People are saying Kaoru hasn't gotten development?
This is very strange to me. She's gotten more development than anyone else.
Seeing her do things is not the same as “development.” She has been consistently passive, obtuse (“So when you say you “like” me after building up to it by talking about your unrequited love, does that mean . . .?”), and conflict-avoidant (allowing her single attempt to confront Reiichi to be deflected by a weak excuse).
...why doesn't this count as development? Her tendency is to slap a band-aid on a problem, usually by feigning ignorance. This is an extremely unhelpful strategy, and she knows it, but she's also kind of given up.
She's pretty clearly depressed, but she's been rewarded by like everyone she knows (including by both Reiichi AND Uta) for being the cute, charming, cheerful airhead. She hoped that 'love' would like magically cause someone to understand her, and she has no idea what to do when that didn't happen.
And Uta tries HARDEST to understand her, because she's worked on "I mustn't idealize her just because I have a crush on her!" Which Kaoru really appreciates and is scared to lose.
This sure looks like development to me.
well actually no development involves a character changing the way he/she acts or sees the world and kaoru has been the same character through all the manga, well not exactly since at the last chapter she actually stop avoiding issues and finally took action, but saying that kaoru is the most developed character is just delusional
Actually, benja, to be fair to karp, I now need to halfway disagree with myself, and also with you agreeing with me. What you said absolutely is character development in the sense that I meant it.
But I should have remembered that “character development” actually has two sometimes overlapping meanings:
One is something that authors do—a character is depicted in such a way that readers have a sense of who that person is and why they do the things they do. That may involve a lot of attention given to the character, or just a few well-chosen strokes that give insight into the fictional person.
The second is what we were talking about—something that characters themselves do. They learn and change because of their experiences (not necessarily for the better, of course). Kuroe is an excellent example of that, but readers are able to perceive that partly because she’s also given development in the first sense.
So everybody’s right, which means we all get lollipops. Lol