Hello and welcome back to Favourite Character Praise Friday!
This is one of my absolute favourite posts to write and I hope you enjoy my
picking apart of my favourite characters enough to stick around while I examine
my next victim, I mean, character. Don’t worry, I do not rank these characters
in a particular order, it just so happens that some characters are better worth
sharing praise for at a different point in time to others! Remember, every
fifth instalment is Least Favourite Character Praise Friday, so keep an eye out
for me probing at characters I can’t stand and raving about how well they were
written in order to evoke such a reaction.
So, who is the subject of my next Favourite Character Praise
Friday?
Rei Ryugazaki from the Free! Franchise!
Anyone who knows me at all well will know that I have an
absolutely unhealthy and excessive love for this character. I have, adored Rei
as a character for over seven years. I have been immensely invested in his
story struggle to articulate how much he means to me as a fan of the show. It
has taken this long to actually start to word why I love him, as many of my
friends expected him to be the first subject of my character praise, but
whenever it came to explaining why I adored him, I would usually type out an
incoherent key-smash punctuated with various heart shaped emoticons.
It’s taken until now for me to even begin to fathom
articulating why I adore him as a character. Before I start praising him in a
more analytical fashion, I would like to explain WHY he is one of my favourite
characters.
Free! Iwatobi Swim Club was my first anime. I saw GIFs from
the ever-iconic “I’ll show you a sight you’ve never seen before” scene on my
Tumblr and was transfixed by the beauty of the animation and knew I had to
watch this show, which was much harder than I ever thought it would be, with my
media players were refusing to play I ended up sneakily streaming it and weeping in the
local library. It was very hard to stay composed.
Rei always stood out as a character I related to due to his
disposition. From the start of the show he makes it very clear he only hopes to
be part of things that are beautiful and organised. He strives for perfection
in his prospects. He struck me as a character that was similar to me in that
respect, always striving for better, always aiming to excel. I related to him
more than I’d related to characters in the past.
Watching his story unfold before my eyes was something that
made me very emotional, watching him go from being unable to swim at all, to
learning how to keep his head above water in all four strokes, improving his
form in his specialised event, and bagging the position of captain had me
sobbing.
When Dive To The Future came out, I doubted I would get as
emotional as I did, as Rei would have been demoted to a re-occurring side
character instead of a main character. Yet I still ended up in pools of tears.
I was so proud of a character that I knew had worked hard for his achievements.
I felt that seeing that season when I had only recently graduated from
university made me feel even more emotional about my relating to him.
Obviously, this just explains why I love him, as opposed to
actual character praise.
The first thing I feel a need to mention when it comes to
praising Rei would be that his blatant disregard for egoism when it comes to
chasing something he wanted. When Nagisa finally convinced him to join the swim
club, he spared no expense, even his pride in attempting to find the things
that were best for him, trying on numerous ridiculous swimsuits trying to find
one that was comfortable. Then, after spending so much money on a swimming
costume, he realised that what he had been wearing wasn’t the issue at all; he couldn’t
swim. In the end, regardless of how hard it was, and how embarrassed he clearly
was by his inability to even float, he did eventually learn how to swim, not
just the butterfly stroke, but front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke. He
also learned that his plight wasn’t due to an ineptitude with water, it actually
had to do with him not having learned before, combined with a high muscle
density from spending his middle-school career doing track and field events. He
had no experience keeping himself above water without the excess weight from
his muscles so evidently had a lot of hassle learning to swim. But he didn’t
stop trying.
Which leads very much to my second point. Rei doesn’t give
up on himself. He is a character that knows his own limits and always pushes
himself to excel in his ventures. Swimming was exception. Prior to joining
Iwatobi High School, it was clear that Rei was very much a visual learner when
it came to academia and engaging in outside interests – his hobbies were
oriented around reading and he relied upon theory to excel, feeling as if the
reason he couldn’t swim was because he hadn’t managed to apply the correct theories
of motion to his actions. Despite this issue, he learned to swim through a mix
of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic experiences, before he eventually managed
to swim butterfly for the first time. He knew he was capable of swimming
beautifully like he had hoped, and he was willing to take his time to learn the
best way to do that, when he had many an opportunity to give up. The fact that
continues to chase this dream of a visually pleasing and clean butterfly stroke
stays with him during the winter months where they are unable to use the
outdoor swimming facilities for health and safety purposes. Rei maintains his
position in the swim club in his second year, when he actually only agreed to
be a part of it for his first year, but upon getting a goal in his head, he was
adamant to achieve it. This continues into Dive To The Future, where as captain
of the Iwatobi Swim Club, Ryugazaki Rei manages to win his heat that the
National Swim Meet, and swim in the final, where he beat his personal best. He
acknowledges at the end of the series that even though he didn’t win at
Nationals, he made it there and placed, and that therefore ended his High
School swimming career with a bang, which was what he wanted.
The last thing I want to mention in this post is that he is
very selfless. Back in Season One Rei gave up his position in the relay at the
regional swim-meet in order to give Rin, someone he didn’t particularly like at
the time, an opportunity to wake up from the negative mental space he had found
himself in. He gave Rin the opportunity to reunite with his original relay team
and see “the sight [he’d] never seen before” once again, even though he had
worked so hard to learn to swim and help get his team to that point. Even
though he knew forfeiting his position to someone from another school would
mean that his team wouldn’t be able to progress to Nationals, he knew it was
the only way to get through to someone in desperate need of help that only he
and his friends could provide, and he put that above everyone else and still
supported Rin, and his teammates as they swam together, even though he wanted
to be at the poolside with him. Those selfless actions further translate into
the way he didn’t wish to burden his teammates by asking them to help teach him
how to swim when, after a year, he was still struggling to swim any other
stroke than butterfly, he ended up going to look for private teaching so he
didn’t inconvenience the team. He was also shown to put his teammates above
himself when he was their captain, actively trying to make sure that Romio was
alright during the training camp, instead of focusing on his own performance
and how to excel. Albeit it isn’t discussed, but theoretically, when a
competition is coming up, one ought to focus on themselves because any time
with your attention on other things, is time you could be spending improving
your own performance. With this in mind, Rei potentially sacrificed his own
performance, to make sure his teammates were performing at their bests. I don’t
believe that this attitude would cease to be when Team Iwatobi went to compete
in the subsequent competitions too.
I feel like as a writer, there is a lot one can learn from
Rei’s character, and the arc he goes through during his three years at High
School. It is really interesting and I would go into a lot more detail about my
feelings about it, except, I intend to do that in a future post. I will,
however, provide a link to said post once it goes live on the blog.
However, I do believe that there are things to learn from him as a writer, outside of looking at his character arc. For example, Rei's means of communicating with Nagisa is something I adore looking at, what started as a relationship where Rei would solely call Nagisa by his surname, "Hazuki-kun", he eventually ended up on a first name basis with him, referring to him by "Nagisa-kun" instead. Despite this happening relatively quickly in the series, significant changes take place from where he hesitates to be so informal, to him being so comfortable with being known as "Rei-chan" and calling his classmate and later friend "Nagisa-kun". The way that he interacts with him can be looked at in terms of motion and action. In Season One, Rei tends to avoid instigating contact, and reciprocating it. Nagisa is very hands-on and is fine touching his friends, while Rei is not as comfortable with it. By Season Two: Free! Eternal Summer, Rei and Nagisa are so synchronised that they lean toward each other when showing off their matching swimsuits. Simple things like that say a lot about the way a relationship has developed. Its subtle and clever and something I aim to focus on when writing my own works, as its the nuanced aspects of a dynamic that tend to say the most about characters.
Please, if you have opinions on Rei Ryugazaki, feel free ((pun
intended)) to share them with me! Don’t forget you can check out my previous
Character Praise by looking through the hashtags below.
And remember!
Per Aruda Ad Astra
