it to Kotarou… Well… I’ve re-read parts of CLANNAD recently and it seems like I was overstimating Tomoya a little. Kotarou’s the best after all. Tomoya’s the second tho.
Kotarou’s just such a shitlord its hard not to love him.
I choose Riki, he’s cute and is actually shown to have weakness, instead of other main character who are either really skilled at several things or are powerful.
Plus he has a nicer personality than others who are not very expresionless, kinda mean even to their own friends, etc
They’re all cool but Hinata’s sexy so
I think my favorite protagonist would have to be Tomoya because I can relate to him when it comes to dealing with change and how his life wasn’t different from today or the next day. His dreams were shattered and every day was a real struggle to him with things became dull and boring.
When he met Nagisa, it didn’t change him at first as he was getting to know her and how he still hated the town. As he started to learn more about the people and their situation, he slowly realized that a family wasn’t just a mere concept to him but it meant how people are brought together and enjoy one’s company to experience happy and sad times too, as well as finding fun and new things.
His character goes through a lot of development that made me think that he has so much potential in him that truly finding new things and experiencing them with others can be a wonderful treasure.
If I could vote for more than 1, it would’ve been Yuu, Otonashi and Riki but Yuu took the vote and was surprised how few votes he had.
His development as character warmed my heart more than other KEY protagnist (not to say others don’t warm them up!) I’ve read/seen so far. He started off as a selfish dick who cheated his way to the top while not giving a fuck about others TO a whole different person who took a huge risk (that could have killed him and potentially time issue) just to save the world filled with strangers who does not even know him.
If this exact situation happend to a different protagnist, how many of them will actually be able to do it fully knowing the risk? For me Otonashi and Riki are the only candidates given how they love their friends so much that they’re willing to do things against the odds.
I dunno, I kinda felt like Yuu’s progression was a watered down version of Tomoya’s. They started out with different problems with Yuu in Charlotte taking care of his sister after losing his memories of his brother and Tomoya in CLANNAD’s relationship with his dad, but both of these are family-related (not that this is bad, family has always been a theme in Meada’s works).
They both not only became better persons throughout their stories, they also become much stronger after being hardened by (Charlotte and CLANNAD)the death of a family member which causes them to sink into a self destructive spiral. In both cases this is (Charlotte and CLANNAD)undone through key-magic. In Charlotte it is straight-up undone by time travel, but depending on your interpretation of CLANNAD’s magic the deaths of Nagisa and Ushio are not undone, they are only saved in one timeline.
Not to say Yuu is a bad protagonist, just that because of this and the fact that Charlotte was kind of rushed in the character development department (as well as every other department) makes me think a lot of people who liked Yuu would have liked Tomoya better. Their opinions of the shows/VN would make a difference too, I mean you are comparing one of the best VNs/animes of all time to a mediocre at best show.
Actually it can be argued that (charlotte spoilers)while Ayumi’s death is undone, Yuu’s experience and character growth from that doesn’t really go away. He learns from that experience to, well, not be such a self-centered asshole, and I think it shows in the later episodes.
You are right, Yuu and Tomoya are developed differently for better or worse. That is one aspect of Yuu that I do actually think was done fairly well, possibly even better than Tomoya was. The big thing that gives Tomoya a lead isn’t that he’s neccessarily a better handled character but rather that he has a huge advantage when you consider the lengths of the stories. You can do much more in 44 episodes than you can in 13, and that’s why a lot of people that liked Yuu might like Tomoya better.
The deveopement of a character isn’t the only thing that someone would like about him/her. I mean, except for the developement, I don’t see anything in common between Yuu and Tomoya.
Yuu is probably unpopular because he’s not “narrating” since Charlotte is but an anime. We don’t know much about he “thinks” like Tomoya and Kotarou. I’m sure that if Charlotte would ever come out as a visual novel, Yuu’s popularity as a protag’ would increase.
