In the last few weeks I’ve noticed that due to my own set of values I have a serious problem with female characters that try to steal the male protagonist from their female counterpart .Ume Kumurizawa, (image above) is one of those characters. Hailing from the anime/manga Kimi Ni Todoke, she shows herself to be a “Kikyo” type character and if you saw my first post ever, you know about my intense dislike for her. Ume tends to have an “I’m the most perfect person in the world” attitude because of her beauty and is extremely irritating. She even stoops so low as to manipulate everyone into thinking she’s the perfect angel when she’s everything but that.

Now most anime characters are beautiful; it’s just a fact you have to accept. It’s when the character knows that they are beautiful, and unscrupulously uses it as a way to entice and deceive people that it gets on my nerves. While its true most characters who are aware of their beauty don’t so this (Tamaki Suoh from OHSHC, Kyohei Takano from The Wallflower, etc.) Often enough you get that particular character who uses their beauty as a weapon, and Ume is that character. For instance, she has convinced all of Kazehaya’s followers (Protagonist who she madly falls in love with) that he was made for everyone (i.e, share him), so that she could have a chance to get closer and clutch him into her grasps. It’s this type of manipulation places her at the top of my ‘anime characters i despise’ list.

To be fair, if Ume wasn’t in love with the male protagonist, I would probably like her a whole lot more. The fact that she’s in love with Kazehaya immediately makes me dislike her; For some reason I tend to loathe any female characters opposing the one that has my vote. Sigh, It really bothers me that Ume is a rival of Sawako (female protagonist), especially as Sawako views her as a friend. Ume honestly needs to find someone else to direct her affections towards.

There is one more attribute of her personality that fuels my passion of dislike towards Ume; she’s the queen bee of their school, and she knows it. Now being a geek almost all of my life, I tend to be very attentive to these things and have discovered there are two types of ‘queen bees’. 1. The Nice Girl and 2. The Mean Girl. Ume, somehow found herself lodged between these two classifications. While she definitely is nice to most individuals, anyone she sees as a threat (i.e Sawako and her friends) gets her mean side. Of course, this only happens when her beloved Kazehaya is not around, when he is, then not even the most sugar filled ice cream can compare to her sweetness.

To sum it all up, Ume is just another one of those characters that I want to strangle. In her own way she almost rivals Light Yagomi with her manipulation, in her mind she just has to be in love with the male protagonist, takes whole ‘Queen of the School’ thing to a whole different level and uses her beauty as a weapon instead of a gift. She aggravates me past the point that I thought was humanly possible. Ume Kumurizawa…… is one of those characters I would love to write in a death note.