Discussion topic for Tenzen Kano in Summer Pockets.
This is a full series spoiler thread so feel free to talk about any Summer Pockets material without marking with the [spoiler] tag. Please mark spoilers of other franchises with the [spoiler] tag.
Before this thread gets flooded with spoilers, I wanted to comment on Tenzen because the nature of his character is relevant to my own past.
My family owns a Table Tennis table which we don’t use anymore, but there was a time where my brother and I were quite serious about the sport. We played for sometimes hours at a time, almost every day for well over a year. We were actually considering trying to go pro.
But we were young and somewhat influenced by some stereotypes that almost enter into racist territory. We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that if we tried entering a doubles tournament or something, for example, we would get destroyed in the finals by some pair of Asian kids who had dedicated their lives to Table Tennis. Once we realised that we lost some passion for it and before long we stopped playing completely.
And Tenzen is one of the stereotypical Asian kids we were imagining. Every time I look at his character, all I can do is laugh weakly…
Oh, and this is a lot more relevant considering that reading Visual Novels was pretty much the hobby I found to replace playing Table Tennis religiously.
