Talk:Hairu Ihei/@comment-24231905-20150918084500/@comment-10733658-20150919184752

Good point, Anon. Ihei is definitely not a well-adjusted or normal person, from the glimpses we've caught of her. We really don't know a lot about her yet, so she's an enormous question mark and I think it's way too early to write her off as a "man-obsessed girl" or a sexist trope.

I think one issue with such thinking is that it creates this absolutism where This Thing Is Always Bad. In other fandoms (and in this one a little bit), it ends up taking a well-written and nuanced female character.....and reducing her to a strawman argument about sexism in media. If she has a strong connection to a male character, or any other single trait that can be associated with Sexism, then everything else about her ends up ignored in favor of amplifying one supposedly problematic trait. In trying to combat or discuss a negative thing, a female character is stripped of everything else about her.

Ihei does seem to crave attention from Arima, though we don't know enough about her to know the reason. Is it romantic? Sexual? A child's desire to be acknowledged by a major authority figure? A subordinate's desire to be recognized by their superiors? We have no idea, and that one detail of her character should not overwhelm or erase her other aspects. She's clearly an oddball, capable of shifting from cutesy-sweet to vicious and deranged at the drop of the hat. She's incredibly strong, and as already said, the second time we've come across an Investigator that CCG has had out in the field since their teen years. She has ambition, as she resents losing credit to Kijima during a hunt. And she seems to have the makings of a rivalry with Matsumae, another strong woman in the series.