I see people bringing up Nishiki slapping Reina so fucking often and I'm so fucking tired of it.
Let's get this out of the way first: was it good of Nishiki to hit Reina? Should he have done it? OF FUCKING COURSE NOT. While violence is the answer to a not negligible amount of problems, here, it WASN'T.
HOWEVER.
People tend to act as though Reina was a poor uwu victim who didn't do anything wrong. So lemme explain the situation here:
1) Nishiki just saw someone he cares about A LOT get sexually assaulted or even raped.
2) Nishiki just brutally killed his boss because of an emotional / trauma reaction to witnessing said assault and was very shaken up by it, having collapsed to his knees when Kiryu arrives.
3) His brother just took the fall for it and will have to go to prison for a very long time.
4) Sawamura disappears from the hospital, leaving Nishiki with most of his support network gone in the blink of a fucking eye.
5) He goes to update Reina on the situation and she starts screaming at him, accusing him of being weak and useless, of failing her by not being able to protect Sawamura and Kiryu.
Great fucking reaction on her part, isn't it? He's just lost two of his siblings at once and she is telling him that it's his fault. Yes, Reina probably didn't mean it like that, but she still says it. And when Nishiki interrogates her on it, she doesn't retract it.
It's not helping that Nishiki's mental stability is already shot to shit because of various pressures, such as an important surgery for Yuko coming up, Kazama's clear favouritism, Kashiwagi's distance.
I reiterate: NISHIKI GETTING VIOLENT WAS BAD. HE SHOULDN'T HAVE DONE THAT.
And he apparently does slap her quite hard. But he also immediately regrets it, looking at his hand with shock. As someone who not only has a lot more physical strength than Reina and is in organised crime and is thus the stronger party in the power imbalance, it was his responsibility to try and counteract the power imbalance by restraining himself. And he failed at that.
My point is that Reina said what I consider to be unforgivable things, even if she didn't mean them. And she knows this because when Nishiki confronts her, she is scared. She knows she fucked up. Yet she doesn't try to retract her accusations or to reformulate what she feels.
They're both horrible in this interaction and this is why I don't like them as a pairing. Reina clearly is way over her head in the Yakuza world. Which is perfectly fine, not everyone can deal with it, in fact I'd wager that most people can't, yet she both involves herself in it and is involved in it by others. And then she deals with being exposed to the dark sides of the yakuza world by toxically unleashing it, here on Nishiki.
Another thing I don't like is the "he hit a woman because she hurt his feelings he isn't an uwu baby". Oh, so it would have been fine if Reina had been a man? No it wouldn't have. Why bring gender into this? Either say that no one deserves to be hurt or say that everyone deserves to get slapped every once in a while.
Let all genders be slapped and let all genders slap. All or nothing, cmon.
